New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
‘Trump effect’ evident in CT’s Republican Party
Donald Trump’s long reach, effectively anointing political newcomer Leora Levy to challenge secondterm U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, has changed the face of the Connecticut Republican Party while insinuating MAGA grievances into the entire fall campaign for governor, top-of-the-ticket constitutional officers and the 187seat General Assembly.
Political scientists in the state said that while Trump’s late-campaign support in blue-state Connecticut was surprising, it’s always the party base that is most-energized for primaries and Levy channeled it to handily defeat partyendorsed Themis Klarides, the former state House minority leader who won the endorsement at the May conventions.
“The Trump effect was as visual in Connecticut almost as much as every other state,” said Ronald Schurin, a political science professor at UConn who teaches a class on political parties. “It does put us a little bit on the national map on the Trump effect. But Connecticut is a state where the default is that it’s where Democrats win, and I’ll be very surprised if the Democrats don’t keep winning in the fall. Obviously the Democrats will try to make it about Trump.”
Gary L. Rose, chairman of the Department of Government at Sacred Hearst University, said that watching the primary returns on Tuesday, Levy’s eveninglong double-digit lead over Klarides was quite extraordinary, especially as towns with reputations for educated, moderate party members voted for Levy.
“It was clearly, without a doubt, the Trump endorsement that put her over the top, combined with the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago,” Rose said in a phone interview. “The Trump endorsement drew voters from Lumaj, who quickly became irrelevant, but it also drew support from Themis. Towns that Themis should have won or expected to do better in, abandoned her and went to Leora. He planted his flag and made a big difference, like in several other races around the country.”
Rose warned about the potential for over-generalizing with such a small sample of voters. “Can you really draw trends from a fifth of the party voting?” he said. “It was a primary where people had the opportunity to make a statement. Still, what I find particularly fascinating is how a primary can tell what is happening to a party. I am starting to think the Republican party in Connecticut is very much enamored of the former president.”
Rose, who hosted Trump at SHU in one of his two Connecticut appearances in the 2016 presidential campaign, said he’s not willing to go far as to say that Connecticut Republicans have become a Trump party. “It’s a party in transition,” Rose said. “That’s what’s happening here. It’s going to be difficult for some candidates.”
Still, Levy is a Trump proxy, running on the MAGA views of the former president and his supporters. “I don’t see how Leora can downplay it,” Rose said. “It’s been her meal ticket.”
Peter Lumaj of Fairfield was a distant third, with 8,735 votes amounting to less than 10 percent to Levy’s 50.6 percent and Klarides’ 30 percent, 10,000 votes behind. Only 10.3 percent of the 455,735 registered Republicans voted for Levy, a member of the Republican National Committee. In all, the 93,064 primary votes cast represented 20.4 percent turnout.
Gayle Alberda, assistant professor of politics at Fairfield University, expects that state Republicans will try to change the topic every time Trump’s name comes up on the campaign trail.
“Connecticut Yankee Republicans seem to be more liberal that Midwestern Republicans or southern Republicans such as Texas, Arizona and Florida, but at the same time it goes to show you that Trump still has some pull in the party,” Alberda said “Does that pull matter in the general election with the unaffiliated voters? For Republican primary candidates you want to be as conservative as possible.”
Alberda said that many GOP candidates on the November ballot will have to moderate themselves and straddle the line between supporting for Trump, and tempering personal opinions. “If you affiliate yourself with Trump, you could alienate other voters,” she said, especially since the 911,419 unaffiliated voters are an even bigger group that the 803,612 registered Democrats.
And as loud and focused as GOP talking points may be about high gasoline prices, inflation and taxes under President Joe Biden, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Gov. Ned Lamont, Democrats say that somewhere behind Connecticut Republicans is the twice impeached, Fifth Amendment-citing former president who is the current subject of civil and criminal investigations, plus the U.S. House’s Jan. 6 Committee.
There hasn’t been a Republican governor since M. Jodi Rell left office in early 2011. The last Republican member of Congress was Christopher Shays, who lost to now-veteran Fourth District U.S. Rep. Jim Himes in 2007. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., lost his U.S. Senate reelection in 1987, then started his own A Connecticut Party to become a one-term governor.
The last GOP majority in the state Senate was in 1995 and 1996, while it has been since 1985 and 1986 since Republicans held sway in the state House of Representatives.
That’s not to say that Republicans can’t win. Schurin remembers Lumaj’s 2014 run for secretary of the state, when he got more than 489,000 votes, but still lost by a few percentage points to Democrat Denise Merrill.
Len Fasano, the former Senate minority leader until an 18-18 tie occurred in November, 2016 election, when he shared leadership power with President Pro Tempore Martin Looney of New Haven for two years, said Friday he believes that at least for the U.S. Senate contest, it will be a proxy Biden-Trump battle between Blumenthal and Levy that doesn’t necessarily spill over into the race for governor.
“Leora Levy is going to have to make her case to the Connecticut people and see where that goes,” Fasano said. “Blumenthal will have to share the Biden record. Sen. Blumenthal has been around for a long time, always voicing his displeasure on things. The question is what has he done?”
Recent reports on a sharp reduction in inflation last month, along with steady reductions in gasoline prices, Republicans might have less-solid room to maneuver in the sprint to November 8. But Ben Proto, chairman of the state party, on a conference call the day after the primary arranged by the Republican National Committee, was adamant with state political reporters that the Trump effect is minimal.
“Donald Trump is not the president of the United States,” Proto said. “He doesn’t hold any office. I understand you all like to talk about him and what he might want to do in a few years. We’re interested in 2022. I don’t think at the end of the day people are voting on Donald Trump. He’s not there. Whether or not Donald Trump had an impact on the primary has nothing to do with the general election in November.”
State House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora of North Branford, who supported Klarides’ candidacy and was in her Middletown headquarters on Primary Night, said that the Trump endorsement and Mar-a-Lago raid clearly drove Levy’s victory.
But he also believes that Trump’s blessing could also drive unaffiliated and even conservative Democrats to support Republicans in key districts this fall.
“I don’t think the Democrats should be crowing victory and getting overly excited,” said Candelora, whose 54-member House minority includes a range of ultra-conservatives to moderates.
“Democrats do have a problem in Biden, whose approval rating has been in basement for a long time,” he said. “People are reeling from inflation, which is caused by government spending. But I am worried about the possibility of divisiveness and hope that rank and file Republicans do not eat each other alive, and not put a microscope on who’s more Republican than who.”