The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Connecticut candidates running amid long odds
Sixty days before Election Day, Ken Krayeske jumped into the state’s race for attorney general in an attempt to unseat Democrat William Tong.
Krayeske is running on the Green Party ticket, has no plans to start his own candidate committee and doesn’t expect to spend much more than $250 of his own money on the election.
Does the Hartford-based lawyer actually think he has a chance of winning?
“No, of course not,” Krayeske said.
Across Connecticut, there are candidates for whom the odds are slim at best. Usually third-party or unaffiliated candidates, they are running for nearly every level of office, including for Congress to governor.
Some, like Krayeske, are running in the hopes of changing the conversation, well aware they have little or no chance to win. Others, while under no illusions, believe they can change the state for the better and are legitimately trying for the opportunity.
Other candidates, despite being up against long-term incumbents with a fraction of the fundraising and less name recognition, believe they have a good chance of winning.
This is the second time Krayeske has run for office.
Back in 2010, he ran against U.S. Rep. John Larson who, at that point, had been the 1st Congressional District’s representative for a decade.
Krayeske is very passionate on specific issues. As an attorney, he’s represented inmates against the state, notably Cara Tangreti, who claimed she had been abused multiple times as an inmate at York Correctional Institution. Tangreti sued the leadership at the prison and the state Department of Corrections, but ultimately lost when the state, under Tong, appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, a ruling Krayeske said was a blow to supervisory liability.
“I represented a pregnant woman who gave birth on a toilet in a prison cell in Connecticut in 2018,” he said. “That we cage pregnant women in the 21st century cries out to us, ‘You must do more to change this.’”
That, he said, is why he’s running for office knowing he has no chance to win.
“The reality is that my run for office allows me to create space in the democratic discourse, to have a dialogue about something that I think is really, really, really, really important,” he said. “I don’t think I’m gonna win, but at least I can look in the goddamn mirror when I go to bed at night and when I wake up in the morning, and say to my 5-year-old daughter, ‘I’m doing what I can, kid.’”
He’s not spending much money or time on the race, because he has a business to run and a child to raise.
“I’m not doing a whole bunch of stuff to run because I can only shovel so much dung against the tide,” Krayeske said. “I got a mortgage, I got a kid, I’m running a business. How can I afford to do this? I can’t, really.”
“It’s 60 days of unpaid labor,” he said.
Krayeske admitted that “perhaps I am naive for maintaining the Jeffersonian ideal of the marketplace of ideas,” but he believes in the mission.
“The idea that the informed voter creates the best model of self governance, that’s what I’m aiming for here,” he said. “Let’s have a conversation.”
Third-party history
Gary Rose, a professor of politics at Sacred Heart University, said there have been two notable instances of third-party candidates winning statewide races, both those were special cases.
Gov. Lowell Weicker was a Republican when he represented Connecticut’s 4th Congressional District, but split with the party and ran a successful campaign for governor under the banner of a party he created himself, A Connecticut Party.
Weicker’s opponent, Sen. Joe Lieberman, had been a Democrat but became an Independent candidate after losing the 2006 Democratic primary.
“Those are very different types of third-party individuals because they all were already well known in the state,” Rose said. “They were third-party in name only, quite frankly.”
Many of this year’s thirdparty candidates had been affiliated with a major party but became disillusioned. Chip Beckett had been minority leader of the Republican caucus in the Glastonbury Town Council.
“I was always Republican my whole life until 2020,” he said.
When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against several battleground states over their pandemic-related voting rules, a lawsuit that was supported by nearly 150 Republican members of the U.S. Congress, Beckett made the decision to switch parties.
“At that point, I realized that the congressmen are our supposed national leaders, and the vast majority of them probably didn’t care about elections, didn’t care about democracy,” he said. “They were only interested in power.”
Beckett lost reelection to the town council after running as a member of Connecticut’s Independent Party. Now, he’s running for lieutenant governor alongside Independent Party gubernatorial candidate Rob Hotaling.
“One of the reasons we’re running is because we think that the Republican Party and the Democratic Party have failed the citizens of Connecticut, and have failed for many, many years,” he said.
While he said their chances are “slim,” Beckett is taking his candidacy very seriously, and looks at former presidential candidate Ross Perot for inspiration. Perot garnered a relatively impressive 19 percent of the vote, and though he never became president, Beckett said Perot succeeded in directing the conversation.
“When he ran, even though he only got 19 percent of the vote, all the Republicans or Democrats would talk about was the deficit,” Beckett said. “They actually worked a lot on it.”
Beckett is hoping that with “old-fashioned earned media,” he and Hotaling can at least affect the dialogue, “to engage the public in a discussion about how does, how does our government work.”
He also hopes to pull out a win, with the intention, should he and Hotaling take the governor’s mansion, “bind state and local government more closely together instead of being opposites that respectively complain about each other, leaving them all the expenses and none of the income.”
‘Other kinds of winning’
Justin Paglino of Guilford is running on the Green Party ticket for Connecticut’s 3rd Congressional District. The seat is currently held, as it has been since 1991, by Democrat U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro.
A former virologist and Yale researcher, Paglino, like Krayeske, is reasonably sure he has little chance to win, though he said that’s how you define “winning.”
“If you mean lose the election, probably yes. But there’s other kinds of winning,” he said. “There’s getting people to think about things differently. There’s getting your message out.”
Paglino had been a Democrat, though on the progressive side of the party. He said he never felt his interests were being represented. He said he was a “banging-my-head-againstthe-wall progressive Democrat.”
And Paglino believes he’s not alone.
“There’s lots of people who agree with me on these issues,” he said. “But they are not even going to get voiced. They’re not even going to be part of the political debate, if it’s just the Democrat and the Republican, because they agree on all these issues. I succeed by doing what I’m doing. I’m succeeding at injecting these views into the debate as best I can.”
This is the second time Paglino has run against DeLauro. Two years ago, he managed to garner 1.5 percent of the vote, “which is not huge, and certainly not enough to tip the election, since Rosa generally wins by more than a double-digit margin,” he said. “But it was very gratifying to me that 5,000 people voted for me and believed in what I was doing, and it was enough to keep me on the ballot for next time.”
For Paglino, being on the ballot and discussing the issues about which he’s passionate is the point.
“The most powerful thing you can do if you want something is vote for it,” he said. “If these issues aren’t even on the ballot, people can’t even vote for them. So how is singlepayer ever going to happen if it isn’t even on the ballot? To me, that’s step one, and that’s a success, just getting on the ballot, so that singlepayer can be on the ballot.”
‘It’s a long shot’
Kevin Blacker, however, believes he can win.
Blacker is running against 2nd Congressional District U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, who has held his seat since 2007.
Though he admits that “it’s a long shot,” Blacker believes that he can “knock down Courtney” by convincing Republicans to vote against their own candidate, Mike France.
“I’m going to try and convince the Republicans, with the stigma against Republicans, you guys have no chance of winning, Mike France has no chance in Hell of winning,” Blacker said. “You would be much better off and you would get more of what you want if you back me up and get the Republicans behind me and just go all out at Courtney
In response to a suggestion that Republicans would rally around their party’s chosen candidate, Blacker said,
“I think that the Republicans are going to adhere to logic, which is, a Republican is not going to win in this political climate,” he said. “That’s just plain and simple fact.”
Blacker, a farmer by trade, is running on the Green Party ticket and some of his political beliefs may not align with those of the average Republican voter. He said his issues are “honest government that serves the people not not just the politically connected,” as well as “achievable, common sense, practical solutions to climate change.”
Blacker knows that he is “never going to beat Courtney or Mike France in a fundraising competition,” so his solution is to avoid fundraising altogether.
“I’m not taking any money from anybody. I’m not taking any donations. I’m not owing anybody anything,” he said. “I think that that’s a very powerful statement in action.”