State Senator Stephen Harding ought to be campaigning with his four caucus colleagues in difficult races. Instead, the Brookfield Republican needed assistance on the final weekend of the campaign from his caucus booster, state Senator Heather Somers (R-Groton). Somers was one of the two Republicans behind the 2017 legislation that has become known as the Millstone bill and continues to cost ratepayers hundreds of millions dollars.

Harding, who is seeking a second term in the 18-town 30th Senate District, became the Senate Republican leader in the spring when Somers and others organized a coup in the 12-member caucus, ousting Kevin Kelly and installing Harding as the figurehead for chief of staff John “Johnny Angel” Healey.

The political weather has changed in Harding’s northwest district. Many pandemic newcomers are Democrats who may not want a committed Donald Trump supporter as their senator. Harding was a Trump delegate to this year’s Republican nominating convention. He has praised Trump running mate JD Vance.

Harding faces an energetic challenger in Democrat Justin Potter.

A sign of Harding’s distress has been his need to bleed the caucus campaign fund of tens of thousands of dollars. Usually the leader is a net contributor to the caucus campaign committee.

Members who survive what could be the Senate Republican annus horribilis will not be able to ignore the hard truth that Harding was more burden than benefit in the campaign. Other members could have used the resources grabbed by their leader. or they could have been saved for future campaigns.

Published November 3, 2024.

Tragic. Connecticut legislative candidates do not often get invited to appear in interviews on broadcast television. When state Senator Tony Hwang did this week, he donned his best embroidered Lacoste, attached a microphone, and stood in a spot that allowed him to be identified by letters on the side of a food truck over his left shoulder. The segment appeared Sunday morning on WTNH’s popular Capitol Report.

Hwang may have skipped the photography class public financing of his campaign paid for a couple of cycles ago. Or the tensions among 28th Senate District Republicans over Hwang’s bid for a sixth term may have caused a campaign worker to have helped set up the memorable shot.

Hwang is known to exhaust the patience of Senate Republican staff members with his requirements that they accompany and photograph him. They may have had enough.

Hwang faces Democrat Rob Blanchard in the district that includes Bethel, Easton, Fairfield and Newtown.

Published November 3, 2024.

Republican Chris Reddy shines another light on the friendship and political alliance of state Senator Mae Flexer and top Eversource lobbyist Leslie O’Brien with a mailer similar to a recent website. O’Brien has been crucial to Flexer’s rise in politics since O’Brien was her boss in the Senate Democratic caucus. The Killingly Democrat won a House seat in 2008.

Flexer succeeded Williams in the 29th district, which now includes Brooklyn, Canterbury, Killingly, Mansfield, Pomfret, Putnam, Scotland, Thompson, Windham.

Insiders have been saying since this Daily Ructions story highlighted the Reddy strategy that the mercurial Flexer and merciless O’Brien are no longer friendly. No one is saying that they, say, took a winter holiday bacchanalia to a sunny climate where the lobbyist did pushups on a bar. No one has mistaken O’Brien for a lobbyist who engages in jaw dropping braggadocio about their friendship with a high-ranking legislator. No, not that.

Reddy’s point is more clinical. He raises a reasonable point as Flexer has been more unresponsive than usual to constituent concerns, this time over rising utility bills. O’Brien, who no longer holds any formal positions in Windham Democratic politics, now holds a lucrative position in the Eversource universe. Whose side is Flexer on? It’s a frequently asked question about the Emerge America state director and fundraiser.

Reddy remains an underdog in the Democratic district but he has emerged as one of the only Republicans to run an eye-catching campaign.

Published November 1, 2024.

Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) conducted a national search for a general counsel and found the winner–that’s right–in Connecticut. Terrence Cheng, denizen of posh Hartford restaurants, passenger in tuition-financed limousines–announced Thursday that Democratic loyalist Karen Buffkin will be leaving the University of Connecticut to join the beleaguered bon vivant at the central office of the 85,000 student system.

Buffkin served as counsel to the historically unpopular Democratic governor Dannel P. Malloy in his second term. As Malloy’s tenure came to an end in 2018, Buffkin was given a first class ticket in the hackerama and safe passage to a job at the University of Connecticut that last year paid $256,000.

Cheng was at UConn’s Stamford campus until he was named President of CSCU in 2021. Last year, the Board of Regents approved changing Cheng’s title to the grander title of Chancellor.

Buffkin’s experience includes navigating labor relations at the UConn Health, which no one on her side of the bargaining table can characterize as a success.

Buffkin begins her new job on November 29th. Cheng may not be at his $442,000 a year job to greet Buffkin on her first day.

Published October 31, 2024.

Daily Ructions readers will be determining their election viewing plans in the next several days. Please include time for the students at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU).

CCSU announced Wednesday, “Students in Professor Darren Sweeney’s Journalism 440 Newscast Practicum class will present a half-hour news cast that they wrote and produced in advance of election night. With support from Journalism 340 Introduction to Broadcast students, the program will be filmed in the university’s Media Center television studio and air live on YouTube @CCSUNews at 5 p.m.”

“Doing a live broadcast for the presidential election is a fantastic opportunity for our students to hone their craft,” Sweeney says. “It will get them reporting on what is shaping up to be one of the most important elections we have ever seen.”

Published October 31, 2024.

State Senator Mae Flexer is facing a late surge by Republican challenger Chris Reddy over the Democrat’s ties to Eversource lobbyist and veteran political operative Leslie O’Brien. Flexer is not accustom to being the target of an effective direct hit in her many campaigns.

O’Brien is a veteran at throwing punches but may not be as skilled at taking one. Reddy’s campaign uploaded a website that claimed to have news: Mae Flexer’s relationship with Influential Eversource Lobbyist Uncovered. The one-page site ties Flexer to O’Brien, Eversource’s new Director of Legislative Affairs. O’Brien also served as chair of the Windham Democratic Town Committee through last year’s municipal elections. Windham is a key town in Flexer’s 29th Senate District. O’Brien resigned from the DTC in August. Head of government relations for Eversource comes with the state’s largest lobbying budget, a type of influence that outranks all but a handful of party committee chairs.

A Reddy campaign mailer on the explosive topic of Eversource bills and Flexer’s close ties to the company is expected to reach voters this week, nearly two weeks after early voting began. Before she became a legislator, Flexer worked for O’Brien in the Senate Democrats Office. It was there that O’Brien earned her ferocious reputation, not reluctant to humiliate senators in public encounters. Some still in office are unlikely to have forgotten the ordeals of those harrowing times when many elected officials mattered not at all but remained silent for too long.

Flexer has long harbored ambitions to rise within the crowded Senate Democratic caucus but remains one of its most unpopular members. Current and former colleagues will be quietly delighted that Flexer is ending this year’s campaign with some wobbly moments. O’Brien is said to be puce with fury.

Futile threats have been directed at the Reddy campaign, which is holding its nerve and ready to double down.

This post was updated on 10/30 to reflect O’Brien’s resignations from local party positions.

Published October 30, 2024.

Stonington election officials are notifying hundreds of voters that they may have been given the incorrect ballot when they participated in the second day of early voting on October 22nd.

Reapportionment in 2022 placed Stonington in two state House districts, the 41st and the 43rd. Democrat Aundre Baumgartner represents the 41st and is unopposed for re-election. Republican Greg Howard, seeking a third term, faces Democratic nominee Ty Lamb in the 43rd district. It includes North Stonington and parts of Stonington and Ledyard. Some Stonington voters, as many as 515, who live in the 43rd district received ballots meant for voters in the 41st.

The ballots cast on the 22nd have been separated and will be counted by hand on November 5th. Voters who may have been given the wrong ballot will have an opportunity to cast a new ballot again. Their previous ballot will be substituted by the new ballot. Voting officials are able to do that because the envelope into which an early voting ballot is placed has the voter’s name on it.

Two lessons emerge. Everyone remained calm. The mistake was corrected as soon as it was discovered. This is the first year of early voting. No one whispered about dark conspiracies. Howard said this week that poll workers are essentially volunteers performing this task for the first time in a new system.

There were always going to be some problems. One of them is the lack of convenient, accessible and free parking at some early voting polling places.

The second lesson is that it took hours before a voter noticed that he had been given the wrong ballot. It’s possible that he was the first, but it may also serve as a reminder that many voters have no idea who represents them in the state House of Representatives. That will be more challenging to change.

Published October 30, 2024.

President Gerald Ford was 33 points behind Jimmy Carter after the 1976 Democratic National Convention. Ford eked out a narrow win over Ronald Reagan at the Republican convention in Kansas City in August.

Ford delivered a stirring acceptance speech (overshadowed by the remarks he invited Reagan to make to the convention), challenged Carter to a debate, and began to make his case, reminding Americans how he had guided the nation through the storms of Watergate and the fall of Saigon to murderous communists.

Singer and actress Pearl Bailey joined Ford on the campaign trail in October. Everybody loved Pearl Bailey. This interview was cut into a 30-second commercial as Ford closed the gap with Carter, who voters began to have doubts about.

Bailey was the essence of candor in her long and storied public life. It was probably true that she had no script when she spoke to the camera. The ad, along with one that included the last memorable campaign song, helped bring Ford within a whisker of defeating Carter.

Carter’s win became a catastrophic victory for Democrats.

Published October 29, 2024.

It is more of a challenge to run a sustained campaign against a conspiracy theorist than civilians might think. The sane candidate can start to sound a little nutty repeating the outrageous but true.

Jeff Desarais, the 32nd Senate District Democrat returning for his third encounter with incumbent Republican and QAnon supporter Eric Berthel has found a pointed way to make a vital point. The district’s 13 towns are represented by a nut.

Berthel’s support for QAnon was no secret. He put a sticker with the group’s creed/slogan/threat on his car. The same car that had his legislative license plate. When asked about his support for the madness, Berthel said he believed in some things on the nutty QAnon menu but not others.

QAnon, according to Berthel, allows the disaffected to be part of “the conversation.” Desmarais sent an antidote for Berthel’s poisonous fantasies–a double-sided card–to voters that features Berthel in one of the essentials of loon’s modern uniform, a tinfoil hat. The Democrat, in QAnon parlance, has red-pilled voters. We’ll know next week if it enlightened enough of them to heave Bertel out of office.

Published October 29, 2024.

Governor Ned Lamont said Friday that he has asked State Comptroller Sean Scanlon to audit Connecticut State Colleges and Universities (CSCU) Chancellor Terrence Cheng’s lavish spending on meals and travel. The audit is also expected to examine Cheng’s use of his housing and automobile allowance, including the use of a car service to ferry the New York resident around Hartford and the state. The black SUV was spotted several months ago and is pictured above.

The issue of Cheng’s spending was raised in a CT Insider investigation by Jacqueline Rabe Thomas in a Thursday article. Lamont’s referral to Scanlon comes on the heels of top state legislators calling for Cheng to turnover his personal spending records in the next 10 days. Cheng slow-walked complying with Thomas’s request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act for eight months. He has thus far disclosed about a third of the documents, according to Thomas.

The remaining 70% of the records are likely to add to public alarm at Cheng’s priorities. It is lost on no one but him that dinners with Lamont administration officials at Hartford’s Capital Grille came as Cheng ceaselessly complained that the 85,000 student system was underfunded.

Lamont earlier this year asked Scanlon to audit the records of the state’s Social Equity Council.

The audit of Cheng’s spending by Scanlon comes at an inopportune moment. Tuition at CSCU schools has been rising and the system’s Board of Regents has required a restoration of some student services, such as library hours. On Thursday, the board required Cheng to develop an extensive five-year sustainability plan, though that will likely be completed and initiated by Cheng’s successor.

The Cheng spending revelations are likely to grow more alarming as legislators and Scanlon obtain records that Cheng long denied Thomas. The insertion of Scanlon by Lamont into the issue has other implications as another reminder that the governor never turns to Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz to handle controversial or complicated matters.