Louis Jacobson, longtime student of Connecticut politics, analyzes the nation’s gubernatorial campaigns in US News. Jacobson concludes Democrat Ned Lamont is on course to win a second four-year term.

Republican Bob Stefanowski, Jacobson notes, ran against Lamont four years ago “as a strong Trump supporter in a solidly blue state.” The Madison Republican’s abrupt late August shakeup of his campaign team, he writes, was “not exactly the sign of a campaign on a roll.”

With just over four weeks left the campaign, a consensus is emerging among observers, Republicans and Democrats that the race has slipped away from Stefanowski barring a late seismic event. A game changing development is unlikely to come from the cautious Lamont in his fourth self-financed statewide campaign. If Stefanowski had something compelling to say to voters he ought to have unveiled it months ago.

Published October 7, 2022.

Republican Senate nominee Leora Levy will never be a United States Senator from Connecticut, but her campaign will make one dream come true. The Greenwich Republican will hold a campaign fundraiser at Mar-A-Lago on October 18th.

Tickets for the joint event with the National Republican Senatorial Committee range from $1,000 to $25,000. That top contribution gets the donor a photograph with the manager and maitre ‘d of the club.

Levy, who made a splash in the party primary by opposing women’s access to abortions, received a boost with an endorsement by phone a few days before Republicans went to the polls. Levy has not harvested many $2,900 maximum contributions to her campaign, but she did receive one from Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Stefanowski.

Levy has made loans to her campaign and also paid some back to herself with supporters’ contributions. Levy’s post-primary fundraising has been thin. She was excluded from a September Florida fundraising tour of Florida by the party’s top prospects.

The retired commodities trader has stood out by highlighting the blessings of freedom she has enjoyed in the United States as a refugee from the island prison of Cuba while revealing herself as a shrill opponent of bestowing them on others fleeing despotism.

Published October 4, 2022.

Vice President Kamala Harris will launch a rescue mission for Rep. Jahana Hayes, the two-term Democrat struggling in her contest against Republican George Logan. Harris is expected to visit Connecticut on Tuesday or Wednesday and will likely include a stop in vote-rich New Britain. With Connecticut’s economy contracting by 4.7% in the second quarter of the year, Hayes is facing some unexpected local headwinds that will be hard to explain to restive voters.

State and national Republicans are investing their hopes in Logan to provide a high profile victory in a year that has seen their optimism for other races collide with reality. The sprawling 5th District runs from the western Hartford suburbs to the New York border and extends as far south as Cheshire.

Hayes has faced one tough race—her 2018 primary campaign against Simsbury Democrat Mary Glassman. Hayes scored a landslide over the Glassman, who was once closely aligned with Governor Ned Lamont and U.S. Senator Chris Murphy. Hayes has won two general election victories by wide margins.

Logan has known only hard races. He defeated a veteran Democratic state senator in 2016, eked out a narrow re-election in 2018 as more experienced Republican colleagues were falling in a Democratic wave, and lost his bid for a third term in 2020. Logan brings prodigious energy and an air of goodwill to his campaigns. National Republicans appear to have recognized his potential and are providing significant resources.

Hayes, who first came to wide notice a national teacher of the year award, is not known among party regulars for a consistently welcoming manner. Staff turnover and the tales that accompany swift departures continue to concern Democrats.

The Harris visit is only one signal that Democrats do not want to spend the next five weeks fretting about Hayes in deep blue Connecticut. The Wolcott Democrat is running an ad highlighting her bipartisan credentials by claiming to have worked with loathsome demagogue Donald Trump during the two years they were in Washington at the same time. The ad is the most vivid sign the race with Logan is tightening. there’s no other reason Hayes would debase herself on voters’s screens. The ad reveals that the former high school teacher needed only two terms to become an ordinary politician whose taste for being an insider has overwhelmed the instincts voters first embraced four years ago.

Published October 2, 2022.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics dropped some terrible news on the people of Connecticut and Governor Ned Lamont on Friday. The state’s economy contracted by 4.7% in the second quarter of the year. It was the second worst state decline. Only energy market-dependent Wyoming had a bigger fall at 4.8%.The national economy declined by 0.6%, according to the report featured in the Hartford Business Journal.

Connecticut was last in personal income growth at 2.2%, the Connecticut Business and Industry Association pointed out Friday. CBIA calls the figure “a key economic indicator of economic competitiveness.” It said the two statistics highlight “the fragile nature of the state’s recovery and growth prospects.”

The double-barreled bad news comes as Lamont, a Democrat seeking a second term. seeks to portray the state on a dramatic upswing after eight years under his surly predecessor, Dannel P. Malloy.

The chilly dose of reality may force Lamont to give a rest to his happy talk campaign and drives a hole through his upbeat narrative. The Democrat may need to shift his odd fixation on the state having the best pizza to explaining the failure of the state’s economy to continue to lag far behind the rest of the nation–and the region–in economic growth. The Greenwich aristocrat has one streak of unbroken luck: He faces Republican Bob Stefanowski on November 8th, a rematch of their 2018 contest. Saudi Bob has been mired in cultural issues, a choice he appears to have made as his campaign falls further behind Lamont in public and private polls.

Stefanowski has put at least $10 million into his campaign, a he pledged to do when he launched it early this year. He may have added more since his summer campaign finance report. The payday lender executive who appears to have had a lucrative second career in the Desert Kingdom as a consultant to senior managers made more than $36 million between 2019 and 2021. He may find that fortune is not as big as it looks when confronted with the fourth generation wealth amassed by Governor and Mrs. Lamont, who have spent more than $50 million in four statewide campaigns, including this year’s, since 2006.

Published September 30, 2022.

Trustees of the University of Connecticut are expected to announce their choice of a new president on Wednesday. Interim President Redenka Maric, sources tell Daily Ructions, has emerged as the frontrunner for the top public position at the state’s premier public university.

The choice of Maric will signal the weakness of the board and the continuing influence of UConn’s top administrators. A Maric presidency will confirm the sclerotic preferences of the board and their bureaucratic overlords. A new president from outside UConn would bring a new team and change. Power would devolve from the people who have made many errors to new ones who may usher in a new era of accountability. Preventing that new era is the chief goal of insiders manipulating the search. An outsider might require the administration to adhere to the state’s hiring practices.

Only a late intervention by Governor Ned Lamont could save UConn from a serious mistake by championing opportunity and renewal over the celebration of connivance and cementing family members of the influential into the extended UConn ecosystem. Lamont, a Harvard and Yale graduate, has shown little interest in the state of public higher education.

Published September 27, 2022.

Republican nominee for governor Bob Stefanowski appears to have a one-person company registered to operate in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as records indicate it is, Daily Ructions can report. Stefanowski says contracts preclude him from discussing his clients.

Stefanowski has a Connecticut entity registered as Lolo Consulting, LLC, with the Secretary of the State. The other Lolo is a ”one-person foreign entity” registered in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and described as “providing senior management consulting services,” according to a commercial registration filed in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

Reached by phone Monday night, Stefanowski, who has loaned his campaign $10 million, refused to say if he does or does not do business in Saudi Arabia. The Madison Republican said he enters into non-disclosure agreements with clients as to their names and locations. If the former payday lender executive has not been doing business in Saudi Arabia ”providing senior management consulting services” there would be no non-disclosure provisions in contracts that do not exist. There is no penalty for denying a contract you do not have.

Stefanowski disclosed in an early September summary earning $36.8 million in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Stefanowski on Monday accused his Democratic opponent in their rematch this year, Governor Ned Lamont, of filing his income tax return separately from Ann Huntress Lamont, the governor’s highflying venture capitalist spouse.

Saudi Arabia has been widely condemned for its brutal and continuing human rights abuses, including the execution of 81 people in one day in March. Stefanowski is unlikely to have mentioned human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia.

The Lolo registration to conduct business in Saudi Arabia was filed in February 2020 and expires in June 2023.

Stefanowski and Lamont on Tuesday will have the first of just two general election debates. it will be streamed live on NBC Connecticut at 12:30 p.m. and broadcast at 7 p.m.

Published September 26, 2022.

Days of Awe indeed. They know how to send it over the footlights to welcome 5783.

Published September 25, 2022.

Democrat Christine Maine ended her appearance on a local radio debate Friday with a startling analysis. Asked by WINY moderator John Mahan posed the innocuous question from a listener: How can police recruit more officers? Maine, her party’s candidate in the 51st House District, shared her experience as a magistrate in Newport News, Virginia.

Maine said her job brought her into contact with thousands of officers presenting her with search and arrest warrants. Maine told Quiet Corner listeners she was “shocked” when she learned ”some of them joined because they wanted to beat people up with impunity, they wanted to have sex because the uniform attracted women and they wanted to speed.”

Maine concluded her answer by observing that current testing methods of new recruits do not keep out the psychopaths. We need, according to Maine, fewer combative and more friendly officers.

Maine faces two-term incumbent Republican Rick Hayes for the Killingly, Putnam and Thompson seat. Hayes, a retired Putnam police chief was nonplussed when given the opportunity to respond and close the hourlong debate.

Maine is no fringe candidate. She qualified for public financing of her campaign with contributions from public safety committee co-chairs Senator Cathy Osten and Representative Maria Horn, as well as Democratic senators Saud Anwar, Richard Lopes and Norman Needleman. Maine also received a contribution from former Secretary of the State Denise Merrill. Alex Kasser, former state senator from Greenwich, contributed $100. Kasser describes herself in the Maine campaign finance report as an unemployed lawyer living in New Milford.

Lt. Governor Susan Bysiewicz joined Maine at a local Democratic even in Killingly last week.

Published September 25, 2022.

It seems crude by today’s standards, but no one had delivered a speech like it before 1952. Mr. Nixon knew how to modulate, divert and attack. He was also a master of posing a question and then answering it to his advantage.

Nixon sounds defiant notes throughout the speech, but he wavered in the days before he delivered it. Pat Nixon bucked up her husband’s fighting spiriting by reminding him of the consequences of quitting the ticket and slinking away.

Nixon had been in politics for just six years when Dwight Eisenhower picked him as his running mate. When he finished, Nixon thought the speech was a failure. “Nixon soon learned that he was wrong,” according to biography John A. Farrell. “He learned it from the teary eyes of the cameraman on the set, and the awe in the voice of the who wiped away his makeup. He learned it from the cheers of the loyalists on the sidewalk, from an adoring crowd that now filled his hotel lobby, and reports of swamped switchboards and overwhelmed telegraph lines all over the country.” The speech attracted the largest television audience to that time.

The response to the Checkers speech caused Nixon to conclude he had mastered the medium. Eight years later, television would be his undoing when he hobbled into a television studio to face John F. Kennedy.

Published September 23, 2022.

Their embarrassment is showing. Governor Ned Lamont’s campaign announced late Friday afternoon that ”it will participate in two debates and four candidate forums ahead of the November 8th election.”

The Greenwich Democrat’s Friday taking out the trash was his declaration that he deigns to grace with his presence a September 27th debate on WVIT and a second on WTNH on November 1st. “These are the only debates in which Governor Lamont will be participating” the campaign declared with a tone that suggests the decision does not comport with Lamont’s often-stated desire to encourage participatory democracy. Lamont has declined several other invitations to participate in televised debates, including from News12 Connecticut.

Debating has never been Lamont’s strength, though after four years as governor he ought to have more confidence in himself as he appeals to voters to show their confidence in him as he seeks a second term. The two debate dates have been agreed to with an eye on containing Lamont’s habit of leaving wreckage when he wanders off-script. Blunders at the end of September can be sealed over with media buys paid for from the fourth generation American aristocrat’s fortune. Gaffes on November 1st will leave little time for Lamont’s opponent to amplify and exploit them.

Republican Bob Stefanowski, not a nimble debater himself, has long been looking forward to a series of televised rematches with the winner of the 2018 race for governor. Lamont’s refusal to engage in October will require his loanshark mogul rival to deliver a knockout before cameras in 11 days.

Lamont has ducked debates before, and it cost him. In his 2010 primary challenge of party-endorsed candidate Dannel P. Malloy, Lamont, relying on the power of his wealth to see him through, avoided debating Malloy. The former Stamford mayor mocked and berated Lamont for hiding from traditional public discourse. Malloy, who polls showed was the underdog through the primary campaign, defeated Lamont in a landslide. Malloy’s reliance on disdain may have been spurred by his fury over Lamont sending a camera crew to film from the bushes at Malloy’s home.

If Stefanowski is to have any chance at defeating Lamont, he’ll need spend the next 11 days preparing for what may be his only meaningful encounter with the curiously timid Lamont.

Published September 16, 2022.