A muted Trump effect as parties claim wins
In a hardfought first selectman battle in Fairfield, a voter named Ian, in his early 30s, showed up at the polls Tuesday for his first municipal election.
He didn’t even know about the big issue in town, a toxic dumping scandal. His goal was to send a message to President Donald Trump by voting for Democrats. And he made sure his mother voted, too.
At the Danbury War Memorial polling place, a woman who used to vote for Republican Mayor Mark Boughton — her former teacher — instead went with the Democrat, Chris Setaro, in part because of Trump. Never mind that Boughton has barely ever said a good word about the president and joked in 2016 that he voted for his dog instead of Trump.
“He’s affiliated,” said the voter, who declined to give her name and had expletives for Trump.
In Greenwich, 94yearold Ralph Guglielmo exited the Bendheim Western Green
wich Civic Center after a disappointment. As a Trump disliker, he intended to vote for all Democrats, then discovered on the ballot that his choice for first selectman, state Rep. Fred Camillo, was a Republican.
“I wanted him to be a Democrat,” said Guglielmo, a World War II Navy veteran wearing a U.S. Navy hat. He voted for Camillo anyway, but down ticket, to send a message, he went with Democrats.
All three represented a muchanticipated trend that turned out to be marginal.
If there was a socalled Trump effect in Tuesday’s elections — a bluestate surge for Democrats in local races having little or nothing to do with national politics — it was subtle and too weak to drive clear results.
Republican Brenda Kupchick, a state Representative who will now give up her General Assembly seat, trounced incumbent First Selectman Democrat Mike Tetreau in Fairfield. In Greenwich, with an open first selectman seat for the first time in years, Camillo upheld the town’s historic GOP edge, defeating Jill Oberlander.
And Boughton beat back a wellorganized challenge by Setaro, a year after Democrats picked up near super majorities in the state House and Senate as anger against Trump boiled over.
Make no mistake, there was a Trump effect in Tuesday’s local elections across Connecticut. The question was how much Trump’s unpopularity in Connecticut would spill over.
We can never know, of course, because politics gives us no way to isolate factors and every race is a rich story full of weird twists. One volunteer for the Setaro in Danbury told me the liberal Democrat picked up votes from some Trump supporters fed up with Boughton’s evident disdain for the president. Go figure.
Just about every candidate and activist volunteer I spoke with had an example of an antiTrumper out for revenge against Republicans. And several voters in my small sample in four towns with close elections said Trump’s reprehensible behavior swayed their ballot picks.
“Some of the choices I made had more to do with Trump than who was on the ballot,” said a Fairfield voter who wouldn’t give her name because she has close Trumpsupporter friends. “He was on my mind. How could he not be?”
In some cities and towns, the Democrat did well by tarring the Republican with Trumpism. That happened in Middletown, where Democrat Ben Florsheim used the strategy to defeat Sebastian Giuliano, a former threeterm mayor, in a race with an open seat.
“A few of Ben’s mailers had Trump on them,” said Rob Blanchard, the Democratic town chairman and a staffer for Gov. Ned Lamont. “We said, ‘Don’t let White House politics infiltrate City Hall.’ ”
Some ploys, famously, grew nasty and underhanded, as with the fake “Trump/Camillo” signs in Greenwich, planted by a local police captain who landed himself on administrative leave.
But overall, it appears that Republican State Chairman J.R. Romano was right this time, just as he was wrong last year, claiming Trump backlash wouldn’t amount to much and that local issues matter more to local voters.
By the count of my colleague Kaitlyn Krasselt, using multiple sources, it appears that Republicans and Democrats each flipped the top office in seven or eight towns. Dems took over from the GOP in Litchfield, Madison, Colchester and East Haven, to name four locales; and Republicans swung the first selectman seats in Sprague (where Democratic state Sen. Cathy Osten is first selectman), Fairfield, Wethersfield and Old Lyme, among others.
Republicans are left in control of a strong majority of towns, just as in last year’s race for governor, when most towns went for Republican Bob Stefanowski over Lamont. But the statewide popular vote doesn’t matter in town elections as it does in the governor’s race.
And so we did not see the Trumpeffect tsunami that many had expected. For the record, everebullient Democrats say they’re happy with the level of energy, the wins on town councils and the decent turnout Tuesday.
This was to be Trump Effect II, the prequel to 2020, Tetreau, the Fairfield first selectman, told me before the polls closed. Trump Effect I was the echo from the 2016 election. “This is part of preparing for Trump next year,” he said. “Getting people engaged.”
Just this past weekend, Tetreau had a getoutthevote event headlined by Attorney General William Tong, who tied the race to Trumpism — appropriately, Tetreau said.
As he and I spoke, Kupchick appeared at the same polling place, St. Pius School. They were cordial. Her take, naturally, differed from the man whose job she would take in this election.
“There was a lot of Trump talk last year when I was knocking on doors,” Kupchick said of her successful campaign for the state House. This year, she said, “I would say it was significantly less and I probably knocked on 9,000 doors.”
She dances when people ask her about her view of Trump. “I say that if the president did anything wrong then he should suffer the consequences,” Kupchick said.
As for Trump’s indefensible personal behavior, an obvious embarrassment to all Americans and all humans, “I can’t call the president out every day,” Brenda Kupchick said.
On Tuesday, that tightrope act worked for many Connecticut Republican municipal candidates. If the bluest state can’t muster a Trump backlash a year before the 2020 national election, with impeachment hearings underway, maybe that’s good news for the embattled president.
Or maybe, as Romano says, it just means voters are tired of high property taxes.