Making sense of political weirdness as we await a recount
What’s going on in Fairfield? Political weirdness on several fronts has catapulted the large town to rival its larger neighbor, Bridgeport, in election-related events beyond the hum of campaigning and voting.
Unlike the absentee ballot meltdown in Bridgeport, it’s not all bad, what’s happening in Fairfield. Some of it speaks well for democracy, some poorly.
We have a flap over students making noise at Penfield Beach, which led Republicans to rally undergrads to their side; the investigation of a torn window screen where ballots awaited Tuesday’s recount in the first selectman race; and an election eve protest over powerline towers along Metro North Railroad.
It’s not a simple picture. At Penfield Beach on a recent afternoon, I saw a woman playing with her toddler grandson right at ground zero of the simmering battle between Fairfield University students living in rentals, and homeowners. I figured she was one of the locals upset over noise and the general ruckus of the undergrads moving into the neighborhood in large numbers.
“I live across the street from the partiers,” the woman, who gave her name only as Carol, told me as we stood a few feet from Lighthouse Point. Then she offered an opinion that surprised me.
Well over 200 Fairfield U students, most living near the beach, exercised their right to register and vote on Election Day last week. Riled up to vote for First Selectwoman Brenda Kupchick, they apparently believed — correctly or not — that the Republican, if reelected, would preserve that other sacred right, to party spontaneously regardless of the hour.
That gave Fairfield by far the largest Election Day registration of any city or town, normally a trickle.
Weirder still, police and state prosecutors rushed Thursday afternoon to the town office where the registrars and other town officials had moved ballot ahead of the recount in the election between Kupchick and Democrat Bill Gerber, who won the unofficial tally by 42 votes. A torn window screen led some folks to wonder whether tampering had happened.
And so, for a while, the outbuildings next to the senior center became, in effect, a crime scene complete with plastic tape. Within a few hours, authorities declared that the screen was torn long ago and no break-in had happened — which seemed fairly obvious to me when I showed up the next day to see the screen flapping in the breeze and no one in the building on a holiday.
The dispute involving socalled monopoles, 95 to 145 feet tall on the south side of the tracks in the Southport section — that’s the tony historic section — broke last spring after United Illuminating sought permits but only recently crept up as an election issue. Hundreds of protesters at the Pequot Library gathered two days before the elections last week, my colleague Jarrod Wardwell, who’s been covering all of this, reported.
It wasn’t clearly a partisan issue until results showed Kupchick lost in that voting district after winning it in 2019. She had opposed the towers and intervened in the case before the Connecticut Siting Council in August, hiring Attorney Tim Herbst, the former Trumbull first selectman and GOP candidate for governor. But in the opinion of some people, Kupchick’s efforts were too quiet, too feeble.
You can bet the Democrats did nothing to stanch that view.
What do we make of all this? I’d tally the GOP’s push to rally students in Penfield Beach as a positive sign in local politics; the window screen inquisition as an unfortunate result of political attacks; and as for the monopole battle, to steal the famous movie line, what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.
Unlike two generations ago in the Vietnam War era, young voters hardly present a force at the ballot box despite hopeful chatter, college protests and occasional flare-ups. Good for Kupchick’s forces for bringing them along.
Okay, so it was parties that motivated the Fairfield U 200, not social justice or war or even student debt. And okay, so the facts that made their way to students didn’t always line up with reality, based on my reading of a story in the university’s student newspaper. A controversial noise ordinance adopted over the summer had already taken effect and it may or may not curtail their soirees — some known as darties, for daytime parties.
I’m waiting for an invitation to a marty — you know, first thing in the morning. I’ll tell my young friends that if the beach battle inspires even a few of them to see the connection between voting and their lives, it’s a good thing. “We understand respect,” one of the students, who’s from Long Island, said to me Friday afternoon. But he added, speaking of neighbors, “You live in a college town.”
The torn screen? That’s political acrimony and heightened tensions gone amok. The two registrars don’t get along, to say the least, and we’ve seen police needing to step in before. Everybody needs to cool down in that office.
And the monopoles? Protesters are upset over UI proposing to take some land, and over the utility’s failure to spend money to bury the lines. Perhaps Kupchick didn’t yell loud enough and perhaps she didn’t try hard enough to persuade the neighbors that the siting council, not the town, controls utility towers.
Just few weeks ago, even some Democrats in Fairfield conceded privately that the first-term Kupchick, a popular former state representative, probably would win, although Gerber ran a strong campaign. The position of the grandmother named Carol at Penfield Beach points to the futility of predicting politics.
“They don’t bother me,” Carol said of the students, waving off the need for stricter rules. “They clean up. They take care of me.” So, I mused she must have voted for Kupchick, who had opposed the updated noise regulations rather than Gerber, a strong supporter?
No, she said, she voted for the Democrat — for totally unrelated reasons.