COLIN MCENROE
Want to keep winning? Become an incumbent
You get the feeling Lauretti doesn’t find this particularly challenging anymore. Last year he floated — in apparent seriousness — the idea of running for mayor of Bridgeport, where he obviously does not live. Maybe Connecticut mayoralties should be like the NBA. You become a free agent and look for the best deal.
On primary night in 2006, I was in a back room at the Ned Lamont election night headquarters with David Pudlin, one of the people running his campaign.
Returns were coming in, and it was looking good for Lamont. Pudlin philosophized about the latent power of incumbency. It’s almost impossible to remove a multiterm incumbent, he said, unless they have stolen a great deal of money or developed an unwholesome fondness for barnyard animals.
“We’re on the brink of turning out an incumbent based on his policies,” Pudlin said in mostly mock astonishment. “That’s almost unAmerican.”
Lamont did win that night, defeating Joe Lieberman who bounced back by creating a third party he never actually joined and then using his XMenlike powers to cloud the minds of pretty much everybody.
But Pudlin’s words have stayed with me. Democratic deepthinker Bill Curry puts it another way: “We have a twoparty system: Incumbents and challengers.” Incumbency is so great an advantage that it would probably be more fair if challengers were spotted, say, 2 percent of the previous cycle’s vote total.
Need proof ? Consider Tuesday’s municipal elections. Republican Mark Boughton faced a strong challenge from Democrat Chris Setaro but won by about 1,300 votes. This will be Boughton’s 10th term. He first won in 2001 when he ran against (drumroll) Chris Setaro. Danbury, where Groundhog Day comes in November.
Ten terms! That’s a lot! No, it isn’t. Republican Mark Lauretti won his 15th consecutive term as mayor of Shelton on Tuesday. You get the feeling Lauretti doesn’t find this particularly challenging anymore. Last year he floated — in apparent seriousness — the idea of running for mayor of Bridgeport, where he obviously does not live. Maybe Connecticut mayoralties should be like the NBA. You become a free agent and look for the best deal.
But 15 terms is nothing, gentle reader. In Wallingford, William Dickinson won his 19th term as mayor. Wallingford was the last place in New England to have a trial for witchcraft, and I’m pretty sure Dickinson presided over it. (Wallingford’s Winifred King Benham was actually prosecuted three times in the 1600s, unsuccessfully, for witchcraft. I believe they may have also tried to tie her to Benghazi.)
You know what Robert Chatfield calls Dickinson and his measly 19 terms? Just getting started. Chatfield, another Republican, won his 22nd term as mayor of Prospect. It’s such a layup for Chatfield that the Democrats no longer bother to run anybody against him.
“It is just a good feeling, a load off my shoulders, and I can get back to work,” Chatfield said after his staggering victory over nobody. Wait. How could there have been a load on his shoulders while running unopposed? Maybe the whole thing has become so routine that Chatfield doesn’t even check to see if he has an opponent.
Let’s go back to Boughton. It should be really hard for him to win. First of all, Republicans don’t do well in cities. Heading into Tuesday, only 14 of the 50 largest U.S. cities had Republican mayors, the largest being San Diego and the second largest being Jacksonville, the only city where you can’t campaign on “Drain the Swamp” because basically it is one.
Democratic voters in Danbury outnumber Republicans 13,400 to 8,200, but unaffiliated voters, 18,600 of them, decide every election.
There are 43 languages spoken in the public schools and 31 percent of the population in Latino. This should be relevant because Danbury somehow shares a border with Ecuador, and Boughton’s relationship with that population has been, in the past, abrasive. Most of the bad stuff — raids, crackdowns, police partnerships with the feds, and, no kidding, an antivolleyball ordinance — happened from 2005 to 2008, but the reputation stuck to Boughton.
Meanwhile, Boughton tried to make nice with the Latino community. After his Tuesday win, in one of his regular appearances on the “Ethan and Lou Show” on WRKI classic rock, right before a really kickass Billy Squier tune, he said it was “hurtful” when supporters of his opponent called him racist and xenophobic.
One of the ironic byproducts of Boughton’s efforts at better relations with the Latino community was being denounced, during his 2018 run for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, as soft on immigration. His main denouncer was former Trumbull First Selectman Tim Herbst whose father Michael, it should be noted, badly lost Tuesday, in his bid to win back his son’s old job. Which proves that, although incumbency is a powerful force, it’s not some ugly Christmas tie you can regift to other family members.
To top it all off, there were concerns about Boughton’s health. He collapsed with a seizure during the gubernatorial slog and had a “lemonsized” cyst from his brain in 2017. He’s not the first Connecticut mayor I thought needed brain surgery, but he’s the only who actually got it.
One way Boughton wins is by coming across as a nice guy. Personality researcher Paul Tieger once said to me, “People vote for people they like.” That sounds pretty obvious, I know, but you’d be surprised how often it gets lost in the fog of campaign war. It has definitely affected the fortunes of certain politicians whose name rhymes with Schmerbst.
If you sat next to Boughton on a long flight, there’s a better than average chance that you’d enjoy his company, as long as you avoided certain topics such as volleyball.
Perhaps the ultimate proof of Tieger’s dictum is Justin Elicker, who actually did pull of a major coup against a strong incumbent, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp.
On Tuesday night, after a superweird campaign tinctured with allegations about espionage drones and backstairs conspiracies with the Trump Justice Department, Elicker spent about half of his acceptance speech praising the accomplishments of Harp.
It was a nice look.