The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Memo to state GOP: Time to dump Trump
Rosa J. Correa has been a Republican for decades and ran for office three times in her hometown of Bridgeport. She served on the party’s town committee until two years ago, headed former Gov. John G. Rowland’s district office and gushes over her moment meeting former President George H.W. Bush in Ansonia.
She watched this week’s funerals for the elder Bush with wistfulness and reverence, coming at a wrenching time when she’s had several deaths among family and friends.
But in the November elections, she doesn’t even know the name of the Republican who ran against the Democratic state Representative that she voted for. It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t consider marking a ballot for a single GOP candidate at any level.
The reason, you might have guessed, is President Donald Trump. For Correa, the final insult was the president leaving her native Puerto Rico to rot after Hurricane Maria, then lying coldly about thousands of deaths on the island.
The character comparison with Bush this week
sealed her convictions.
“I had to vote for Ned Lamont because I could not pull the lever for a person who was manifesting for Donald Trump,” said Correa, a retired manager at Career Resources Inc., a job training and placement agency based in Bridgeport that works with a challenged population.
That vote in the governor’s race was painful because she believes in Republican principles of smaller government and individual self-sufficiency. She’s still a registered Republican and party member by conviction, she said, just as she’s a Catholic by belief, not tradition. That won’t change.
“This party had values,” said Correa, who’s 69. “If you think of Lincoln and you think back to Ronald Reagan and you think back to the Bushes .... I’m hoping and praying that we can get out of this rut and move forward the way the party exemplified under the leadership of George H.W. Bush, with his gentlemanly ways.”
She’s hardly a typical
Republican, being a big-city Latina with a social services background, but she’s not alone. And she’s part of a broad swath of activists the party desperately needs. That’s powerfully true in cities, where, let’s face it, one-party control hasn’t exactly improved conditions over the last halfcentury.
So, what should Republicans do about the political poison of Trump in blue states such as Connecticut and deep blue cities such as Bridgeport? It certainly won’t get easier in 2020 if Trump finds his way back onto the ballot, as he intends.
The answer is, for the good of the party and for the betterment of the state at a time of fiscal crisis, Republican candidates need to reject Trump outright. They must do it in rich towns and poor cities, where the backlash in November unwound a decade of gains in the General Assembly.
They need to to it publicly, loudly and without dilution — none of this “I like the policies, not the man” nonsense. And not with the sort of dog-whistle hints we saw from some moderate Republicans such
as Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton, the endorsed candidate for governor, who lost to Bob Stefanowski in the primary.
“I’ve heard people say, let’s say in conversations, ‘I’m against Donald Trump,’” Correa recounted on Thursday, referring to local Republican candidates. “And I said, ‘Will you say it publicly?’ and they say no.”
“Truth shall make you free,” she said, citing the verse in the Book of John.
Free, yes, but will it win elections? It just might.
Would Sen. L. Scott Frantz, R-Greenwich, have won re-election against the upstart Democrat Alexandra Bergstein if he had repudiated Trump? Maybe yes, maybe no. She spent a fortune, benefited from running in the Year of the Woman and hit Frantz hard on gun control.
It certainly wouldn’t have hurt. Greenwich sent 5,351 more people to the polls last month than it did in 2010, when Gov. Dannel P. Malloy first ran, and the margin for governor narrowed — but remained Republican. Some of those added voters came out for Bergstein, who won by about 600 votes, but probably more came out
against Trump.
And with all due respect for Bergstein, a very impressive Democrat, Frantz’s expert, level-headed, bigpicture view of the budget makes his defeat a huge loss for the General Assembly and for the state. It’s not like the new Senate will need Bergstein’s vote to pass Democratic legislation.
In short, Republicans’ unwillingness to rebuke a toxic president is hurting the whole state, not just the party.
Yes, I get that we have closed primaries that favor hardliners and I get that Trump has deep support in heartland places such as the Naugatuck Valley. But a good, local, anti-Trump Republican should rise above that.
Party leaders including J.R. Romano, the state party chairman, and Rep. Themis Klarides, R-Derby, the House Republican leader, acknowledge that Republicans took a beating in large part because of Trump.
They say the basic Republican message about Connecticut is sound and I don’t dispute that. Klarides, in comments reported by Mark Pazniokas of The CT Mirror, toughened her position
on Trump, for whom she was a delegate in 2016.
She told Pazniokas, “it’s important that people are very clear…that when he does something that we don’t like, we stand up, we’re vocal about it .... That means we may support some of the things he does, and we don’t support other things he does.”
Good first step. Should have been done long ago. Not enough in 2020.
Klarides, Romano, Sen. Len Fasano, R-North Haven, the Senate Republican leader, strategist Chris Healy, Boughton and others name many possible solutions. I’ve yet to hear any of them add rebuking Trump outright to the list.
Romano chafes at the idea, saying only the rich can afford to snub Trump.
“The Trump effect was centered around people who were more interested in being self-indulgent instead of focusing on the crisis that Connecticut is in,” Romano said. “They made the life of a single mom who who works as a nurse making $55,000 a year, they made her life harder…because she’s going to pay for failed policies in Hartford.”
Romano asks pointedly,
why don’t Democrats hold their leaders accountable for political sins such as calling for the abolishment of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement?
Um, they’re not the president of the United States lying over and over again, separating toddlers from their parents at the border, denying basic science, claiming he’s cleared in a criminal inquiry when he’s not.
Even if Romano is right, political reality is what it is, and GOP candidates in 2020 can win by trashing Trump.
Correa, for her part, is prepared to return to the fold. She tells a story about visiting the White House in 2011 in her role on a commission planning a National Museum of the American Latino. She needed help getting out of her chair for a picture, and suddenly a hand appeared, and a voice asking if she needed help.
It was President Barack Obama. He walked her to a waiting wheelchair.
She was awestruck. But a year later, she still voted for Republican Mitt Romney against Obama. She wants to be a loyal Republican, and she’s waiting for that hand from a leader.