New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
3 candidates — all started out as Democrats
Rivals grew disenchanted with DeLauro
All three candidates for the 3rd District congressional seat originally registered to vote as Democrats.
Two have switched parties as they launched challenges to 15-term U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, but for different reasons.
Margaret Streicker of
Milford, the Republican candidate, sees the Democratic Party as having moved too far to the left. Justin Paglino of Guilford, running on the Green Party line, believes the Democrats
are not progressive enough.
Streicker, in her first political campaign, changed her party registration from Democrat to Republican on Nov. 16, 2019, according to records in the Milford registrars of voters office.
“Frankly, at 18 I voted for Rosa,” Streicker, 45, said Wednesday. “But now I’m disgusted with all that Rosa and the modern left represents, and that’s why I’m running.”
She said she voted for President Barack Obama in 2008 and for Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson in 2016, and she plans to vote for Republican President Donald Trump on Nov. 3. As for DeLauro, “In the last few elections I didn’t care who the [opposing] candidate was; I voted against her,” she said.
Streicker, who also has been endorsed by the Independent Party, said of her campaign, “The bottom line is I intend to work with all parties to lower taxes … to create more jobs, to improve our infrastructure, which is crumbling around us” and for transparency in medical pricing.
She said issues should not come down to “a binary decision” of red vs. blue. “I’m fiscally conservative. I’m socially moderate. I’ve been saying that this entire time,” she said.
“Right now, the Democratic Party does not represent the values my parents instilled in me,” she said. “I believe in equality under the law. I don’t believe in looting and rioting.” She said Tuesday’s debate between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden “was the first time that I heard anyone truly condemn it from the left.”
Streicker said it was not important that she had been a registered Democrat since 1983 because “I’ve voted how I wanted to vote for years. As an outsider it never really mattered to me. It never affected me because I voted for the candidate I wanted to vote for.”
Paglino said he had thought about switching from the Democratic Party for some time because it didn’t represent his liberal views. He said “the immediate catalyst” came when Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent democratic socialist senator from Vermont, dropped out of the Democratic presidential race April 8.
That’s when “I decided to go to a local chapter meeting of the Green Party of Connecticut. … Like many progressives I’ve been frustrated with the direction of the party leadership for a long time.”
He said progressives like himself have struggled with whether they should stay in the Democratic Party and “try to reform the party from within,” despite “the demands of the party’s major donors” and their “corporate influence.”
He said he has opposed the national party’s positions on issues such as authorizing the invasion of Iraq, deregulating Wall Street and backing the North American Free Trade Agreement. “I’m opposed to free trade,” he said. “I advocate for fair trade … trade agreements that incorporate high labor standards and environmental standards so that laborers are paid a fair wage and that concerns over pollution are taken seriously in other countries.”
As a voter, he said, “I have always thought, well, we only have two choices, the Democrats and the Republicans … but then when I learned about ranked-choice voting I learned how a better democracy is possible.”
Ranked-choice voting, which is used in Maine and which divvies up the votes of a last-place candidate among those voters’ second choice, would give him a chance to win, he said, and he needs to run to press that issue. “You can’t have a multiparty system with first-past-the-post voting,” said Paglino, 47. who said he cast his first presidential vote for Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992. “It’s really the absence of rankedchoice voting that is the reason we only have two dominant parties.”
While the Green Party has never won a congressional seat, Paglino said, “I view this as a nothing-tolose campaign because I feel I am on the ballot representing many ideas that are popular but are not espoused by the other candidates in the race,” such as Medicare for all and a carbon tax.
“Whatever the outcome of the race, I feel good that I’m giving voters a choice to vote for policies that have majority support,” he said. “I view our health care crisis and our climate crisis as enormous threats to our well-being, the wellbeing of all Americans. The solutions that most Americans favor have not been embraced by the major parties.”
DeLauro, who learned Democratic politics from her parents, both of whom served as New Haven alders, said in an emailed statement, “Part of what makes American Democracy so great is our freedom to change political parties as personal ideologies shift and party platforms adjust to meet to the needs of the moment.
“I cannot comment on other people’s personal decision to change parties, but I am confident that the people at the top of the Democratic ticket represent the values — governing with fact, truth, and science and providing for working families over handouts for the wealthy — that guide my work for the people of Connecticut,” DeLauro said.
Scott McLean, chairman of the Department of Philosophy and Political Science at Quinnipiac University, said changing parties is not unusual, especially when deciding to run against someone like DeLauro, who “has a lock on this seat.”
“I can’t imagine they think that their odds of winning against Rosa DeLauro are very good, but they want to run, they want to get their views out,” he said.
McLean said he did not have statistics on how often candidates change parties to run, “but it’s more common when you have a longtime incumbent with party support like Rosa DeLauro.”
He said the best chance for the Republican Party in the 3rd District “is to find someone who will run who’s fiscally conservative and run on lowering taxes,” which is popular among voters.
A moderate Republican, such as former Gov. M. Jodi Rell, has a better chance to win in Connecticut, he said.
“She’d be in good company,” McLean said of Streicker. “Ronald Reagan was a Democrat and became a Republican. [Former U.S. Sen.] Joe Lieberman was a Democrat who became an independent and was pretty well aligned with Republicans on many issues.
“There’s nothing wrong with someone changing parties if they can give reasons and if they can talk about the issues,” he said. “We need two political parties in this state and maybe three [that] can hold the party in power accountable.”