Basking in the Trump afterglow

I wasn’t even going to cover the 2022 U.S. Senate election in fair Connecticut.

My reason, oddly enough, is that I was too close to the presumptive Republican nominee. I like Themis Klarides. I always have.

But when she got married in 2020, she wed a very close friend of mine. There was no chance I could achieve a neutral state of mind about Themis, and I so informed my bosses at Hearst and CT Public.

And then look what happened.

Leora Levy, a Greenwich Republican fund-raiser who has embraced the style and politics of Donald Trump, beat Klarides in Tuesday’s primary. An electoral novice, she will run against Richard Blumenthal who has not lost an election since he entered politics in 1931.

This year, there was an unusually feisty race for the GOP nomination, with a third opponent in Peter Lumaj, who has spent the past 10 years as the kind of perennial candidate who is happy if elevator buttons light up when he touches them. We don’t get threeway Senate primaries a lot. Connecticut Republican candidates for Senate are pretty much like the goat staked out for the Tyrannosaurus in “Jurassic Park,” so the party often has to beat the bushes (as opposed to the Bushes) to find somebody.

In 2000, the party nominated Philip Giordano, the mayor of Waterbury, who lost almost 2-to-1 to Joe Lieberman. The following year, Giordano was arrested when federal agents, conducting surveillance in a city corruption probe, recorded abhorrent sexual contact between Giordano and the children of a prostitute. He is currently a resident of the Yazoo City Medium Security Correctional Institute, from which he is scheduled to be released in 2033, just in time to be part of the first crewed space flight to Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons.

OK, OK, that’s an unfairly garish example. The next cycle, 2004, the Republicans nominated a very nice grilled cheese sandwich to run against Chris Dodd.

Right around that time, Connecticut made the unwise decision to switch its primaries from September to August. The first year this was tried, a dead stingray washed up on the beach in New London, was nominated to run for state representative, an early sign that people weren’t really concentrating.

Tuesday’s results hint at the problem this poses for Republicans. Levy received about 47,000 votes to about 37,000 for Klarides. (Lumaj finished under 9,000, but a Starbucks barista got his name right, so: winning!) Hmmm, 47,000 votes. For a little perspective, the last time Blumenthal ran in a general election, he surpassed 1 million votes.

I know, I know! I am comparing malus pumila to citrus sinensis. The general is different from the primary in many ways, but the August primary exacerbates the existing structural problems of Republicans in Connecticut. According to the calculator on my phone, four-fifths of Connecticut’s active Republicans did not participate in this primary.

There are many reasons for this, starting with the weather, which spiked at around 97 on Tuesday, with atmospheric conditions resembling a fire on an Indonesian rubber plantation. It’s tough to get Republicans to vote in the midst of weather caused by problems the party is committed to not addressing.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say weather of this sort favors nuttiness. The voter who wakes up thinking, “My brain is on fire. I have no life. Vaccines contain zombie DNA. Trump! Trump!” is more likely to vote.

I could be wrong. The party is changing. For example, in 2016, a Greenwich Republican wrote a letter to the editor of the Greenwich Time that read, in part: “Trump has turned the Republican primary process into a circus for his own purposes and his own aggrandizement. He is vulgar, ill-mannered and disparages those whom he cannot intimidate. His modus operandi is to try to intimidate people then call them names and calumniate about them and then if those tactics do not work, to sue them. That is how he has run his businesses and that is how he is running his campaign. It is the media who have done the American voters a huge disservice by falling for his sideshows and not covering the serious candidates.”

That letter-writer has now transformed into an ardent Trump supporter. In fact, that letter-writer is Leora Levy, who apparently developed a taste for calumniating presidents and basked in the orange glow of a Trump endorsement.

But, yes, Blumenthal looks weaker in this cycle. The Democrats, as a party, look weaker. The old Connecticut wisdom — that a more moderate Republican like Klarides would stand a better chance — may mean nothing now that that America has turned into the Land of Bananas and Cuckoo-birds.

All I know is that I’m ready to cover this race. Put me in, Coach.

H John Voorhees III / Hearst Connecticut Media Leora Levy gives her victory speech in the U.S. Senate GOP primary race at Hyatt Regency Hotel in Greenwich in 2022.