The quoted potions cited below are taken from an op-ed piece
– “The alternate reality of the modern GOP” -- written by Senate President Pro
Tempore Martin Looney for the Hartford Courant and printed in the paper’s
Saturday, August 23, 2025 edition.
Looney’s remarks are celebratory and somewhat repetitive,
even boastful, but they bear close scrutiny as a preliminary campaign strategy
for national and state Democrats.
Looney begins by offering an answer to a critique of
national Democrats – “a glut of notions expressed in print that the Democratic
[sic] Party, both in Connecticut and at the national level, has somehow become
‘radical’ or ‘extreme,’ while Republicans now occupy the hallowed moderate
middle ground of American politics.”
Such notions are “false, self-serving, and dishonest.”
Looney begs the reader to study democratic Connecticut as a paradigm of true,
altruistic and honest politics.
“Beginning in 2018,” he writes, “and in every state election
since, Connecticut Democrats” [note that here Looney correctly refers to his
party correctly as the Democrat, not ‘Democratic’ party] – “have increased our
majorities in the General Assembly [Connecticut’s House and Senate] because
people know that in Connecticut it’s Democrats who speak for the moderate
income working people who are struggling to pay their property taxes, educate
their children, and save for a modest retirement.”
Now, all Looney’s assertions above – subject to necessary
modifications, are from his point of view true, but Mark Twain, were he alive
and commenting on Connecticut politics today, would insist that some of Looney’s
propositions contain distortive “stretchers.”
Neo-progressives such as the 77 year old Looney, who began
his uninterrupted political career 32 years ago, have been extremely successful
in Connecticut because they have had a strong wind at their backs in party
registration and media approbation.
Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in Connecticut,
“the land of steady habits,” by a two to one margin, an advantage that long pre-dates
2018. Parties, both Democrat – not, be it noted, “Democratic” – and Republican,
have leeched voters into what we might call the “party of the disaffected,”
people who have voted not to affiliate with parties. Unaffiliated outnumber
Democrats in Connecticut by an increasingly significant margin. There are two
dramatic ways to disaffiliate from parties; one is to join the ranks of the
unaffiliated, and the other is to leave the state.
Red flags, all studiously unnoticed by Looney, are
everywhere. A recent story in the New York
Times, not a Trump organ, rather sorrowfully notes: “Of the 30
states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground
to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and
often by a lot…That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5
million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to
climb out from… All told, Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters
between the 2020 and 2024 elections in the 30 states, along with Washington,
D.C., that allow people to register with a political party. (In the remaining
20 states, voters do not register with a political party.) Republicans gained
2.4 million.”
Looney ends his threnody to the Republican Party on a stiff
but well-rehearsed funereal note: “They [Republicans] can posture all they
want, but no amount of cynical mislabeling by Republicans can obscure what we
Democrats are and what they have wretchedly become.”
And here Looney bumps into an unavoidable problem. If
enlightened Connecticut voters have endorsed Democrats by voting for them for
thirty years and more, Democrats also own thirty years of a politics that has deeded
those voters children and grandchildren with an accumulative state debt that is
per capita the third highest legacy debt in the nation -- $28.97 billion as of
fiscal year 2022. But who’s counting -- certainly not state Democrats.
Someone in the General Assembly – was it Looney –
incautiously asked the state Office of Legislative Research to create a
comparative listing of state debt. The
office produced a debt table showing that “ Connecticut had the highest NTSD
[net tax supported debt] as a percent of own-source revenue at 103.8%, greater
than the median of 24.5% for all states.”
Looney’s wretched time-worn rhetoric won’t cut it anymore.
People are staring dumfounded at the recent past with wide open eyes, and they
are telling us, both with their feet and with their votes -- they do not like
what they are seeing. Their warning is simple and direct: Democrats had better
introduce some reality into their policy prescription gap. You can’t sell
something with nothing, and whipping the opposition is a poor substitute for
rational political action.
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