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Republican Leora Levy told the Connecticut Post at the 2012 Republican National Convention when asked about abortion, “I believe in a woman’s right to make that decision for herself.” One of three Republicans competing in the August 9th primary for the party’s U.S. Senate nomination, Levy declared a decade ago, “Abortion is really not at the top of anybody’s list.”

The Greenwich Republican sees abortion as a powerful wedge issue in her race against party-endorsed candidate Themis Klarides and Fairfield Republican Peter Lumaj. Truth has lost its meaning for Levy, who was a prominent supporter of Jeb Bush during his 2016 presidential campaign before becoming an enthusiastic booster of Donald Trump. who Levy characterized as “vulgar” and “ill-mannered.”

On Monday, in the aftermath of Friday’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Levy’s campaign proclaimed her “the only pro-life candidate in the race….” That will come as news to Lumaj. Like Levy, he also opposes legal abortions for women. Klarides, who served in the state House of Representative for 22 years, is unequivocally pro-choice and does not support a parental notification law for minors seeking abortions.

The stench of opportunism pervades Levy’s crowing over the Dobbs decision. The Republican National Committee member wrote:

None of these thoughts appeared to have occurred to Levy a decade ago. If abortion was vexing her last summer, Levy did not say much about it in her brief and unsuccessful campaign for a special election for the State Senate. Broadcast debates among the three Republicans running to challenge Democratic incumbent Richard Blumenthal ought to be memorable, with a stage littered with each other’s quotations.

Published June 27, 2022.

Webster Bank executive Rob Hotaling will kick off his Independent Party campaign for governor in New Haven Saturday afternoon.

Hotaling is a member of the Independent Party. The party, with more than 30,000 registered members, gave its endorsement in 2018 to Republican Bob Stefanowski. The Madison Republican would like the party’s nomination in his rematch with Governor Ned Lamont, a Democrat.

The rules governing the Independent Party have been in frequent dispute among its shifting factions. The party’s chair, Mike Telesca, sounded unlikely to support Stefanowski’s attempt to win the party’s endorsement later this summer when he spoke with CT Insider’s Jordan Fenster last month.

A tussle over what rules and statutes govern the party nominating process is likely to continue.

Published June 22, 2022.

Democrat Muad Hrezi may not have submitted enough verified signatures to force the state’s first primary against an House of Representatives member, but his petitions from West Hartford include a couple of prominent Democrats.

State party vice-chair Adrienne Billings-Smith signed Hrezi’s petition. Billings-Smith is also a member of the West Hartford town council. Billings-Smith was named Nextstar’s 2022 Connecticut Woman of the Year. Her signature on the primary petition shows there are some insiders who want to pull down the state’s high hurdles to ballot access.

So does Tracey Wilson, the wife of former state senator Beth Bye. Wilson is a retired high school history teacher and serves as West Hartford’s town historian. Wilson is probably aware that Connecticut is among the most difficult states in the nation for a candidate to gain access to the party primary ballot. Bye serves in Governor Ned Lamont’s administration as commissioner of the Office of Early Childhood.

Bye served four terms in the Senate for eight years but declined to be sworn into office for the fifth two-year term she had sought with tens of thousands of dollars in public funds. Instead, Bye joined the Lamont administration with a pension boosting commissioner’s job in the office she helped create, causing a special election to be called and more public funds to be spent on campaigns in the winter of 2019.

Lamont provided an early endorsement of incumbent U.S. Representative John Larson’s bid for a 13th term. Al lis long forgiven between Lamont and Larson. Larson supported Joseph Lieberman in his 2006 primary campaign against Lamont. Larson supported Dannel Malloy over Lamont in bitter their 2010 Democratic primary race for governor. Larson, a deft collector of special interest campaign money, cited Malloy’s support for campaign finance reform in the Stamford Democrat’s race against the self-funding Lamont.

Larson supported Lamont in his 2018 campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Lamont, at Larson’s persistent urging, brought the veteran congressman’s brother, Timothy Larson, into his administration as the head of the Office of Higher Education, where he has lately struggled to explain why he authorized expenditures from a restricted fund. Timothy Larson followed the Bye trail and declined to serve the term in the State Senate he’d recently asked voters to honor him with and took a pension boosting job in the administration.

A hearing on Hrezi’s action to be placed on the August 9th primary ballot begins Wednesday morning.

Published June 21, 2022.

Muad Hrezi’s challenge to Connecticut’s restrictive ballot access laws begins two days of hearings in Superior Court on Wednesday morning.

The First Congressional District Democratic challenger fell several hundred signatures short of the number of signatures he needs to qualify for an August primary against 12-term incumbent John Larson. Hrezi’s complaint relies on claims that the requirements of the state’s election laws to participate in a primary are unreasonable. “Connecticut has the most restrictive laws for access to the primary ballot of any State in the United States when it comes to the office of U.S. Representative. No state requires a candidate to get more signatures in a shorter amount of time than Connecticut,” according to Hrezi’s complaint.

Hrezi also raises the two-day delay in Secretary of the State Denise Merrill’s office providing the petitions required to begin collecting signatures. The law allows 42 days for the process, the delay in the at Merrill’s office reduced that to 40 days. That may be the most persuasive argument Judge Cesar Noble hears from Hrezi on Wednesday and Thursday. Judges enjoy wide discretion in elections law procedural disputes. Judge Noble could restore the two days Hrezi’s campaign lost and allow his campaign 48 hours to collect more signatures.

Larson and his campaign committee have intervened as defendants in the case, joining Merrill, Governor Ned Lamont, state Democrats, and two Democratic registrars of voters as defendants.

A ruling is expected Friday.

Published June 21, 2022.

Campaign debates loom larger for candidates than voters. The immediate audience is usually small but the media coverage and campaign ads that follow them are not.

Connecticut legislative debates are indirect and stilted by design. A campaign debate should be neither.

Veteran debater and debate coach Bo Seo, author of Good Arguments, recommends 10 books in The Atlantic that show readers how to make better arguments, the essential task of a candidate.

It’s mid-June–there’s still time for candidates to read and improve.

Published June 14, 2022.

Muad Hrezi fell 500 valid signatures short of the 3,900 required to qualify for the August primary ballot in the state’s First Congressional District. Hrezi said Monday afternoon that his campaign submitted 4,900 signatures to registrars of voters in the district’s 27 towns, not 5,300, as he originally believed.

A hefty 1,500 signatures were declared invalid by registrars. Approximately 100 signatures were rejected in East Windsor and South Windsor because they were delivered to registrars after the 4 p.m. June 7th deadline.

Hrezi filed an action in Superior Court Monday alleging his campaign was hindered by the Office of the Secretary of the State’s two-day delay in providing petitions to the Hrezi campaign. The campaign also claims several of its 12 full-time signature gatherers were out of the hunt for days due to Covid-19 infections.

The obstacles Hrezi faced in collecting signatures provide another reminder that the Constitution State remains the home of some of the most restrictive ballot access laws in the nation. A candidate who does not win 15% of the delegates at a party nominating convention may use the signature collection process, which always proves cumbersome.

A presidential candidate may be required to submit no signatures for a place on the state’s party primary ballot.

Published June 13, 2022.

Democrat Muad Hrezi appears to have collected to force veteran U.S. Representative John B. Larson into an August primary. Larson is seeking a 13th term in the House the First Congressional District. Hrezi, a former staff member for Senator Chris Murphy, is making his first bid for public office.

Hrezi, Daily Ructions can report, has submitted approximately 5,300 signatures to local registrars of voters. State law, among the most restrictive in the nation, requires a candidate to collect signatures from 2% of the registered Democrats in the district. Hrezi needs 3,833 valid signatures to qualify for the primary. He submitted 2,400 signatures in West Hartford alone.

A Larson-Hrezi contest will be the state’s marquee political contest of the summer. An incumbent House member has never faced a primary in Connecticut.

Establishment Democrats are growing concerned that Larson, who has not faced a serious challenge since he defeated West Hartford Democrat Miles Rappoport in a ferocious 1998 primary. Larson’s campaigns have been casual endeavors since. Larson, who will turn 74 in July, will need quickly to create a nimble and enthusiastic campaign organization. The primary will the retired state employee to do more than block Hrezi from speaking before Democratic town committees.

Larson will need some sharp surrogates to explain his reliance on special interest campaign donations. He may want to start searching now for the Democratic friend who will defend Larson’s acceptance of thousands from Vincent Roberti, the Washington lobbyists and former Connecticut legislator who has made millions representing Russian energy interests.

Ambitious Democrats in the 1st CD may respond to the most painful enticement Larson can offer to win spur them into action. The East Hartford Democrat could promise that his next term will be his last term.

Published June 8, 2022.

Fifth District Republican nominee George Logan thanked U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) for her endorsement Thursday. Stefanik, once a moderate who worked in the George W. Bush administration, has followed her party to the paranoid far right.

Stefanik has adopted the racist “great replacement” theory of extreme politics. The Upstate New York Republican invoked poisonous Q-Anon rhetoric in May when she used Twitter to criticize “The White House, House Dems & usual pedo grifters” for supporting sending baby formula to refugees and immigrants at the nation’s southern border.

Stefanik objected to the certification of electoral college ballots from Pennsylvania on January 6th last year. She planned to object to the certification of electoral votes from other states but insurrectionists intervened, according to a district newspaper. Stefanik voted against the creation of a January 6th commission.

The four-term Republican replaced Representative Liz Cheney last year as the third-ranking House Republican leader. On a voice vote, House Republicans ousted Cheney for refusing to ignore Donald Trump’s role in the January 6th invasion of the Capitol by Trump supporters.

Logan told the CT Mirror when he announced his candidacy that he did not object to Cheney’s removal. The former state senator has described himself as a moderate Republican. Logan declared in his tweet that he is “looking forward to working with Rep. Stefanik to help deliver much needed change in Washington!” That alliance puts Logan far outside the mainstream of 5th District voters. It is an endorsement alert that Logan may not have intended.

Published June 3, 2022.

This week’s Left. Right & Center podcast begins with an extended segment on guns. It offers what many have not been able to summon in their sadness and fury at the massacre of students and teachers in Uvalde, Texas: ideas on the way forward.

Guests include Elizabeth Bruenig, @Bruenig, who represents the left. Bruenig, who lives in Connecticut, is always thoughtful and interesting, never more so this week.

Avik Roy, @Avik, stands on the right and offers an assessment of the politics of gun control and common ground across a wide swathe of the political spectrum.

Jessica Yellin, @jessicayellin, guest hosts from the center.

Published May, 27, 2022.

Democrat Muad Hrezi will force U.S. Representative John Larson into a historic primary if his campaign submits 3833 verified signatures to election officials by June 7th. Hrezi tells Daily Ructions he is on course to hit the mark.

Larson, 73, seeking his 13th term, would be the first Democratic member of the House from Connecticut to be forced into a primary for renomination. Larson’s only competitive contest was the 1998 Democratic primary for the open Hartford area seat.

Connecticut’s political system is constructed by party insiders to protect themselves. Local party committees select delegates to nominating conventions. Those committees usually ask incumbents to name their local delegates. A challenger needs 15% of those convention delegates to win a spot on the primary ballot. A candidate may also qualify for a primary by collecting 2% of the registered party members in the district in which the candidate is seeking office.

Connecticut’s resistance to outsiders is starkly evident on the website of Secretary of the State Denise Merrill, the state’s chief elections office. The “Candidate Ballot Access” page provides no specifics on how to seek a party nomination. “How do I get on the ballot?” it asks. “Consult with local party officials to determine how to qualify for nomination by an established political party.” Hrezi learned that many local party officials are not willing to talk to a challenger. His requests to speak to local town committees were usually rebuffed.

Collecting signatures is always harder than it looks. It is expensive and time-consuming. It consumes the resources a candidate will need for the primary and it takes time away from campaigning. Hrezi says his campaign is collecting about 200 signatures a day. He has begun submitting petitions to local registrars of voters. The diffused nature of collecting signatures means there will be errors. Candidates need to collect more than the law requires to have a buffer against disqualified signatures.

Larson and Hrezi both live in East Hartford. Hrezi, 27, is making his first bid for public office. Larson was elected to the state senate 40 years ago, defeating incumbent Democrat Marcella Fahey in a primary. Larson was the party-endorsed candidate for governor 1994 and lost the primary to Bill Curry, making his first of three bids for governor.

As of late April, Hrezi had raised just shy of $500,000, with $165,000 on hand. That is a significant haul for a Connecticut challenger. Larson has raised close to $1.2 million. He had $841,000 in cash on hand in April, according to his pre-convention report. Larson has raised a majority of his money from political action committees. Hrezi has raised more in individual contributions than Larson. That may be a warning sigh for Larson.

Hrezi is making his bid from the Larson’s left. Larson has seen this before. Two of his centrist colleagues, Joseph Crowley of New York and Michael Capuano of Massachusetts, were defeated in primaries by young challengers from the progressive aggrieved wing of the party.

Crowley was famously defeated in a low turnout 2018 spring primary by Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Later that year, Ayanna Pressley, a member of Boston’s city council, defeated 11-term incumbent Capuano in a primary landslide.

If Hrezi qualifies for a primary, Larson’s biggest challenge may be convincing supporters they need to vote in the August 9th contest. There are no Democratic primaries for governor or U.S. Senate. Primary contests for secretary of the state and state treasurer appear to depend on challengers assessing their fundraising prospects. It could be a sleepy summer in Democratic politics.

Larson is familiar and well-liked. The organization that delivered a victory in a ferocious primary 24 years ago no longer exists. Easy re-elections have allowed his to forgo the tedious task of renewing his political operation. Larson is alert to the danger a low-turnout August primary against Hrezi poses to the incumbent winning two more years in Washington. If Hrezi submits enough signature for a primary, he will see that behind the genial Larson are establishment Democrats who have no interest in seeing him lose to an outsider.

Published May 23, 2022.