It’s Trench Warfare To Control Legislature

We have 187 state legislators here in Connecticut. For no earthly reason. It’s a small state. We’d don’t need all of them.

We are not the craziest. That would be New Hampshire, where the state House of Representatives alone has 400 members. There must be House members who represent only small groups of politically engaged bears and cows.

In California, each state senator represents more than 900,000 people. If we applied that standard in Connecticut, we’d have three full-time senators and one who came in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fine with me.

I mention all of this because, while Kevin Rennie and I and the rest of the Connecticut political press corps have been droning on and on about the most tedious gubernatorial election since Pangaea broke up, there has been trench warfare involving control of Connecticut’s two legislative chambers.

There are 18 senators from each party. In the House … well, it’s hard to tell because the House is like a big understaffed day care center where the kids are all running around without name tags, so it’s like, “Who are you? Where are you from? What time is your mother picking you up?” Anyway, I believe the House is an 80-71 Democratic majority.

The Republican leader of the House is Themis Klarides of

Derby. You know the island where Wonder Woman is from? Klarides is from there, too, but she had Wonder Woman kicked out for being overly soft and conciliatory. Klarides really wants to be speaker and, if I were a Democrat holding one of the seats she needs to flip, I would hide under my bed until Nov. 7. I say this with love and admiration for Themis. Because I don’t want to die.

In the Senate, there are two likely Election Day scenarios. One is the red and blue whack-a-mole scenario, where the balance flips back and forth until about 10 p.m., when we wearily realize it’s still 18-18. Or 19-17 one way or the other. I realize that’s actually three scenarios, but whatever.

The other scenario is the Big Blue Wave. Remember in January 2017 when 3 million to 5 million ladypersons, many of them wearing peculiar hats, amassed in cities around the U.S.? Don’t be surprised if they storm the polls with such force that actress Debra Messing somehow becomes president pro tem of the Connecticut Senate.

If that doesn’t happen, here are a few hard-to-call races.

The 33rd Senate District is a peculiarly shaped monster stretching from East Hampton to Long Island Sound. The seat was vacated due to love. Seriously. Republican Sen. Art Linares fell in love with Democratic Rep. Caroline Simmons. In a slightly nauseating flutter of cute details, they married and moved to Stamford, where her seat is. He was going to be state treasurer but that did not work out.

Now Republican state Rep. Melissa Ziobron is running against Essex First Selectman Norm Needleman. Needleman has drastically outspent Ziobron. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen. But if you don’t enjoy saying “Norm Needleman,” you are dead inside.

A little bit northward is the 4th Senate District, mainly

Manchester and Glastonbury. Longtime Democratic incumbent Steve Cassano is 162 years old, give or take. Every election, it seems like he’s going to lose, but he never does. He’s running against state Rep. Mark Tweedie, who probably should be running against Needleman. But life is not fair.

In the 26th Senate District (a bunch of rich towns like New Canaan), incumbent Republican Sen. Toni Boucher has served in the House and Senate for 22 years. Coincidentally, that’s the age of her opponent Will Haskell! Would you like Will to roll your garbage cans to the curb? He did that for everybody in Ridgefield Tuesday night! And had 13 meet-and-greets in Westport the next morning! Obama endorsed him! I get tired just thinking about being Toni Boucher.

I’m running out of space. There are other interesting Senate races, and it’s a near certainty that an incumbent or two will get bumped out. Legislative campaigns are often incomprehensible to us outsiders. Sometimes a town just wakes up one day and says, “You know that guy we elect every two years? Well, he’s stupid and grumpy and we hate him now.”

I’m exhausted. Can Will Haskell finish my column?