State Dems succeed by keeping cities dependent

Analyzing Connecticut’s vote on television on election night and fearing that the trend was Democratic, former Republican gubernatorial aspirant Tim Herbst chastened the two Democratic analysts with him. If Connecticut elected a Democratic governor and General Assembly, Herbst said, the party would “own” state government’s financial disaster and the tax increases and highway tolls likely to follow.

True enough, but this could not have frightened any Democrat. For the financial disaster only worsened over the last eight years with a Democratic governor and Legislature, so the party already “owned” it going into this election — and has emerged triumphant again anyway. Why?

Part of the explanation is the big Democratic advantage in Connecticut’s voter registration. But unaffiliateds outnumber Democrats, and responsibility for disaster might tend to reduce the Democratic ranks.

More of the explanation may be the unpopularity of President Donald Trump, who, while better regarded than the retiring Democratic governor, Dannel P. Malloy, has two years left in his term while Malloy is retiring.

A possibly bigger factor is overlooked: the Democrats’ long proletarianizing of Connecticut. This could be observed as the returns from the state’s biggest cities — Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven — were reported belatedly as usual, New Haven’s not until Wednesday night, fully 24 hours after polls closed. Also as usual, a Democratic plurality of more than 50,000 from those cities was added long after all other votes had been counted.

Most people in Connecticut’s cities are dependents of government one way or another. Their dependence provides subsistence, but city living conditions never improve and few city residents rise to self-sufficiency. Instead most are only farmed by the Democratic Party, the party of dependence, very profitably so at election time. For if the poor ever became self-sufficient, they might acquire a little property, lose interest in being farmed, and maybe even become Republicans.

Not that many Connecticut Republicans understand this — they don’t complain about it — or even understand that Trump has sullied the Republican brand here to the point of forfeiting the state to a more organized dependency, the government employee unions, for another four years. But if the Republican Party is ever again to provide meaningful opposition, it will need much betterinformed candidates for governor than the justdefeated political neophyte Bob Stefanowski.

A few days before the election Stefanowski appeared before the Connecticut Motor Transport Association and remarked that, recently driving past the state Transportation Department headquarters on the Berlin Turnpike in Newington, he was shocked by its palatial appearance. But the building has been there for 25 years, and though he was proposing to run state government, Stefanowski had never seen it before.