How the Republican Party can reclaim the governor’s seat
Republicans of Connecticut, be of good cheer. For even though your enemies did smite ye and send unto ye boils and carbuncles and cause ye to creep and crawl upon the ground like a white, many-legged thing one might find after turning over a damp piece of wood in the forest, ye shall have hope.
I really mean this. Some people have concluded that the shellacking delivered to the Republicans in what was supposed to be a red wave year further proves that the party has no chance of winning races here in the immediate future.
So let me say this: The Republican party can win the Connecticut governorship any time it wants to.
Consider: When Ned Lamont finishes his second term, Connecticut will have a 16-year unbroken streak of Democratic gubernatorial rule.
Immediately prior to that, Connecticut had Republican governors, also for 16 straight years. This broke down into 10 years of John Rowland, after which he was raptured body and soul into Heaven and placed in jail. You wouldn’t think there would be jails in Heaven, but Rowland turned out to be unusually gifted at finding jails and winding up in them.
Jodi Rell was elevated to the governorship, which left the office of lieutenant governor vacant. The way it’s supposed to work is that the President Pro Tem of the Senate moves “up.” That rare privilege befell Kevin Sullivan, who was so convinced it was a bucket of warm spit and first class ticket to irrelevance that he trial ballooned the idea of switching places with another senator, Billy Ciotto, a good-natured man who would have enjoyed cutting ribbons, eating moussaka at Greek festivals and shooting paper clips at a Dixie cup placed atop a bust of Nathan Hale, which are the main duties of the lieutenant governor.
I forget why it didn’t happen. Maybe it was illegal or something.
In 2006 Rell ran for governor and beat New Haven mayor John DeStefano Jr. By that time, there were so many officials under arrest, under indictment or under investigation that the FBI could have reduced its mileage costs substantially by opening a field office in the State Capitol. Rell ran on the implied slogan: “Let me fix this.”
Rell won by a 63.2 to 35.5 percent margin, almost exactly Rowland’s margin over Barbara Kennelly in 1998. That is a thing I want you to remember. Republicans used to win by almost 30 points.
It turned out that Rell — and she should have mentioned this — had close to zero interest in being governor, and the state was run by her reclusive Nero Wolfelike chief of staff and her budget director.
Fine.
Then 2010 saw a race between a flinty, hard-tolove man who did not suffer fools (or, really, anyone else) gladly and … a flinty, hardto-love man who did not suffer fools (or, really, anyone else) gladly.
Given such a choice of polar opposites, the voters inexplicably deadlocked 49.5 to 49. Dan Malloy, the mayor of Stamford, narrowly edged out Tom Foley, who was very rich and had never exhibited a shred of interest in public service.
Malloy turned out to be extremely interested in doing the job of governor. He hated vacations. He worked seven-day weeks. He went for punishing morning runs with his unhappy-looking state police security detail.
People will tell you I nicknamed him The Porcupine because of his prickliness, but I’m pretty sure Malloy himself was the introducer of that trope.
In 2014, The Porcupine ran again. A possible challenger was John McKinney, the amiable state Senate minority leader. Possibly not the most ferocious campaigner, but smart, moderate, experienced and appealingly convinced that the Legislature needed better ethics laws. The Porcupine people were not crazy about maybe having to run against him.
No worries. Foley, the other, even less embraceable and more likely to bite porcupine, beat McKinney in a primary by a double-digit margin. Malloy once again wins a pretty tight general election despite his poorly chosen campaign slogan, “Blow it out your old wazoo!”
OK. Could we just freeze the projector and turn on the lights for a second? Thanks. The two major problems of the state GOP are sitting right there on the screen.
The first is the August primary. You know who votes in August primaries? Joyless soreheads who have not been invited anywhere.
The second is the closed primary. There are not many Republicans in Connecticut. To win a general election, they need enormous amounts of support from unaffiliated voters. So what do they do? Exclude the people they need. Why do they do it? Because they think unaffiliated voters would saddle them with a candidate who wasn’t a hard-edged, red meat, brimstone-spewing Man of the Right.
Foley won that primary with 44,000 votes. To beat The Porcupine, he was going to need around 550,000 votes. You see the problem, right?
Because of a federal court decision in the 1980s and because of universally beloved, funny, sweet-tempered, much mourned Republican state Chairman Tom D’Amore, Connecticut Republicans have the absolute, unreviewable right to switch to an open primary. But they won’t do it.
OK, cut the lights and restart the projector. Here comes 2018. Ned Lamont, a pleasant, vaguely startledlooking rich man, wins the Democratic nomination. Mark Boughton, the droll, likeable mayor of Danbury, is backed by the Republican state convention. Bob Stefanowski, a flinty, hard-to-love rich man who had never exhibited a shred of interest in public service, knocks off Boughton in a 5-way primary, collecting — ready? — 42,000 votes. The general election is nonetheless sort of close.
Four years later, Stefanowski runs again, and this time Ned Lamont records the first double-digit Democratic gubernatorial blowout since — wait for it — Bill O’Neill in 1986.
Republicans, do you not get it? You are not nominating the right candidates, and you are still coming very close (until this last time.) Fix your primary. Value congeniality and governing experience. You will win.
And when you do win, if you see Kevin Sullivan wandering the halls, could you tell him he’s not lieutenant governor anymore and he’s free to go? Thank you.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Tuesday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his free newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.