Can the Fourth Congressional District return to the GOP column?

By Scott Benjamin

FAIRFIELD – Why has a congressional district that only elected moderate Republicans from the Vietnam War through the Great Moderation become more Mark Warner than Mitt Romney during the Great Stagnation?

The voters in the Fourth Congressional District have switched from electing moderate Republicans Lowell Weicker, Stewart McKinney and Chris Shays to supporting Democrat Jim Himes, who once sent a letter to Sacred Heart University’s Gary Rose that he didn’t portray him enough as a moderate in Rose’s 2011 book on the Fourth District.

Himes, who lives in the Cos Cob section of Greenwich, was initially elected in 2008 and in the most recent campaigns in a district that travels from Greenwich to Oxford, has posted numbers the Democrats could only have fantasized about a generation ago – hovering above, at or near 60 percent of the ballots.

Wikipedia reports that with a Cook Partisan Voting Index rating of D+13, it is the most Democratic district in Connecticut, a state with an all-Democratic congressional delegation. Historically, the 4th was a classic "Yankee Republican" district. However, it has not supported a Republican for president since George H.W. Bush in 1988.”

Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini, a Greenwich native, wrote in his 2023 book, “Party Of The People” that a higher percentage of college graduates are voting Democratic. Census Reporter states that 52.8 percent of the adults in the Fourth Congressional District have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Ruffini wrote, “A college diploma has replaced income as the new marker of social class and the key dividing line in elections.”

Next month Republicans in the Fourth Congressional District will take their first major step this cycle in determining who their candidate will be in a district that, prior to Himes, had only elected Republicans from 1968 through 2006.

Bob MacGuffie, a Tea Party Republican who entered the race about a year ago, said regarding his campaign, “We’re going to expose [Himes] for what he does, not what he says.”

MacGuffie, a former financial executive who lives in Fairfield, has posted a billboard sign in Norwalk underlining Himes’ senior thesis at Harvard, which was titled, “The Sandinista Defense Committees and the Transformation of Political Culture in Nicaragua.”

“I think that it is astounding that he wrote it,” said MacGuffie. “I think it informs his thinking. He interviewed the Communists for two months during their revolution” in Nicaragua. “He was researching Marx, Stalin and Castro.”

After being contacted via e-mail by Patch.com, Francesca Capodilupo, Himes’ campaign manager, stated that they would not be providing comment for this story.

MacGuffie will be competing for the GOP nomination against physician and attorney Michael Goldstein, a member of the Greenwich Representative Town Meeting who lost in the congressional primary in 2022, and Daniel Miressi, a former state Senate candidate from Norwalk, on Monday night, May 20, at the nominating convention at Roger Ludlowe High School in Fairfield.

MacGuffie said that he has “the juice to take on Himes.”

In a phone interview with Patch.com, Miressi said that at age 34, much younger than his two rivals who are both in their 70s, he can more easily embark on 21st century Republicanism.

He said he respects MacGuffie and Goldstein, but, “There are too many that think it is still 1984 and we’re just a policy away or tax brackets away from being a Reagan Revolution.”

Regarding MacGuffie, Republican State Central Committee member Michael Garrett of Bridgeport stated in an e-mail interview with Patch.com that, “ I like Bob's approach . It provides the contrast that voters need to make a clear decision.”

However, he added, “There is no discernable favorite thus far [for the convention nomination]. Perhaps a debate will clarify the situation.”

In an interview with Patch.com, MacGuffie said the delegates were recently selected and the candidates are continuing to seek their support. He has spoken to each Republican Town Committee in the district at least once.

Goldstein stated in an e-mail message to Patch.com that he believes his prospects of winning the convention nomination are “very good.”

Goldstein petitioned for a primary two years ago against Jayme Stevenson, the former first selectman of Darien. She easily secured the convention nomination and also won the primary three months later.

MacGuffie said that if he doesn’t take the convention nod he owes it to his “supporters” to seek a primary. Miressi said he also is committed to running in a primary, which would be held on August 13.

MacGuffie has been challenging Himes’ positions at the congressman’s forums dating to the first one in 2009.

However, if MacGuffie is elected, what will he do at his first congressional town meeting when a member of the Occupy Wall Street movement throws bricks at his policies?

“I will discuss the issue with them,” said MacGuffie.

He said that Himes has never been rude to him when he has spoken out at the congressman’s public events.

MacGuffie described Himes as being “very calm and deceptive” in his responses.

Regarding the campaign, he said that voters chief concerns are: illegal immigration at the borders and an American economy in which wealth is shrinking.

MacGuffie said former President Donald Trump, the apparent 2024 Republican nominee, deserves a two-thumbs up rating.

“He’s the only one we can count on to tackle the issues seriously that need to be tackled,” he commented.

In 1990 on NBC’s Later with Bob Costas, Washington Post columnist George Will said that Ronald Reagan’s popularity was “85 percent” due to his policies and only 15 percent due to his charisma and personality. Will said it usually is that way, noting that Richard Nixon lacked charisma, but in the 1972 election he collected more votes for president than anyone in history up to that point.

Is it also that way with Trump?

MacGuffie exclaimed, “It is his policies, because his personality can be abrasive.

He added, “His opponents never talk about his policies.”

“People are coming our way,” said MacGuffie of the multi-racial working-class coalition that he says has made Trump’s base bigger than it was in 2016 when he first ran for the White House.

Ruffini wrote that “seven in ten American voters belong to groups that have moved right in the last two presidential elections.”

“There is nothing in American life that Democrats do not want to regulate and poke their noses into,” said MacGuffie. “The Tea Party movement, MAGA movement, all it represents: ‘Leave me alone.’ And if they did, then all of the discord in society would calm down.”

On another topic, MacGuffie expressed disappointment with U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) negotiations in late March on the package of six spending bills totaling $1.2 trillion that were approved to keep the federal government running.

“Johnson just caved to [the Democrats],” MacGuffie declared.

During the 2016 presidential primaries, then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich had a billboard at his rallies noting a federal debt approaching $20 trillion. Now, George Logan, the likely Republican nominee in the Fifth Congressional District, is posting stories on his Facebook page that the federal debt exceeds $34 trillion.

Yet, there has been no commission appointed to address the debt, as there was under Barack Obama. Congress has not again adopted the Pay As You Go controls that George H.W. Bush insisted upon when he supported a tax increase in 1990.

The federal government hasn’t had a balanced budget in nearly 23 years.

MacGuffie exclaimed, “We’re racking up about a trillion dollars in debt every 100 days or so.”

“Johnson [is] not fighting it,” said MacGuffie, noting that under similar circumstances, the Freedom Caucus took steps last fall to oust Kevin McCarthy of California as Speaker.

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a member of the Freedom Caucus, has filed a motion to vacate against Johnson.

“He deserves it.,” said MacGuffie. “However, I don’t know that it is the most practical thing to do.”

Goldstein stated that he opposes trying to remove Johnson as Speaker.

“The Republican majority is so slim that the chaos created might lead to huge delay in electing a new speaker. It is also possible that with one or two Republican abstentions [Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries could be elected speaker. Republicans need to unite and convince voters, through their actions, that they should remain the majority party in the House.”

On a separate subject, Columbia University Law School professor Tim Wu recently wrote in The New York Times that the Biden Administration has taken an approach that “calls for a different kind of capitalism — one that opposes the centralization of economic power and favors a market in which wealth can be earned by people and businesses in a broader set of geographic regions, drawn from a wider array of social classes and involving a more diverse set of industries.”

Wu added, “Over the past three years of the Biden administration, you can see this philosophy at work in what may seem like different areas. It is at the heart of the Justice Department’s continuing New Deal-style antimonopoly campaign, which has already prevented dozens of unwise mergers.”

Said MacGuffie, “I know from personal experience, some of the biggest company mega-mergers are ego and personal-finance driven, and clearly do nothing for the consumer - in fact they reduce competition and lead to unfair pricing power. Many warrant being prevented. Amazon is certainly big enough and its acquisitions should be closely watched. I think the RealPage situation as software vendor in residential real estate could well be a price-fixing case. Generally I favor plenty of competition - keeps everyone honest.”

He added, “As to anti-trust laws of the U.S. government, I understand their purpose and generally agree with that purpose - to assure a competitive marketplace and level business playing field.”

Resources:

Interview with Bob MacGuffie, Patch.com, on Sunday, March 24, 2024.

E-mail interview with Bob MacGuffie, Patch.com, on Monday, March 25, 2024.

E-mail interview with Michael Goldstein, Patch.com, on Monday, April 1, 2024.

E-mail message from Francesca Capdilupo, Patch.com, on Wednesday, April 3, 2024.

E-mail interview with Michael Garrett, Patch.com, Monday, March 25, 2024.

Phone interview with Daniel Miressi, Patch.com, Wednesday, April 3, 2024.

Interview with Gary Rose, Patch.com, Tuesday, January 28, 2024.

Patrick Ruffini, “Party Of The People,” Simon & Schuster, 2023.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://censusreporter.org/profiles/50000US0904-congressional-district-4-ct/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/house-senate-government-shutdown-vote-fccc16e6

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/opinion/biden-trump-economy-election.html

https://books.google.com/books...