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Behind the General Election Barricades


Now that the party primaries have concluded, the substance of the play will change – because the audience will have changed.

Democrat Party nominee Ned Lamont unsurprisingly dished Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim with 81 percent of the primary vote.

On the Republican side, Bob Stefanowski hauled in 30 percent of the vote, 9 points more than Mayor Mark Boughton of Danbury, not a strong showing for a party nominee. In the hotly contested 5th District, abandoned by Elizabeth Esty after charges she had not moved quickly enough on reported incidents of harassment by her Chief of Staff against one of her female aides. Jahana Hayes upset party nominee Mary Glassman with a convincing 62 percent of the vote. State Senator Joe Markley won a resounding victory over his two primary opponents, and Susan Bysiewicz, hand-picked by Lamont for the Lieutenant Governor slot, prevailed over her primary opponent with 62 percent of the vote.

During primaries, politicians tend to pitch their messaging to the party faithful -- to progressive Democrats or fiscally conservative Republicans. Many “conservative’ Republicans avoid the snare of social issues like the plague and, likewise, Democrats will wish in the coming general campaign to skirt the obvious failure in Connecticut of progressive fiscal measures.

In the post primary general election, a rough-hewn left or right ideology tends to take a back pew, and the post primary candidates – Democrat Lamont and Republican Stefanowski --  may make both substantial and symbolic adjustments in their campaigning, a  strategic move designed to appeal to a greater number of voters, many of whom are unaffiliateds.

We know very little about unaffiliateds because, for some indiscernible reason, pollsters have not probed the nature of the beast.

Groucho Marx used to say that he would decline to join any group that would have him as a member. It is possible that the bulk of unaffiliateds are anti-social Marxists. It is also possible that a goodly number of them are expats from both political parties who have alienated themselves from party politics for reasons good and bad. If this is the case, the breakdown among alienated unaffiliateds in Connecticut would pattern the general breakdown among the party faithful.

A data-driven understanding of unaffiliateds is essential in forming campaign strategies in a general election. There are no such studies, and in their absence campaigners more often than not become the victims of untested hypotheses. The first doubtful presumption is that unaffiliateds are “parties of one,” like Henry David Thoreau preparing to leave the comforts of Concord for the rude discomforts of Walden Pond. The second presumption is that unaffiliateds are non-ideological creatures – moderates rather than conservatives or progressives. Both assumptions may be wildly misleading.

In any case, it has become almost a tradition among Connecticut politicians moving from primaries to general elections to temper their primary messaging until, in a general election, its becomes a sort of ideological mush that appeals to everyone and no one. This is called winning a campaign on the cheap.

During the Democrat primary, Lamont and Byseiwicz gave no indication that their future administration would be other than a continuation of the disastrous reign of Dannel Malloy, whose approval rating is the lowest in the nation, though slightly higher than the Devil in Dante's ninth circle of Hell. The Republican program of Stefanowski/Markley has long since been hammered out in a rumbustious Republican primary.

Columnist Chris Powell noted a  tectonic shift in Lamont’s “overwrought if not hysterical acceptance speech admitting that the party's eight years in control of state government have laid Connecticut low and it desperately needs to change direction.”

There are two kinds of change, quantitative and qualitative. A quantitative change involves more of the same – more rodomontade from slippery politicians, more taxes, more spending. Lamont’s former gubernatorial primary opponent, Malloy, was a near perfect demagogue. So far, Lamont is only “nearly hysterical.” Demagoguery lies at the crossroad of hysteria and power. In ancient Greece, the demagogue was an accomplished rhetorician, a populist rabble-rouser who gained the affections of the populace by exploiting prejudice and ignorance among the common people, stirring the passions of the crowd and shutting down reasoned deliberation.

It may be well to bear in mind Mark Twain's sage advice: “When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.”

Here in Connecticut, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a two to one margin, and unaffiliateds, about whom we know nothing, have a slight edge over Democrats, presenting a rich field in which the demagogue may sow populist tares among the wheat.


Eventually, comes the harvest of despair.




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