Connecticut’s Political Colors Shift
Democrats Gain In Once Reliably Red Suburban Towns
GREENWICH — Margaret Van Vliet was a lifelong Republican. Her neighbors in the gated enclave of Belle Haven in Greenwich were Republicans. Her parents were Republicans. Her grandfather was a Republican state senator.
Yet earlier this year, Van Vliet did the unthinkable: She became a Democrat. “I felt I had to make a stand,” said the 61-year-old health care administrator. “I believe that to be a Republican now, you have to be a rigid tribalist.”
Van Vliet is far from the only Republican woman from Greenwich to renounce the party in the Trump era. In Fairfield County, and in suburban communities throughout Connecticut, the GOP brand is losing its luster — driving a political realignment that could have sweeping implications for the governor’s race and the balance of power in the General Assembly.
In Avon, the number of registered Republicans slipped from 4,145 right after the November 2016 election to 3,969; the Democratic ranks increased by more than 100 voters during that same span. Republicans also have lost ground in Simsbury and Glastonbury, two wealthy Hartford suburbs, even as the party has made striking gains in blue-collar regions such as the Naugatuck Valley and Eastern Connecticut.
“Trump has flipped the narrative,” said Gayle Alberda, assistant professor of politics at Fairfield University. “He carried a message that the Republican Party is the party of the working class ... and the suburbs have been trending Democratic.”
An ad released by President Trump’s re-election campaign last week illus-
trates how important these voters are. The ad targets women, urging voters to “choose the right future” with images of a suburban mother moving into a new home and attending a child’s music recital. “There’s more opportunity and security to invest the ones that matter,” the ad states. “But this could all go away if we don’t remember what we came from.”
Polls suggest that surburban women voters, in particular, strongly reject Trump: An NPR/Marist national poll conducted in September found the president with a 65 percent disapproval rating among women in the suburbs, while just 29 percent approve of the job he is doing. The latest Quinnipiac Poll of likely voters in Connecticut shows women choosing Democrat Ned Lamont over Republican Bob Stefanowski for governor by 55 percent to 34 percent.
“The Republican Party has had a ‘woman problem’ for the past few years,” Alberda said. Trump, she said, has hastened that exodus: “Women are just done.”
That shift is evident in affluent suburbs across the nation, from the bedroom communities bordering Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., to the sunbelt GOP strongholds such as Orange County, California, and is central to Democrats’ hopes of reclaiming the House of Representatives, and perhaps the Senate.
The iconic suburbs of Connecticut’s Gold Coast, long the bastion of a reserved brand of Yankee Republicanism typified by the Bush family and former U.S. Reps. Stewart McKinney and Chris Shays, flipped in 2016. Hillary Clinton won every town in lower Fairfield County, including Greenwich and New Canaan, towns Republican Mitt Romney captured with ease just four years earlier.
“This is a Republican town and it’s always been a Republican town,” declared Kit Devereaux, a Democratic member of the New Canaan board of selectmen who came within 33 votes of winning the first selectman’s job last year. “But I will say this: There’s a lot of Democratic energy this year.”
Facing an aggressive and disciplined challenge from Stefanowski, Lamont and his running mate, Susan Bysiewicz, are counting on that energy to help them win on Nov. 6. Last week, Bysiewicz made campaign stops in New Canaan and Greenwich, meeting with local business owners and attending a meet-and-greet hosted by Democrat Lin Lavery, a former Greenwich selectwoman. “I’m seeing a tremendous awakening,’’ said Lavery, a local real estate agent who’s been active in town for 35 years, as she surveyed at the crowd milling around her family room waiting for Bysiewicz to speak.
While Trump’s bombastic personal style, aggressive denunciation of the establishment and identification as a nationalist have alienated him from some Fairfield County voters, the region was drifting away from the GOP long before 2016. The 4th Congressional District, which consists of most of Fairfield County, hasn’t been represented by a Republican since Shays lost the seat in 2008.
That’s partly due to demographics, said Sandy Litvack, a Democratic selectman in Greenwich. “The town has become much more diverse than it used to be, but people don’t know that,’’ he said. “They still think of it as an old, whiteshoe, white Republican town.”
Susan Serven of New Canaan said the Republican Party she grew up in no longer exists. As a young girl in Westchester County, N.Y., she learned the gospel of fiscal conservatism from her stepfather, an entrepreneur.
“As someone who’s been a Republican, I found the activities of the last two years overwhelmingly negative,” Serven said. “The Republican Party is not the party for any of us anymore.”
While Serven still defines herself as a fiscal conservative, she also supports abortion rights, protecting the environment and LGBT equality. “I used to hear that the older you got, the more conservative you got, but I’ve gone in the opposite direction,” she said.
She says she finds Trump “absolutely frightening.” Asked to explain her objections, Serven cites Trump’s “relationships with Russia and with dictators in North Korea and his destruction of the [Environmental Protection Agency] ... and all of these things that, when you boil them down, seem to be only about benefiting his businesses.”
Serven, who is now an unaffiliated voter, is part of 203 Action, one of many grassroots organizations that sprung up after the 2016 election to give voice to citizens anxious about the direction of the country.
Now the group is mobilizing for the upcoming state election, writing letters, knocking on doors and phone-banking for Demo- cratic candidates such as Alex Bergstein, a University of Chicago-educated corporate lawyer turned nonprofit advocate running against five-term Republican state Sen. Scott Frantz.
“Every day people I don’t know are saying, ‘I’ve been a Republican all my life, but I’m done,’ ” said Bergstein, 51. Her mother was the Republican mayor of Montclair, N.J., in the early 1980s and later ran for U.S. Senate against Democrat Bill Bradley.
Bergstein, who is not taking public financing, has lent her campaign $260,000 — an extraordinary sum for a state legislative seat. She says the stakes in this fall’s election are enormous. “Not only [is] this a very important election ... perhaps the most important ever, but it’s the beginning of a new chapter in our democracy where we never take anything for granted,” she told the crowd gathered in Lavery’s family room.
Unlike Democrats running in other parts of the state, Bergstein’s campaign website doesn’t tout popular progressive talking points such as single-payer health care and raising the minimum wage. Instead, she is pitching a fiscally centrist plan to lower taxes and grow the economy, while also supporting access to abortion, strong gun control laws and LGBT rights.
Frantz, the president of an investment capital firm who has held the seat since 2008, said Bergstein and the firedup Democrats are trying to nationalize the state election. “People in our neck of the woods are very concerned about fiscal issues, and they know the state is in really tough fiscal shape,’’ he said. “The Democrats are trying to leverage dissatisfaction about what’s going on in Washington, but that’s just background noise. ... I don’t see a blue wave at all.”
J.R. Romano, the chairman of the Republican Party in Connecticut, said Trump resistance groups such as 203 Action are “too invested in what’s going on in Washington.”
He views the political realignment that’s shading Fairfield County blue through an economic lens. “Look at what’s happening across Connecticut in the hard-working communities of the Naugatuck Valley and Eastern Connecticut,’’ Romano said. “These are not areas like New Canaan and Westport. ... These people are struggling. They don’t feel the pain of the poor economic policies of Connecticut Democrats like someone in Ansonia or Norwich does.”
Trump has upended the old notion that well-heeled Republicans will always vote with their pocketbooks. While his tax package has been a boon to wealthy investors across the nation, the gains have been tempered by the elimination of the state and local tax deduction, which hurts well-paid white collar suburban families in higher tax states such as Connecticut.
“I know of one Trump voter who became a Democrat because he’s going to get screwed on his taxes,” said Shiva Sarram, a 46-year-old mother of two from New Canaan who launched 203 Action. Many Republicans also view the tax cuts as fiscally irresponsible because they will burden the next generation by adding to the deficit, she said. “It’s basically a loan from our children.”
Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski has focused almost exclusively on the state’s economy and is pledging to phase put Connecticut’s income tax, providing a boon to highincome earners. In the waning days of the campaign, the Republican Governor’s Association is spending $3 million on ads promoting Stefanowski, and criticizing Ned Lamont in the New York media market, which includes Fairfield County.
Van Vliet, the former Republican voter from Greenwich, won’t be swayed. She says she’s voting for Democrats up and down the ballot this year.
“I grew up under the Republican guard,” Van Vliet said, “and one of the things I was taught was to be an independent thinker and apply reason and measured compassion to every decision.”