The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Lamont cruises to win
Race called early, Ganim defeated soundly
Connecticut Democrats on Tuesday overwhelmingly chose Ned Lamont to be their candidate for governor, rejecting Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim’s unlikely challenge.
The Associated Press called the race for Lamont before 8:30, with 85 percent of the vote to Ganim’s 15 percent.
“This is a very important election,” Lamont said. “This is the end of the beginning but it’s just starting again. I’m focused right now on what we have to do for the state of Connecticut.”
During an interview as he walked handin-hand with his wife Annie along Chapel Street in New Haven, on his way to a victory party at the College
Street Music Hall, Lamont said he had just accepted a congratulatory phone call from the Bridgeport mayor.
After ending Ganim’s bid, Lamont must now overcome eight years of accumulated criticism of Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in the fall election campaign. Republicans will link Lamont to Malloy while Democrats will pin his Republican opponent to President Donald J. Trump.
Lamont’s Primary Day ground game, and the May endorsement at the Democratic convention, were enough to fight off Ganim’s aggressive campaign.
The 64-year-old Greenwich businessman’s previous claim to political fame was a short-lived, upset primary victory over then U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in 2006. He ran a mostly positive primary campaign this summer, relying on optimism, and support from the state’s major unions, to take his latest candidacy to the finish line.
He also drew strength from Democrats who believed that Ganim’s criminal record would be toxic in a statewide effort to retain the governor’s office at a time of record low-approval ratings for Malloy.
On the campaign trail, Lamont talked about the need for investments in education, in particular the expansion of vocational education to fill the more than 13,000 openings for skilled manufacturing workers.
He has promoted the expansion of renewable energy sources; widening the state’s nationally recognized gun-safety laws; and investing in the transportation infrastructure by creating electronic highway tolling for trucks, similar to those in Rhode Island.
But Lamont showed his own feisty side during debates with Ganim, 58, who took every opportunity to point out Lamont’s tremendous wealth, even making a campaign issue out of the number of bathrooms in Lamont’s home.
Ganim portrayed Lamont as out-of-touch suburbanite who laid off workers from his cableTV company while reaping profits.
On those occasions, Lamont stressed his former employees kept their jobs when he sold off a division of his company, calling Ganim a liar, and making only a slightly veiled reference to the mayor’s seven-year prison sentence after losing a federal corruption trial in 2003. Overall, Lamont suggested that Ganim focus on Bridgeport, where he won re-election in 2015, and he promised to work with the mayor for the betterment of the state’s cities.
Lamont has served as a former member of the finance board in Greenwich and the state’s pension board under former Gov. Lowell P. Weicker, Jr.
Ganim’s feisty, in-your-face campaign, which he tried to frame as a city-versus-suburban class struggle, featured TV ads that portrayed him as a boxer, vowing to fight for state residents. Barred from the state’s public-financing program, he raised about $900,000 and has only a small fraction of it left for an upcoming campaign that could cost $10 million. Ganim also loaned his campaign $60,000.
At about 9:15 p.m. Ganim took the stage at Testo’s Restaurant in Bridgeport as a soundtrack blared “Eye of the Tiger” from “Rocky” – fitting given his boxing commercial.
“A few minutes ago I called Ned Lamont and congratulated him on his victory, a great victory and a hard-fought, spirited primary,” Ganim told supporters.
“We had a good conversation and a conversation that’s important for Democrats and for Connecticut,” Ganim said. “This state right now needs to be and can be a better place if we come together and fight to make it a better place. What happens with the Democatic Party is that we come together and now we beome part of a larger army.”
Ganim failed to gather the 15-percent support needed at the convention to automatically qualify for the primary, but collected 32,000 signatures to petition his way onto the ballot. About 15,000 were invalidated by local voter registrars and the Secretary of the State. An examination of the petitions in late June by Hearst Connecticut Media found that only 16,929 were validated. He needed 15,458 signatures from registered Democrats to qualify for the primary.
With the primary settled, state Democrats will now face a challenge in the general election. Malloy’s major investments in the state’s under-funded employee pensions have been overshadowed by the two highest tax increases in state history to create a bleak political landscape for Democrats to hold the governor’s office.
J.R. Romano, Republican state chairman, said Tuesday that the state’s fiscal problems, with a projected $2-billion-plus deficit facing the next General Assembly in January, mean that both Democrats are vulnerable in the fall campaign.
“At the end of the day, whether Joe Ganim or Ned Lamont wins, their solution to the state’s financial crisis is to raise your taxes,” Romano said. “So to us, the winner doesn’t really matter.”