Republicans’ bad year could get much worse

You could forgive Connecticut Republicans for thinking it’s 536 A.D. That was the worst year to be alive, according to historians and scientists, The Times newspaper of London reported Tuesday. A volcano in Iceland sent a vast cloud of ash over Europe, the Middle East and some of Asia. The sun refused to shine through, crops died, temperatures plunged, two more eruptions followed and the bubonic plague was not far behind.

Voters on Nov. 6 shut out Republicans from statewide office again and culled the ranks of Republican legislators in a year that had begun with sunny optimism. Gov.-elect Ned Lamont has stated there’s a place for Republican legislative leaders at his table of talk. There’s no reason to doubt Lamont’s intentions, but what Republicans know is that when the final painful agreements are reached the Democrats will have their way.

Republicans will have to decide if they want to make some appealing contributions to legislation that they find unpalatable overall. They did, after all, shape a bipartisan budget in 2017 that appears to be hitting its targets without requiring a tax increase. Lamont has promised no income or sales tax boosts, so the Republicans possess experience he might be able to put to good use.

The math, however, remains cruel for Republicans who thought they would be in the majority when the legislature convenes in January. It is a bitter result that will be difficult to reverse in 2020. The Republicans face a lethal reality. The rebuke Connecticut voters administered to Donald Trump landed on them. Take state Sen. Toni Boucher, R-Wilton. She’s a veteran legislator accustomed to winning by large margins in her 10 years in the Senate. In 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the seventown Fairfield County district by 20 points, Boucher was re-elected with a hefty 12,000 vote margin. That meant thousands of voters split their tickets. Not this year. Boucher lost to 22-year-old Will Haskell, a Westport Democrat. Boucher was one of four incumbent Senate Republicans to lose.

Boucher has been a busy, dutiful legislator. Nothing she herself did in the past two years would have invited her reversal of fortune. Haskell worked hard, certainly, but he alone could not have created the district’s dramatic change. Only Trump could accomplish that, and the loathsome demagogue did. Thousands of new voters, or voters who often skip off-year elections, showed up on Election Day and voted for Democrats.

If they were angry this year, when Trump was not on the ballot, prepare for their righteous fury if he runs for re-election in 2020. It may not matter what Lamont does in his first two years as governor or what brilliant ideas state legislative Republicans muster. They will find it impossible to breakthrough the public’s focus on Trump and his rancid antics.

In the past week, the president launched a nasty attack on the commander of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. He seemed to blame retired Adm. William McRaven for not getting the Saudi terrorist sooner. But it’s the CIA that was responsible for finding Bin Laden, the Navy SEALs under McRaven’s command successfully took him out in one attempt. A president, even one so often feeling petulant in public, ought to know the difference.

Trump also caught the public’s attention with comments about the lethal California fires. He made some strange comments about the Finns raking forest floors that dominated the news for several days. On Tuesday of a short holiday week, Trump issued an appalling statement pardoning the Saudi government for the gruesome murder of American resident and Saudi citizen Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. It is another step into a state of lawlessness.

Republicans remain mostly silent in the face of the circus that never leaves town and then wonder how so many defeats have befallen them. “If a man incites himself to drown, and will not restrain himself, it is not the water’s fault,” wrote the English poet John Gower. Many Republicans are afraid to criticize what they know is atrocious but appeals to a significant tranche of the party faithful who vote in primaries.

This should have been the Republicans’ year in Connecticut. Their inability to overcome voters’ hostility to Trump consigns them to the wilderness for four more years or until even the wilderness will not have them.