Mathus wants to revitalize ailing Connecticut Republican Party

By Scott Benjamin

DARIEN -- “I’m the guy to call if you want to plan and revitalize things. I’m not the guy you’re going to have a drink with for two years,” says David Mathus.

About a year ago, Connecticut Republicans thought they were on the verge of completing a revitalization that would merit putting on eye goggles and spraying champagne at each other in a locker room-style celebration.

From the 2010 through 2016 state elections they had consistently gained seats in the General Assembly. They even had tied the Democrats at 18-18 in the state Senate following the 2016 campaign and were only seven seats behind them in the state House.

Former Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Essex) was leaving office with the worst approval ratings of any state chief executive in the country.

Connecticut was beset with a contracting economy, employee pension obligations that had been under-funded for decades and an inefficient transportation system.

“Very few innovative companies that are looking to establish facilities and research facilities are looking to move to Connecticut,” Mathus, who is running for the Republican state chairmanship, said in an interview.

“This was a race that had change election written all over it,” Sacred Heart University Political Science Professor Gary Rose said a week after the balloting.

However, revitalization turned into despair.

“We had a big opportunity, especially on the gubernatorial, and we did not take advantage,” said Mathus of Darien, a New York City-based attorney.

Democrat Ned Lamont defeated Madison businessman Bob Stefanowski, the Republican nominee, by about 45,000 votes.

The GOP lost 13 seats in the state House and five in the state Senate last fall. It has regained a seat in each chamber in special elections that have been held since then.

Mathus, who grew up in Salisbury, said Democratic candidates have been winning in areas, such as the Northwest Corner, and the Fairfield County Gold Coast, where he now lives, that had been traditional Republican strongholds.

“The towns in the Northwest Corner are important, but there isn’t a lot of population there,” explained. “Losing in Wilton and Greenwich, that’s a bigger concern.”

Rose has said that Republicans were hurt in 2018 by President Donald Trump’s unpopularity in Connecticut.

“It’s possible clearly in some areas he probably had an impact,” said Mathus. “That’s true with any national politician.”

Mathus faces incumbent two-term Chairman J.R. Romano of Branford and former state GOP chair Dick Foley of Danbury in the campaign to annex support from a majority of the 74 Republican State Central Committee members, who on June 25 will elected a chairman for a two-year term.

He’s been a delegate and alternate at some recent national and state conventions, but his principal calling card is serving as president of a historic building near Park Avenue in Manhattan.

Mathus called the Union League Club “one of the premier forums in New York City.”

The private social club bills itself as “a sanctuary from urban life.” It has overnight rooms and hosts banquets and weddings. Former presidents Herbert Hoover and Ulysses S. Grant were members, and currently former President George W. Bush, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of Kent, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor and former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft are honorary members.

Mathus said during his tenure from 2011-2015 in leadership positions they completed “the most significant facility improvements in 80 years.”

He said that he helped lead the Union League Club’s “resurgence.”

“Some of the most talented people in the membership I brought into the leadership formally or informally,” added Mathus, who was the president of the club from 2013 to 2015. “I’m good at recruiting, planning and executing.”

He said as Republican state chairman he also would be able to effectively utilize skills from his 35 years as an attorney.

“My legal career has been one with very complex and very large projects and financings,” he said, noting that, among other things, he helped start two technology companies.

He will probably need all of those skills to revitalize a party that hasn’t won a U.S. Senate race since 1982, a gubernatorial or U.S. House race since 2006 and has not controlled both chambers of the Legislature simultaneously since early 1987. The last time a GOP candidate captured a seat on the state under-ticket was 1994 when Chris Burnham was elected as state treasurer.

Whomever is elected will face the challenge of building an organization similar to the Democrat’s Fight Back CT, which was organized by U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Cheshire) and embarked on an extensive canvassing campaign that resulted in one million phone calls and 250,000 home visits.

“Senator Murphy upped the game quite a bit,” Mathus exclaimed.

“I don’t think that our state party organization is strong,” he added. “We need a better ground game.”

As of mid-April, Romano did not have any announced the challengers and the conventional wisdom he might cruise to a third term since no one had surfaced in the months immediately after the Republicans were trounced at the polls.

Mathus said his interest in the chairmanship grew from meetings in February that were organized by Dave Kelsey, the Republican Town Committee Chairman in Old Lyme and the founding principal of Hamilton Point Investments, a real estate company based in Old Lyme.

Romano, a longtime political consultant, told Brookfield Patch in March that he has held dozens of training seminars for Republican town committees across the state on how to effectively utilize technology and campaign year round.

Mathus said the people at the meetings spoke to Republicans across Connecticut in March and then he formally launched his bid in April and has been posting Internet ads and speaking with GOP town committees regularly since then.

He said he believes the May 14 election of the 74 state central committee members was “very beneficial for us since there was an unusual degree of turnover. Most of the turnover, we think, was in our favor.”

Romano said in a May 22 phone interview that he is “very optimistic” about garnering a third term.

Mathus said if he wins, he plans to initially be a part-time chairman and hire a full-time executive director. He said that might change by next year if he believes he needs to be a full-time chairman.

Regarding seeking to expand the party’s base through opening Republican primaries to unaffiliated voters, he said, “My initial reaction is to have it for just Republicans. But we can’t write off” opening the primaries to unaffiliated voters.

“We need to get them if we’re going to win,” Mathus added.

He said he supports the concept of having a run-off vote after the primary, noting, for example, that Madison businessman Bob Stefanowski won with only 29 percent of the vote last August. He lost by about 45,000 votes to Lamont in the November election.

“There was no process to coalesce a majority of Republicans behind one candidate,” Mathus said regarding the lack of a run-off system in which the two top vote-getters in the primary would then face each other to determine the party’s nominee.

Romano has called for holding the primary in March, if possible, and then conduct the run-off in May.

Mathus said he would prefer determining the party’s nominees earlier, but didn’t want to “be pinned down to a specific date yet.”

Romano has said that, if possible, he wants to abolish the convention, which would save about $80,000 that could instead be used for advertising and party-building.

He said he has spoken with state Rep. Art O’Neill (R-69) of Southbury, who has been the party’s point person in the General Assembly on the issue, and if he is elected to a third term, Romano wants to discuss with the state Central Committee members the possibility of a federal lawsuit to give Connecticut Republicans the option of not holding a convention in some years.

Under the current state statutes it is required that a convention be held.

Romano said in the recent phone interview that the party might want to hold conventions in some instances if there is an incumbent who likely would not face competition in a primary.

Mathus said it is “one of the things that we need to review” since, among other things, many of the major nominations are being determined three months later in a primary.

“There are divergent views on” the convention, he said.

“There is a lot of concern in our party on how the convention went off this last cycle,” Mathus said, since Stefanowski didn’t participate and instead collected petitions to get on the primary ballot after he had launched an ambitious television advertising campaign months earlier.

“It continues to irk some people,” he said. “There are some raw feelings. It hasn’t been a smooth process where everybody is happy with the convention.”

On another topic, Mathus said the party also needs to re-engage its donor base.

“A lot of money is sent out from Connecticut donors to other parts of the country,” he said.

On the 2020 presidential campaign, Mathus said he expects that Trump will be the Republican nominee and the national economy, which by some measures is the most robust in 50 years, will continue to be strong.

“His style is not the one that everyone prefers in a president,” he said. “However, they elected a big New York City real estate developer and brand developer to change things.”

Mathus said he has deep admiration for such Republicans as former presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and former Secretary of State James Baker.

He added, “I’m a big fan of George Herbert Walker Bush,” who grew up in Greenwich.

Mathus declared that H.W. Bush stopped Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, didn’t “grandstand” after the Berlin Wall fell and bought the country out of a recession following Black Monday near the end of Reagan’s tenure and the Savings & Loan crisis during his first year in office.

He said, “He probably is the greatest one-term president in history.”