Independent Party brings the fun to Election 2022

The Independent Party of Connecticut is like a fusion of “Brigadoon,” “XFiles” and Schrodinger’s Cat. It disappears and then rematerializes at regular intervals, and the very nature of its existence is a matter of quantum speculation.

Nobody, I would submit, knows how many members it has, because a certain percentage of registering voters write “Independent” on section 9 of their forms, unaware that this is the opposite of being unaffiliated.

Somebody should start the [ ] Party, so that every time the section 9 line is left blank, it counts as an affiliation with them.

The party’s old website appears to be dead. But there definitely is a party, because it met a few days ago and nominated Rob Hotaling, a Cheshire businessman with a background in “security systems with gunshot detection” and “food automation” among other things, to run for governor on its muchcoveted ballot line.

Not “much-coveted” by you or me of course, but by Robert “Bob” Stefanowski who hoped to continue his 2018 arrangement with the IP.

Connecticut gubernatorial politicians are like mafia guys. They’ve got their wives and their “gumars,” the ones they see on the side. Gov. Ned Lamont’s wife is the Democratic Party, but his gumar is the Working Families Party, which reliably cross-endorses Democrats.

For Stefanowski, a similar arrangement applied in 2018. Republican wife and cross-endorsed by Independent gumar.

For people who would like more than two choices, this is not a satisfactory state of affairs. For people who, for some irrational reason, feel they need more options than two affluent white guys whose policy sets are, when you dig down and strip away their fevered opposition to each other, probably not glaringly different, this is not a satisfactory state of affairs.

The last time the Independent Party was anything more than an auxiliary generator was 2010, when Chester first selectman Tom Marsh ran for governor on that line and, by some reckonings, delivered the governorship into the hands of Dannel Malloy.

This year it seems like the party leaders want to try something similar, which is how Hotaling got the nomination, unless he didn’t. Party chairman Mike Telesca said earlier this year he hoped the IP would be a true third party and nominate its own candidate.

Telesca, by the way, is from the old Waterburybased version of the IP. There was also a Danburybased version, and both claimed to be the actual party, and in 2018 the courts had to pick one.

The party caucused Tuesday night. Prior to the caucus, Stefanowski put out a big spread of food and drink at his Madison home. He did the same thing at the 2018 GOP convention at the Foxwoods Institute for Public Policy and Slot Machines, staying mostly absent but hosting a hospitality suite.

Hearst political writer Ken Dixon covered the Madison event but said police prevented him from getting in under the tent to find out if there were shrimp. We’re all getting older. The young Ken Dixon would have totally gotten arrested while trying to nail down a major political finger food scoop.

The convention’s first ballot finished with Stefanowski getting 79 votes. Hotaling got 75 and Ernestine Holloway, a pastor and community activist who ran as a IP candidate for a state House seat in 2020, got four.

The rules required 50 percent + 1, so the caucus did one of those ranked choice thingies, cutting loose Holloway, whose four votes then shifted to Hotaling.

After a dance-off, penalty kicks and a Mark Pazniokas impersonation contest, the vote was still deadlocked at 79, so Telesca broke the tie. He was apparently already one of Hotaling’s 79 votes, and now he became the 80th as well.

You can see how that might get Stefanowski’s dander up. He is preparing a legal challenge. I spent a little time reading the “minor parties” sections of the state General Statutes, and when the cleaning staff found me and woke me up, I had drooled on the relevant language.

It is apparently not at all clear whether minor parties are required to follow their own rules, but I’m guessing we’ll get a historic precedent out of this case.

What, you may ask, is all this worth? The guessing would start with 25,000, which is how many votes Stefanowski collected on the IP ballot line in 2018. He lost to Lamont by 44,000 that year.

But it might not go that well this time, because Hotaling has been attacking Stefanowski as a rich guy who will throw money and possibly even shrimp around to get what he wants. And even though rich guys getting what they want is a feature, not a bug, in Connecticut politics, it still might turn some Indy Party voters off.

It would be easier to evaluate the importance of all this if we had, you know, a poll. There hasn’t been one since May, when Lamont was eight points up. If the race is still that close, Stefanowski needs to scramble to get his old gumar back, but, looking around at other Democrats overperforming in recent contests, you have to wonder if the tide is going the other way..

The 538 website gives Lamont a 92 percent chance of winning, and when have they ever been wrong? Perhaps more significantly, Stefanowski has retooled his campaign staff, making it lean and mean and eliminating superfluous positions such as “full-time campaign manager.”

Stefanowski’s new campaign manager has a day job as a firefighter but is, according to Bob, always available by phone. So it’s more like tech support for your HP printer and less like, you know, a political race.

I leave you with two thoughts. One, I had forgotten how entertaining Connecticut elections are. Two, I would have crushed the Mark Pazniokas impersonation contest.