Some in GOP cool on Trump
Handling of pandemic, George Floyd killing have many former supporters losing faith
A.J. Kerouac, a Republican from Brooklyn, Conn., remembers the moment he lost faith in President Trump.
It happened last month, while watching a Twitter video of a police officer pelting a news reporter with bean bag rounds. “I thought, ‘This is exactly how we lose our entire form of government,‘” said Kerouac, a 33-yearold real estate agent and former candidate for the state legislature.
Kerouac’s disillusionment with Trump began a few days earlier. “What got me there was the handling of the George Floyd movement,” Kerouac said, referring to mass demonstrations against racism and police brutality following the killing of Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck.
“I watched that video and I can’t even describe how gutwrenching it was. We watched a man get murdered. Then came the protests and we didn’t hear any show of support from our leaders,” Kerouac said. “I look at the president and his whole team and I think none of these people deserve to be in office.”
Since the 2016 election, many Connecticut Republicans have refused to criticize Trump, at least publicly, choosing instead to remain loyal throughout his
turbulent and unconventional presidency.
But in recent months, Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic turmoil that followed, as well as his emphatic dismissal of demands for racial justice and relentless stoking of cultural resentments, have created small cracks in that support.
A Courant/Sacred Heart University poll in the spring found that more than twothirds of Republicans in Connecticut approved of President Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, compared to only 21.8% of Democrats. In the months since then, Trump has struggled to manage the coronavirus pandemic as infection rates have surged in dozens of states.
Trump’s lagging job approval ratings, in Connecticut and around the nation, have led some prominent Republicans to rebuke the president, or at least publicly speculate that his chaotic leadership could imperil the party’s future.
Last week, Erin Stewart, the Republican mayor of New Britain, launched a political action committee to move the state GOP closer to the political center and broaden its appeal among young people, women and LGBTQ voters.
Stewart, who hinted she may run for governor in 2022, did not criticize Trump directly. But she suggested his brand of divisive politics could hamper Republican efforts at the state and local levels.
“We have to elevate our voices even louder to say, ‘Here’s why you should vote for Republican ideology — less government, pro-business,’ not necessarily the things spewing from President Trump,” Stewart said last week.
In 2016, the same year that Trump won the White House, Connecticut Republicans made significant inroads in the state House of
Representatives and achieved political parity in the Senate. By 2019, many of those gains were gone, with some blaming the Trump factor for a blue wave of Democratic wins.
This year, with both the entire legislature and Trump on the ballot, some Republicans worry that the president’s sagging popularity will drag down the under-ticket.
“There’s no other way to spin it: We’re in a blue state, and Trump is not popular,” said Ty Seymour, 25, national treasurer of College Republicans and the former leader of the group’s Connecticut federation. “The Republican Party has [attached] itself to him, and that makes electing Republicans and spreading our message a lot harder. It’s just the math.”
Presidential politics tends to dominate the news cycle, making it difficult for candidates for state and local office to break through, Seymour said. “I’m worried that issues pertaining to Connecticut are being drowned out,” he said.
STATES en. Heather Somers, a Republican from Groton, said she is “laserfocused” on Connecticut, not Washington. “Come November, I have full confidence my record of leading with an independent voice to deliver results, being there for the diverse needs of our communities and challenging the status quo will continue to resonate with voters,” she said.
J.R. Romano, the chairman of the Republican Party in Connecticut, said
Democrats want to keep the focus on Trump, not on the state’s problems. “They love when everyone’s talking about national politics because it means we’re not discussing the failures in the state,” he said.
Romano dismissed disgruntled Republicans as a media fabrication. “There are just as many people leaving the Democrat party, who are upset about these far left organizations like antifa that are destroying monuments,” he said.
Over the past year, several national groups have begun focusing attention on Republicans who have grown disenchanted with Trump. Some are urging support for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. Others, including the prominent group of Never-Trumpers behind the Lincoln Project, have produced a blistering series of ads targeting the president.
Andy Felder, a Republican-turned-unaffiliated voter from Cromwell, said he intends to support Biden in November. “The country’s ready for a reset,” said Felder, who is 41 and works in finance. “We need someone who is boring and stable and has many multiple years of experience.”
Felder is no liberal. He said believes in lower taxes and smaller government and breathed a sigh of relief that neither Bernie Sanders nor Elizabeth Warren wound up as the Democratic nominee. Through the years, he volunteered for many Republican candidates in Connecticut and he expressed deep admiration for John McCain, Mitt Romney and former U.S. Rep. Nancy Johnson.
But Felder left the Republican Party about a year or two into Trump’s presidency. He called Trump “an unqualified, narcissistic human” and said he could no longer belong to a party that has elevated such a divisive figure as its leader.
Felder cited Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as a chief failing. “He faced a serious crisis and he fumbled the ball,” Felder said. “He put being reelected ahead of science, ahead of the good of the country.”
Some of those same misgivings prompted Michael Magistrali of Torrington to resign from a party he had been a member of since he was a college student in Vermont in the early 1970s.
“I didn’t support President Trump in [2016],” said
Magistrali, who is 66 and serves as a probate judge for the Torrington area. “I had questions about his fitness as president, but I was willing to give him a shot once he was elected.” And, he added, he believed Congress would act as a check on the president.
But last month, Magistrali finally had enough. He resigned from the Torrington Republican Town Committee and switched his voter registration to unaffiliated. Magistrali said he still supports Republicans on the local level, who he praised as honorable people.
“I came to see that the national Republican Party no longer reflected my values,” he said. “On so many issues, I am on a different page than he is … and I really don’t see the Republicans in Congress standing up to him at all.”
Romano, the state Republican chairman, dismissed the Lincoln Project and other anti-Trump groups as disgruntled political insiders determined to attack a president who shunned them.
“They we re n ’t in Trump’s inner circle so they found a way to make money,” Romano said. “They’re political elitists and establishment people, and this is a way for them to pay themselves.”
Four months before Election Day, it is still unclear how much of a role Trump’s Republican critics will play in shaping the outcome of the race.
“Republicans see the economy is hobbling, but they see it as a temporary factor,” said Jonathan Wharton, a professor of political science at Southern Connecticut State University and a former member of the Republican State Central Committee. “The stock market is up, and that’s more or less what their main talking point is, especially in Connecticut.
“Too often, people try to explain things in terms of one factor, but it’s really more nuanced than that. And it all could change by November.”