GOP challenge to Blumenthal splinters at convention
State Democrats unanimously nominated Richard Blumenthal for a third term in the United States Senate on May 6. Blumenthal’s campaign has around $8 million on hand and easy access to more. This is the Greenwich Democrat’s eighth statewide campaign. He has been in public office for 42 years and is the state’s most familiar public official.
Three Republicans have begun a campaign without pity against each other to face Blumenthal in November. Each is certain he or she can defeat him in November. On May 7, Republican delegates to the party’s nominating convention endorsed former state Rep. Themis Klarides as the party’s nominee with 56% of their votes.
Republican National Committeewoman Leora Levy and Fairfield lawyer Peter Lumaj each received about 22% of the delegate votes, easily surpassing the 15% required to qualify for an August primary. Klarides, who served in the House for 22 years — four as minority leader — had been expected to win more support than she did on the day.
She might have if a barrage of negative text messages had not reached delegates in the run-up to the convention.
Harsh political campaigns are an American staple. Technology has created campaign equivalents of cruise missiles. Text messages are becoming the tool of choice. The day before the start of the Republican convention, delegates received a text message accusing Klarides of voting for Joe Biden, being pro-choice (or pro-abortion, as the text put it), and supporting both gun control and COVID19 mandates. The message also raised Klarides’s ties to utility giant Eversource through her marriage to top company executive Gregory Butler.
In 52 words, the message detonated some of the most potent political commandments of Republican orthodoxy. It was — and will remain — a challenge for Klarides to refute. She says she did not vote for Biden in 2020. Klarides says she wrote in her immediate predecessor as leader of the House Republicans, Lawrence Cafero, for president. That may be a clarification Donald Trump supporters find more infuriating than persuasive.
Klarides voted for the state gun control laws enacted after the 2021 Sandy Hook School massacre. Many Republicans did, but a decade, especially the last one, can bring dramatic changes in a political party’s prevailing consensus. There was a broader consensus in the state two years ago as the global pandemic bore down on us. The COVID-19 mandates were intrusive, disruptive — and necessary at a time without vaccines or effective treatments. Klarides’s last term in office ended before opposition to mandates became another fever that refuses to break.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion overruling 1973’s Roe v. Wade abortion opinion has upended many of the year’s political expectations for now. We do not know what the final opinion will say, how
many justices may write limiting concurring opinions, or whether any of the justices voting with Alito may change his or her mind.
Klarides is not a Connecticut outlier. Roe, reduced to its essentials, concluded a state did not have an interest in restricting abortions in the first trimester of a woman’s pregnancy, some in the second, and a lot in the third. In 1992, the Supreme
Court adopted a standard that prohibited obstacles to abortions before a fetus is viable, generally seen as 24 weeks into a woman’s pregnancy. Klarides is one of the many state Republican voters, candidates and officeholders who supported Roe for decades. Levy was part of that state Republican tradition a decade ago. Now she describes herself as the only pro-life woman in the race. Lumaj also opposes abortion.
Connecticut enshrined abortion rights protections in state law more than 30 years ago.
The state has long been one of 16 that provide coverage for poor women seeking abortions. There will be many ads and texts among Republican primary candidates on abortion that may sink Klarides with party voters.
Instead of imposing rigid litmus tests, maybe one of the candidates will take a breath and share some ideas on issues that are not party dogma intended to enrage. A lot of Connecticut residents use home oil for hot water and heat. It costs $5 a gallon today. That’s more than double what it cost two years ago.
Most Americans have not lived through a prolonged period of inflation. It is destructive, anxiety-inducing and painful to reverse. By August, primary voters will want to hear candidates explain their solutions to that complicated challenge — in complete sentences and sober paragraphs.