Vice President Harris to bolster Hayes with midweek visit to 5th CD. New ad highlights her work with demagogue Trump.
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.