Dems need to build in New Milford, Brookfield, Winchester, Torrington

By Scott Benjamin

Not only did Ned Lamont’s blue wave fail to reach the Eastern Surfing Nationals in Cocoa Beach, it didn’t extend to Connecticut’s 30th state Senate District.

Lamont, Connecticut’s 89th governor, not only prevailed by 13 points in winning a second term, but even carried Republican reliable New Canaan.

But as has been the case in every election since 1980, a Republican in the 30th District, which has 18 municipalities – more than 10 percent of Connecticut’s total – elected a Republican.

Brookfield Republican Stephen Harding – who had been the state representative in the 107th state House District for nearly eight years – took 53.8 percent of the ballots to 46.2 percent for New Milford Democrat Eva Bermudez Zimmerman, who had sought the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor in 2018.

Audrey Blondin, who was recently re-elected as the Secretary for the Democratic State Central Committee and is a member of that committee in the 30th District, which extends from Brookfield to Salisbury – said when the party leaders met recently the biggest question was: “Why” the blue wave didn’t produce a Democratic state senator.

After all, Connecticut has reportedly been undergoing a political identity crisis for five years. If Greenwich – where the Bush family came to power – elected three Democratic state representatives in 2022 – why couldn’t the Democrats elect a state senator in the neighborhood where conservative icon William F. Buckley first developed his arguments for Firing Line?

Perhaps, the answer to Blondin’s question was provided by John Morris of Litchfield, the longest serving current member of the Republican State Central Committee, in a phone interview with Patch.com more than five months before the election.

“The upper part of the district has become more Democratic, but the lower part of the district still runs the show,” he said.

“New Milford and Brookfield [in the southern portion] do make up a good chunk of the district," Morris remarked. "When you take in New Fairfield and Sherman, you see that the southern part of the district is very important.”

Harding won the election by 3,559 votes. His collective plurality in Torrington, New Milford, Winchester and Brookfield was 4,875.

He has received accolades for helping secure state funding for part of the costs for the Candlewood Lake Elementary School in Brookfield, which is under construction, and the emerging New England-style business district in the 198-acre Brookfield Town Center. He has been lauded for working constructively with Democratic first selectmen in his former state House District.

Blondin told Patch.com last December that the Democrats were unable to link Harding with Republican former president Donald Trump, who has had low approval numbers in Connecticut.

Blondin offered a similar comment to Morris’s analysis in a recent phone interview with Patch.com after Democratic leaders had held their post-election review.

She said the Democrats are not performing well in those four more-populated municipalities. In contrast, in the 64th state House District, which largely covers the less-populated Northwest Corner of Litchfield County, the Democrats since 2000 have annexed 11 of the 12 elections. A generation ago, Democrats in that neck of the woods were reluctant to discuss their party affiliation at a cocktail party.

Blondin said in a phone interview with Patch.com that each of those municipalities have had Democratic mayors or first selectmen at one point or another.

“We as Democrats have not been able to hold onto those seats and increase our electability,” Blondin remarked. “In my opinion, that is our problem.”

“It has to start at the local level,” she explained.

However, in New Milford and Brookfield, for example, that may be a tall order. The GOP has controlled the mayor’s office in New Milford in 23 of the last 27 years. Republican Pete Bass garnered a third term in 2021 with 73 percent of the ballots.

In Brookfield, random voter comment in recent months has been favorable toward first-term Republican First Selectman Tara Carr. In particular, she has been praised for being accessible. Carr even has been touted as a possible candidate for higher office in the future.

The race in the 30th District was between two Millennials – both Harding and Bermudez-Zimmerman are 35.

When Blondin first became active in the Northwest Corner, the congressman from the now-defunct Sixth District, Democrat Toby Moffett of Litchfield, used to complain that too many young people would say: “I’m not into politics – as though they were talking about playing chess or going skiing.”

Is that still the case more than 40 years later?

Regarding Generation Z, Harvard pollster John Della Volpe wrote in The New York Times last year that many of them are pessimistic about the future after growing up through the Great Recession, the pandemic and the increase in gun violence in schools.

“Less than one in 10 Americans between 18 and 29 years old describe ours as a ‘healthy democracy,’ ” he wrote.

However, Blondin said that in Connecticut the Millennials, who are slightly older than Generation Z, are now ascending to higher office.

“The 20-to-40-year-old cohort can get a message up on the social media in a way that captures attention,” she said. “We’re seeing people from that cohort coming forward and getting elected. They have that command of the social media that people over 40 don’t often have.”

She pointed to such statewide Democratic office-holders as Treasurer Erick Russell of Hartford and Comptroller Sean Scanlon of Guilford, who are both in their 30s.

Blondin added that three of the five Executive Committee members on the Connecticut Democratic State Central Committee are 40 years of age or younger – Vice Chairman Jimmy Tickey of Shelton and Adrienne Billings-Smith of West Hartford and Treasurer Robert Alves of Danbury. Alves is making a second bid for the mayor’s office in Danbury.

On a separate subject, the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan wrote a column recently under the headline: “Our Political Parties Are Struggling.”

Noonan – who wrote memorable speeches for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush – stated she didn’t know “where to start” in her concerns about the current Republican Party.

On the Democrats, she wrote: “Since at least 2020 they have aligned with or allowed themselves to be associated with another deeply agitating cultural question, the identity politics-wokeness regime. . . Michael Lind, in a piece in the Tablet, sees it as composed of three parts, all falsely presented. The “Quota Project” uses anti-racism to pursue “social reconstruction.” The “Androgyny Project” goes beyond civil rights and ignores gay rights to “redefine all male and female human beings as generic, androgynous humanoids whose sex is a matter of subjective self-definition.” The “Green Project” uses climate change as an excuse to “radically restructure the society of the U.S. and other advanced industrial democracies.”

Blondin replied, “Both parties struggle with the extremes on both ends. However, when it comes to getting elected, for the most part it’s the more moderate, middle of the road candidates that are successfully elected and that will continue to be the case despite these types of extremism being presented as the ‘norm.’ “

“In addition, over the decades, what has been viewed as extremism in the past in areas such as the environment, climate change and LGBTQ+ rights over time often becomes much more mainstream and an accepted part of our lives and culture,” she added.

After more than 40 years of working for Democrats in Connecticut, what elected officials, past or present, does Blondin most admire?

“Ned Lamont,” she said. Interestingly, 13 years ago she endorsed former Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy over Lamont. Since then, they both have been elected twice as governor.

On Lamont, she said, “You have someone that was not particularly political who came into office and faced the biggest challenge of our life time with the Covid-19 pandemic and handled the entire situation with wisdom, knowledge and experience that was clearly acknowledged and appreciated by the electorate in his great re-election victory in November despite him having no medical, public health or extensive political background.”

She concluded, “These are the kind of situations that show true leadership and he really deserves credit and my personal admiration for all that he did to successfully get us through this crisis that otherwise really could've come out very differently.”

Resources:

https://www.jsonline.com/elections/results/race/2022-11-08-state_senate-CT-7089/

Phone interview with Audrey Blondin, Patch.com, Thursday, February 2, 2023.

Phone interview with John Morris, Patch.com. April, 2022.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/o... Secretary of the State’s web site.

Audrey Blondin news release on Democratic State Central Committee elections.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/opinion/young-voters-midterms-democrats.html

Greg Dembowski interview, Patch.com, February 2, 2023.

Toby Moffett, speech, Danbury, Friday, September 19, 1980.