Klarides wants Republicans to regain strength in CT suburbs

By Scott Benjamin

For Connecticut Republicans is the problem that there are too many Whole Foods and not enough Cracker Barrels?

Republican consultant Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in her 2015 book, “The Selfie Vote,” (272 pages, Broadside Books) that Dave Wasserman of the Cook Political Report has said that you can identify your political geography based on whether your area has a Whole Foods supermarket, which tend to be in Democratic environs, or a Cracker Barrel restaurant, which usually are located in a Republican area.

In Connecticut, there are nine Whole Foods, including two in West Hartford, but only two Cracker Barrel outlets.

Milford is the only one of the 169 municipalities that has both a Whole Foods and a Cracker Barrel. East Windsor is the only municipality with just a Cracker Barrel, and as was the case in Milford and the other seven municipalities that have a Whole Foods, East Windsor supported Democratic President-elect Joe Biden in the November 3 election.

Perhaps if the Republicans want to improve their chances of winning the 2022 gubernatorial race they could formally designate Milford as Connecticut’s Bipartisan Community and present a silver bowl to the city – similar to the one awarded each year at the Belmont Stakes – commissioned from Tiffany & Co. in Greenwich – a town which has a Whole Foods but no Cracker Barrel.

However, departing state House Republican Leader Themis Klarides of Derby said, “Once you get beyond Milford you can go through the rest of the shoreline to Rhode Island and not find a Whole Foods.”

It has not been confirmed if the Republican state party leadership plans to have its people have lunch on the second Tuesday of next month with Cracker Barrel’s people to determine if more of its restaurants could be built over the next year going east along the Connecticut shoreline.

However, from a different perspective: Ten years ago, Tom Foley of Greenwich, lost by just 6,400 votes to Malloy after winning 128 of the 169 municipalities – 72 percent.

Since Foley got clobbered in Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford the consensus was the Republicans suffered from a “city problem.”

But over the last two even-numbered year elections there also appears to be a “suburban swoon.”

All signs indicated that 2018 could be a banner year for the GOP with former Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Essex) departing with dismal job approval numbers.

However, Democrat Ned Lamont of Greenwich scored a 45,000-vote plurality for governor and his party added seats in the state House and Senate.

The word at the state Capitol in early 2020 was that the criticism over Lamont’s unsuccessful efforts to put tolls on the highways would be the “watershed” issue in the November 3 balloting. He also was panned for having ineffective legislative outreach.

An October 2019 Hartford Courant/Sacred Heart University poll reported that Lamont had a 24 percent approval rating. CT News Junkie columnist Susan Bigelow wrote at that time that Lamont “is about as unpopular as sewage.”

Instead, Lamont has been largely heralded for his leadership during the pandemic and his once anemic approval rating has risen to 54 percent in the most recent Sacred Heart University poll. Democratic President-elect Joe Biden easily carried the state and the Democrats re-elected five incumbent U.S. House members and added seats in both chambers of the General Assembly.

Klarides partly attributes the results to departing Republican President Donald Trump’s personal conduct.

Sacred Heart University Government Department Chairman Gary Rose told Patch.com last year that suburban women, who used to be evenly divided, are now trending toward Democratic candidates.

Klarides declared, “It is not just suburban women, but the suburbs in general that have been going more Democratic. I’ve seen that in my district.”

“There have been a number of women in the suburbs and elsewhere that have disliked the president,” Klarides added in a phone interview. “I understand that.”

However, before the pandemic, a February New York Times/Siena poll indicated that 65 percent of the voters surveyed thought the president would capture a second term since the economy was roaring and the United States was not at war.

“If you stepped back and put on your objectivity hat, you can say that some of his domestic policies – but not all of them – moved the country’s economy forward,” said Klarides, an attorney, who is retiring after 22 years in the state House.

“But you can be the smartest person in the world and you will lose support and offend people if you make caustic and divisive comments,” she remarked.

The GOP hasn’t had a winner in a presidential election in Connecticut since George H.W. Bush in 1988; a U.S. Senate election since Lowell Weicker in 1982; a gubernatorial election since M. Jodi Rell in 2006; a U.S. House election since Chris Shays in the Fourth District in 2006.

The last time the Republicans had a majority in the state House came in the 1984 election.

After the 2008 election, the Republicans only held 37 seats in the state House. After the 2016 balloting they were at 72 seats, an addition of 35 seats over the elections from 2010 through 2016.

Now it is 97-54 in the House and 24-12 in the Senate following the 2020 election.

Klarides, who did not seek re-election in November, is the honorary chair for the recently-formed Political Action Committee Fight for Connecticut, which CT Mirror in October had raised $70,000.

She indicated that the organization plans to speak to groups and post digital advertising to make voters “understand” that Connecticut Republicans are often fiscally conservative and socially moderate and differ from those in the red states of the south and southwest, for example.

Former W. Bush White Political Director Karl Rove wrote recently in his Wall Street Journal column that two Republican voter drives in Texas – which included big data, technology and paid workers canvassing neighborhoods and Department of Motor Vehicle offices – helped carry the Lone Star State in 2020 for Trump.

Klarides said Fight for Connecticut plans to engage in canvassing.

What about opening the Republican primaries to unaffiliated voters? Wouldn’t that help get the Connecticut GOP message out to the rank and file?

“It might,” Klarides said. “I’m not completely sold on it. But I’m not against it.”

Some observers believe that such a move would rankle members of the Republican town committees, who fear that statewide and congressional candidates would be less likely to attend their monthly meetings.

Secretary of the State Denise Merrill (D-Hartford) told Patch.com in 2019 that is one party adopted open primaries it would be an “advantage” for them.

Rose told Patch.com in 2019, "I believe that party affiliation should mean something. "But as a strategist: The Republicans might want to do that," he continued. "Their party has shrunk to where it's 21 percent of the electorate. For strategy, it makes perfect sense."

Departing Republican state Party Chairman J.R. Romano told Patch.com in 2019 that the GOP typically spends $80,000 to hold its state convention, which in recent years has been at Mohegan Sun in Uncasville.

Would it be more practical to have a less-expensive virtual convention and use some of that money for voter outreach?

“It is a lot of money,” Klarides said of the costs of holding a large in-person convention.

She said that maybe there could be some “balance” to save money and still hold a convention.

Even with the Democrats’ registration advantage, Klarides said the Nutmeg State could elect a Republican candidate for governor who is fiscally conservative and socially moderate since it is happening elsewhere.

You have to look no further than Massachusetts with Charlie Baker, Vermont with Phil Scott and New Hampshire with Chris Sununu.

“It hasn’t just been the governors in those states but many of the Republicans in the legislatures in those states also have had similar approaches to those governors,” Klarides said.

In September 2019 at the Republicans’ 41st annual Prescott Bush state fund-raising dinner, Klarides criticized Lamont, calling him “incompetent” and deserving a grade of “F-minus.”

The Hartford Courant reported that the “caustic outburst reverberated through the State Capitol” the following day.

Yet, state Rep. Bob Godfrey (D-110) of Danbury told Patch.com this last spring that Klarides would criticize Democrats at news conferences but she was always friendly in private conversations with the legislators of the opposition party.

“You cannot be attacking the other side constantly and expect to get issues resolved on the floor of the House,” state Rep. Stephen Harding (R-107) of Brookfield said. “Themis understands that. She could be making aggressive criticism about the Democrats in a television interview and five minutes later she was having a conversation and laughing” with them.

Klarides said she likes her Democratic leadership counterparts.

“The bottom line is that legislators are going to fight for what they think is best for their districts,” she remarked. “Just because I might disagree with someone doesn’t mean that I can’t respect them.”

“As long as people are direct and honest I can like them even if I disagree with them,” Klarides explained. “I very much like the [departing] speaker [Joe Aresimowicz], [Senator [President Pro-Tem Martin] Looney and [incoming House Speaker] Matt Ritter” [who had been the House Majority Leader].

Said Harding “She maintained a good rapport with the Democratic leadership which allowed her to be a major player in getting the 2017 bipartisan budget approved.”

Klarides calls it the “best budget” in her career in the General Assembly, noting that it included caps on spending, bonding and volatility. Some observers believe the agreement is partly responsible for the state having a record $3.1 billion in its rainy day fund.

The 2017 budget was negotiated after the majority Democrats had failed for months to get a budget approved.

“They didn’t have a choice because they didn’t have the numbers,” Klarides related regarding the need to use Republican objectives in a bipartisan agreement.

“Every single day we asked them to call the budget, but they couldn’t, because they didn’t have enough support,” she explained.

Regarding the 2022 election, Harding said, “I definitely hope she throws her hat into the ring.”

Klarides is on the short list of candidates to run for either governor or the U.S. Senate in 2022.

She said she still hasn’t decided what her next step will be.

Former state Senate Republican Leader John McKinney of Fairfield said on a recent edition of the Capitol Report on WTNH-TV Channel 8 that 2018 GOP nominee Bob Stefanowski, the financial executive from Madison, “is the prohibitive favorite” for the party’s 2022 gubernatorial nomination. McKinney indicated that Klarides would be a welcome addition to the field.

She indicated that the top issue is Connecticut’s economy, which hasn’t recaptured all of the jobs lost during the 2008 Great Recession.

“I know that people are moving from New York City to Connecticut, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is very expensive to live here,” Klarides said, referring to people who have opted during the pandemic to move to the Nutmeg State’s suburbs.

The Wall Street Journal stated in a November 1 editorial that the state has a pension system that recently has been evaluated by Fitch Ratings as the second worst in the country, after Illinois.

The 2018 report from the state Commission on Fiscal Stability indicated that Connecticut’s economy contracted eight percent between 2008 and 2016.

“I think there is a lack of trust in government,” Klarides said.

University of Connecticut Finance Professor Fred Carstensen, the director of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis, has told Patch.com that Connecticut has been stymied by a lack of public-private investments. For example, in Holyoke, Massachusetts, MIT, Harvard and the University of Massachusetts contributed toward a digital information center that has produced a stream of money.

He has said that in 2005, then-Gov. M. Jodi Rell (R-Brookfield) signed a stem-cell package that was “hands down the best in the country.” He bemoans that Connecticut hasn’t had similar programs since then.

Said Klarides, “Since Gov. Rell’s tenure there have been regular budget deficits that we have had to address,” she explained. “You have to get those things done first and thus some of those extra items can’t be funded.”

CT Mirror has reported that the General Assembly may consider an increase in the state gasoline tax during the 2021 session to help address a special transportation fund that is projected to go into deficit in the next year.

Klarides said during the 2019 session the Republicans in the General Assembly offered a comprehensive transportation initiative that included $375 million in bonding for each of the next five years.

“I get that it is user fees,” Klarides said of increases in the state’s 25-cent a gallon gasoline tax. “But if you do that, then get rid of some of the other taxes. Let’s find out which taxes are the greatest burden for the residents of our state.”

Regarding economies in the state, CT Hearst business columnist Dan Haar has stated that the full-time state work force was trimmed by 13.1 percent under Malloy.

Could it be slashed further?

Klarides said, “I think there are a lot of places where we could lower costs through technology without impacting services. I think we could have fewer deputy commissioners and in some instances staff members could be shared so that there would be fewer staff members.”

Lamont has hired the Boston Consulting Group to produce an analysis of the state work force since there are many pending retirements expected to occur in the coming years.

Said Klarides, “I have no problem with using a consulting group. But I disagree with how he did it. It was done in the dark of the night. You need to be transparent.”

Whom did she admire during her 22 years in the General Assembly?

“Larry Cafero” she said, referring to the former state representative from Norwalk, who immediately preceded her as the Republican leader. She had been the deputy leader during Cafero’s tenure as the leader of the caucus.

“I learned so much because he engages everybody,” Klarides explained, noting that she continues to be in contact with him.

She added, “I served under several governors who each had their good and bad points. I will say that Gov. Malloy was very committed to his proposals, a number of which I disagreed with. However, he was one of the hardest-working elected officials that I have been around. He pushed for what he wanted, and I respect that.”