Lamont’s return to the foreground

After losing to Lieberman and Malloy, insiders thought he was out of politics

Political insiders thought Ned Lamont was done with politics.

He’d spent a combined $26 million on his failed gubernatorial bid in 2010 and his 2006 Senate race loss to Joe Lieberman — more than enough to turn anyone off — and then he retired quietly from the political limelight. Or so it seemed.

“After 2010, he just dropped off the map,” said Frank Farricker, former chairman of the Greenwich Democratic Town Committee. “I don’t remember him really getting involved in any partyrelated activities at all. Not only was I surprised when he ran for governor, but I was surprised to the degree to which a lot of the party insiders decided to coalesce behind his campaign.”

Lamont officially announced his campaign in January. By the Democratic Party’s May convention, all of his many opponents — save Bridgeport Mayor and ex-convict Joe Ganim — had dropped out or, in Susan Bysiewicz’s case, joined his team. It’s a comeback that has left some wondering what he’d been doing in the interim.

“As far as I know, nothing,” Farricker said. “And I was town chairman of the Democratic Party in Greenwich, Ned’s hometown, from 2008 to 2015. It’s the most politically active I’ve ever been in my life, and I don’t recall him doing anything more than an ordinary citizen would do.”

Back in the real world

The day after his 16-point loss to now-Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in the August 2010 primary, Lamont returned to Campus Televideo, the company he founded in 1984 to bring cable television to college campuses.

But he found he wasn’t as intellectually invested in the company. So he transitioned from CEO to chairman and sold the company the next year.

For the first five years after the election, Lamont said, his day-today was spent working on the company’s transition in the morning, and in the afternoons, he sometimes taught classes at Central Connecticut State, or did work for one of the many boards he served on.

As a Distinguished Professor, Lamont drew from personal experience as a candidate to lecture on political science, philosophy and even psychology, according to CCSU. A spokesman for the university clarified, Lamont did not teach semesterlong courses in degreegranting programs, but rather individual classes.

After selling the company, Lamont invested in and provided consulting services for a pair of media startups — Stringr and Watchup — through his holding company, Lamont Digital. It wasn’t until General Electric announced its departure from the state in 2015 that Lamont dipped his toe back into the world of public service.

He had a friend at GE, and as a Connecticut resident, he said he needed to know what the state could have done to keep the company. Through Yale, where he served on the board of advisers for the School of Management, Lamont set up a meeting with the departing company. It was about six months after GE’s announcement. Running for governor, he said, wasn’t even on his radar.

“No, I was not thinking about that at all,” he said. “For me, it was something I cared about. I had relationships with the folks at GE. I just figured I’d be able to help ... from there, we put together a study group and worked with all of the major employers in the state. So we were going to make sure that Black and Decker and Pratt and Whitney and all of these companies, we’re going to make sure that nobody leaves again because they can’t get the talent.”

“That got me back into the political part of the time,” Lamont said in an interview last week. “(House Minority Leader) Themis (Klarides) was there, Governor Malloy was there, Oz (Griebel) was there. We cast a wide net to get folks who could learn from the GE story at the table.”

Following GE’s departure, Lamont stayed involved in studying the state’s workforce problems, often using his connections in the business world to gain insight into the state’s growing problems. That, he figured, is where he could be the most useful.

“I thought probably I could better serve from the outside than from the inside,” Lamont said.

No one, Lamont says, was more surprised than he was to find himself running for governor.

“I thought I’d been out of the game of being active in politics,” Lamont said. “Most of these folks go to every town committee meeting. But I stayed involved in the issues, if not the politics, so I was able to jump back in pretty quickly.”

Lamont freely admits that in the early stages of the search for a Democratic candidate, he wasn’t the party’s first choice. But when the likes of state Attorney General George Jepsen, Comptroller Kevin Lembo and Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman — all thought of as possible frontrunners to succeed Gov. Dannel P. Malloy — each declined to run, the name left at the top of the list was none other than Lamont. Lamont had actually encouraged Jepsen to run, he said, and Jepsen responded by encouraging him to run instead.

Lamont easily won the party’s nomination in May and will face Republican Bob Stefanowski and independent Griebel on Nov. 6.

Tom Swan, executive director of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group, which recently endorsed Lamont, said it was Lamont’s experience at CCSU and in helping with the workforce development study that made him a better candidate this time around, whether he intended it that way or not.

“He’s continued to elevate and engage on some of the major policy things, between his classes, symposiums, forums at Central, and he continued to keep in touch with people, meeting with them, continuing to go to events,” said Swan, who ran Lamont’s 2006 campaign but did not endorse him in 2010, in part because Swan’s group worked hard to launch the Citizens Election Program and Lamont was so rich he wasn’t taking part in public financing.

“I think he’d learned some of his lessons in 2010 not to listen to political consultants who said to run to the middle and he got back in touch with more of his core values and that plays well,” Swan said.

David Pudlin, a former state House majority leader and political consultant who worked on Lamont’s 2006 campaign, called Lamont a “unifying factor” at the convention after the party expressed some now-unfounded fears about the Republican Party.

“There was certainly some anxiety that if two ‘if’s’ occurred they would be in trouble,” Pudlin said. “One if being if the Republicans were to unify around a candidate — which was in retrospect an unnecessary fear — and the other was if we were to not have one clear voice, we would be in trouble because of the diminished popularly of the incumbent. In hindsight, the fears turned out to not be true, but I think those are accurate things we could take from the past.”

That assessment makes sense to Farricker, the Democratic insider and former Lottery Board chairman.

“I think Ned was the default choice,” Farriker said. “I don’t think people were rushing to Ned, but I think they were figuring he was better than Jonathan Harris or Luke Bronin or any of the other guys who were running, and I think he let the state party leaders have a much bigger say in his campaign than the other candidates.”