Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Politico ,  not a raving right news site, offered some hope to Republicans in Connecticut on the last day of the old year: “Deep-blue Connecticut is actually one of Republicans' best opportunities in 2018. Malloy’s approval ratings were some of the worst among any governor in the country, and he decided not to run for a third term. But Republicans hope that environment in the state will clear the way for their candidate next fall. There are almost a dozen candidates running in the Republican primary and it’s unclear who will emerge as the nominee. A Tremont Public Advisors LLC poll conducted in mid-December found a generic Republican candidate beating a generic Democratic candidate — 35 percent to 23 percent, with 42 percent undecided — despite the fact that Connecticut has not voted Republican at the presidential level since 1988.”

No one quite knows for certain how the play will unroll during the upcoming 2018 elections, but the cast of characters is slowly taking shape. Last April, Governor Dannel Malloy announced   he would not be running for a third term. Said Malloy, a rare emotional hitch in his voice, “I am today announcing that I will not seek a third term as governor. Instead, I will focus all my attention and energy – I will use all of my political capital from now through the end of 2018 – to continue implementing my administration's vision for a more sustainable and vibrant Connecticut economy." Malloy’s announcement opened a Pandora’s Box.  Lieutenant Governor Nancy Wyman, who rode shotgun on Governor Dannel Malloy’s coach for eight years, has only recently bowed out of the race. Wyman, it appears, has children and grandchildren whose company, she has belatedly said, she at long last would like to enjoy. Her bow-out, we are to understand, had nothing to do with Malloy’s failed...

President Donald Trump does not like the press he is receiving. The press – we now call it the media, because bloggers and ideologues with knives in their brains have been folded into it – convinced of its moral rectitude, begs to differ. Trump’s press notices would be very much different if he were the media, and his twitter activity has been taken by some as an attempt to offset this lamentable deficiency. Trump has been setting the day’s press calendar by tweet-twerking. He is, his Democratic and Republican opponents insist, the presidential equivalent of the-guy-in-a-bathrobe-in-his-mom’s-cellar turning the world upside down by loosing upon it nuclear tipped declarations. To Trump, tweets may be no more than a new colorful crayon in his box of tricks. To the contra-Trump media, they are a threat that must be disposed of, as the sixties radicals used to say, “by any means necessary.”

So then, everyone knows that Governor Dannel Malloy will not be on the ticket in 2018. Like another big tax and spender before him, former Governor Lowell Weicker, Malloy has chosen to skedaddle after having imposed on possible voters both the largest and second largest tax increases in Connecticut history. But – where to? Rumor, the Hartford Courant said , is now moving like a raging fire among “lobbyists, state employees and political insiders that Malloy would step down before his term ends in January 2019 and allow Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman to become governor. Malloy, under the scenario, would then take a high-ranking position at the University of Connecticut or another college.” Malloy was called upon to deny these possibilities, and he did so with his usual aplomb.