Political lawn signs reveal one party is ashamed of itself
Are Republican candidates in Connecticut helping or hurting themselves with the lawn signs for their campaigns?
Most lawn signs for Democratic candidates in the state identify the candidates with their party, but few if any Republican signs do. If a candidate’s sign fails to identify his party, you can be pretty sure he or she is a Republican.
This long has been so, and the rationale for it has been that Republicans are such a small share of Connecticut’s electorate — only about 20%, outnumbered by Democrats by almost two to one and outnumbered again by unaffiliated voters by slightly more than two to one — that the Republican label is a drag and that candidates won’t be given a second look if they are known to be Republicans.
This rationale has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. For when the signs imply that candidates are ashamed of the party that has endorsed them, why should they be given a second look?
Of course the Republican Party in Connecticut and nationally is horribly tainted by the antics of former President Donald Trump. Yet Trump’s taint is more a matter of personality and character than the policies of his late administration, while the Democratic Party is now horribly tainted by both the policies and personal characteristics of President Biden, including his ever more embarrassing episodes of dementia on stage.
Indeed, more Democratic candidates seem to be avoiding Biden than Republican candidates are avoiding Trump.
While party registration in Connecticut has been so imbalanced for decades, during that time the state nevertheless has elected two Republican governors, a Republican senator, and three Republican U.S. representatives, giving them long tenure, indicating that moderate Republicanism can appeal to a majority here. But moderate Republicans are not likely to be elected in Connecticut unless they plainly identify themselves as such.
That’s why the most effective television commercial of the current campaign in the state may be that of former state Sen. George Logan, the Republican nominee in the 5th U.S. House District. In the commercial Logan touts his moderation and faults the Democrats for trying to put him in a box marked “typical Republican.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Logan is the Republican congressional candidate Democrats worry about most. (It doesn’t hurt that he is Black.) The Republican ticket in
Connecticut has more than a few other moderates but they don’t make the point as well.
Democrats ran against Herbert Hoover for 30 years after he left the presidency, and it often worked. They may be running against Trump for another 30 years. Connecticut Republicans should draw the necessary conclusion or else change the party’s name to something they dare to put on their lawn signs.
Slant beats endorsement
Many newspapers around the country are forswearing endorsements of candidates, as the Hartford Courant announced it would do the other day. This is being dressed up as an improvement in civic virtue but is really more a cynical financial calculation.
That is, as civic engagement and literacy decline, editorial pages are often found to be the least read sections of newspapers, and as the newspaper industry itself declines, many newspapers no longer staff their editorial pages seriously and so can’t produce meaningful endorsements anyway.
This doesn’t mean that newspapers are no longer political. To the contrary, most major papers are more partisan now than they have been in 50 years as they move their partisanship from their editorial pages to their news pages.
The selection of every news story always has been a political act in the broadest sense. But not so long ago fairness was considered the highest virtue in journalism after accuracy. The favorable and unfavorable things about candidates were both to be reported. Not so much today. For example, many newspapers and broadcast networks eagerly pursued the “Russian collusion” hoax about Trump while they dismissed as a hoax the genuine and grossly incriminating material on Hunter Biden’s discarded laptop.
Slanting and spinning news coverage for or against candidates can be far more effective than devising reasoned arguments for or against them. Today it requires more work than ever for voters to keep themselves reliably informed.