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| Weicker |
In any statewide contest between Republicans and Democrats in Connecticut, the Republican Party would face, many have argued, odds that cannot easily be overcome.
Current numbers stand against Republicans, Registered
Democrats in Connecticut outnumber Republicans by a two-to-one majority.
Voters unaffiliated with either of Connecticut’s two major
parties outnumber registered Democrats in Connecticut by a slight majority, and
Democrats have for decades held major cities in Connecticut, the holy grail of
power politics in the state.
None of these fortifications are impregnable. To believe
they are part of the permanent patrimony of the State Democrat Party is to
yield to political despair and affirm the political superiority of hegemonic
governance over that of a representative republic.
The enfeeblement of the state Republican Party begins with
the political ascendancy of Senator Lowell Weicker. When Senator Weicker’s
congressional ascendancy ended in 1989, he had long established himself as the
premier “moderate” Republican senator in the US Senate. Weicker had provided to
other Republicans a winning campaign template. Other Connecticut Republicans
running for state office had only to repeat in their own campaigns Weicker’s
winning formula – run for office on the Republican line and govern as a
Democrat – to gain a step on state majority Democrats.
Someone should take over the state Republican Party, Weicker
told his Major Domo Tom D’Amore, who was appointed Chairman of the state
Republican Party at Weicker’s urging.
Weicker’s ascendancy in the US Senate came to an end when
Democrats -- and Republicans who could
not fail to notice that Weicker’s far left Americans for Democratic Action
(ADA) rating during his last year in office was about 20 points higher than
that of liberal Democrat US Senator
Chris Dodd – combined to elect to the US Senate then state Attorney General Joe
Lieberman in Welcker’s place.
Weicker later ran for Connecticut governor on a third-party
ticket and won office. His first major act as governor was to muscle through
Connecticut’s largely Democrat General Assembly a state income tax that had in
the past been successfully opposed by seminal Democrats such as former Governor
Ella Grasso. One of Grasso’s biographers, current Democrat Lieutenant Governor
Susan Bysiewicz, tells us that Grasso’s fervent opposition to an income tax was
a mar on an otherwise exemplary record. Grasso, a notorious penny pincher,
thought an income tax would raise the ceiling on state spending to penurious
levels, and the state’s long-term debt is unimpeachable evidence of her
political foresight.
An October 23, 2025 report by the Reason Foundation tells
us, “Connecticut had the highest per capita long-term debt in the nation, at
$23,934 per resident. New Jersey was just behind, with $21,197 in long-term
debt per capita.”
Most commentators in Connecticut still regard Weicker as a
so called “moderate” Republican. Having gifted neo-progressives within the
state’s hegemonic Democrat Party with their long-desired income tax as a
one-term governor, the title of “moderate Republican” is in Weicker’s case
ill-fitting. The senator who used the state Republican Party as a foil to
garner votes among Democrats and frequent bursts of applause among the state’s
left of center media was, not even by his own reckoning, a moderate. He titled
his own autobiography, written in large part by someone else, Maverick. The
book was entertainingly reviewed by then Managing Editor and Editorial Page
Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell under the title “Mr. Bluster Saves
The World.”
Though he was rejected by his party as a leftist, Weicker –
who in his brash political manners bears an eerie resemblance to President
Donald Trump – continues to be regarded by Connecticut’s left of center media
as a political template for the state Republican Party. Only Republicans who
are “mavericks” with respect to a conservative Republican Party and are willing
to accommodate the majority Democrat Party on important issues, so it is
thought, can win elections in Connecticut.
Although all Republican Delegates to Connecticut’s U.S.
Congressional Delegation have been replaced by left-of-center Democrats, many
Republicans in the state, as well as political influencers in the media
continue to insist that the key to Republican election victories is to offer up
for election Republican candidates who are, as they sometimes put it, fiscal
conservatives and social liberals such as former U.S. Representative Chris
Shays, the last Republican U.S. Congressperson in Connecticut.
During the current
election process, Governor Ned Lamont, who has taken care to present himself to
voters as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, will face in a possible
Democrat primary contest no challenger on the right – because there is no moderating
right wing to the Democrat political juggernaut in Connecticut. The forward
movement within the Democrat Party in the northeast corridor and California is
propelled by leftists such as Mayor elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani, a
boastful socialist.
Neo-progressivism and socialism always have and always will
overpromise and under-deliver because both operate in a free-market system that
convincingly answers this important question: Who decides what must be done?
In a political hegemony in which all important political,
economic and cultural questions are decided by a single party, the ruling
single party displaces cultural prerequisites and true democratic opposition to
a unitary, costly, inefficient and unobstructed government. The only thing
worse than a two-party system is an autocratic one-party system that dispenses
– because it can do so – with the niceties of republican governance.
When Ben Franklin, emerging from the Constitutional
Convention, answered a question put by a woman – “Sir, what have you given us?
– by saying “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” he likely had in mind the
fragility of representative republics, always prey to strongman politics. There
is always a Caesar waiting in the wings to rescue the people from their awesome
political responsibilities as citizens in a free state.
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