A red wave never arrived
Dems gained seats in Connecticut despite bold GOP predictions
HARTFORD — The largest impacts in politics are traditionally about what happened, but 2022 was different.
One of the year’s biggest stories focused on something that did not happen — the much predicted big red wave.
For months, Republicans and conservative media outlets were touting the expected wave that was coming all around the country, predicting that Republicans would score big gains in a year with the highest inflation in four decades that was marked by sluggish poll ratings for President Joe Biden.
Back in early May — six months before the elections — a confident state Republican chairman Ben Proto ended the party’s convention by proclaiming, “That red wave is coming, folks!”
While the wave was muted across the country, it never arrived at all in Connecticut. In the state legislature, Democrats actually increased their control with one extra seat in the Senate to a veto-proof margin of 24 -12 and by one seat in the state House of Representatives to 98-53.
In addition, Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont defeated Republican rival Bob Stefanowski in a 13-point victory that was more than four times greater than his narrow, three percentage point win in their first contest in 2018.
For Republicans, the amount of money spent didn’t seem to matter in the final outcomes.
Stefanowski spent $13 million, but he and other Republicans remained in the same narrow range of 42% to 44% of the vote, regardless of the number of commercials or amount spent. Stefanowski received even fewer total votes than Greenwich resident Harry Arora, the Republican candidate for state treasurer who had little name recognition statewide.
Lamont’s victory was so far-reaching that Stefanowski’s ticket lost in his hometown of Madison and his running mate Laura Devlin’s hometown of Fairfield.
Just like he did in 2018, Stefanowski went on the Chaz and AJ radio show on the morning after this year’s election and said he had expected to see the
red wave.
“I thought it’d be a bigger night for Republicans both nationally and in the state last night, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t,” Stefanowski said. “It doesn’t make sense to me, to be honest with you.”
Klarides defeat
One of the most stunning results of 2022 was the loss by longtime Republican Themis Klarides in the U.S. Senate primary. Klarides won the party’s convention handily in May and had been deemed the front-runner in an expected battle against U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
But that all changed when former President Donald J. Trump endorsed Greenwich fundraiser Leora Levy in the final days before the August primary. That endorsement proved to be the difference as Levy won in a stunning upset.
Democrats and some Republicans had predicted that holding a three-way primary would backfire on Republicans because the candidates — Klarides, Levy, and conservative lawyer Peter Lumaj of Fairfield — would clash against each other and drain both time and money from the Republicans. Democrats predicted that the winner would wake up on the morning after the August primary with essentially no money left to battle against Blumenthal.
That’s exactly what happened. Levy spent precious time raising money, including traveling to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Longtime political science professor Gary Rose of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield said that Levy essentially disappeared from the campaign trail while she was privately raising money — dooming her candidacy as a newcomer who had never held public office and had little statewide name recognition.
While former state Democratic chairman John F. Droney and others said that Klarides would have put up a tougher fight against Blumenthal, they say she would have lost against Blumenthal anyway in a blue state where Democrats have won every election for Congress and constitutional offices since 2006.
Blumenthal won by 13 percentage points — essentially the same margin as Lamont.
5th Congressional victory
The closest major race in the state ended with a narrow victory by U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes over Republican George Logan in the 5th Congressional district.
A two-term Democrat, Hayes was targeted by national Republicans who successfully regained control of the U.S. House of Representatives in their quest to oust Democrat Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. The national battle was fought around the country, and the Connecticut swing district emerged as a key battleground in the larger contest for national political control.
The Republican National Committee chairwoman, Ronna Romney McDaniel, visited the district twice at the national committee’s campaign office in New Britain, a critically important city that Hayes won in her first two elections. McDaniel made the trips in an effort to bring the red wave to Connecticut.
The state Republican Party sent at least 10 campaign flyers in the U.S. mail to voters in the 5th Congressional District — a far higher number than usual. Some did not mention Logan at all, but instead said Hayes was “rubber stamping Nancy Pelosi’s disastrous agenda” with pictures of Pelosi, President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known widely as AOC.
As the political winds have changed through the years, Democrats remained confident in holding an important seat they have won every two years since 2006. With Litchfield County and the Farmington Valley increasingly trending more Democratic, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden defeated Republican Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020 in the district.
A major factor in favor of Hayes was the spillover effect from the two statewide races on the ballot. Political pundits predicted that if the state’s two best-known Democrats — Lamont and Blumenthal — won their races by 10 to 12 percentage points, it would be highly difficult for Logan to overcome that trend.
In the end, Lamont and Blumenthal won by 13 points each — generating enough support and momentum for Hayes to win the state’s closest major race by less than 1 percentage point.