CT Governor’s Race 2018: Meet All The Candidates

Registered Republicans and Democrats in Connecticut will go to the polls Aug. 14 to choose nominees for governor and other statewide offices. The last day to register online to vote is Aug. 9 and in-person is Aug. 13. Absentee ballots will be available July 24 onward.

Ned Lamont was chosen as the Democratic Party’s candidate for governor at the state’s Democratic Convention. He is being challenged by Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim in the primary. The two support many of the same issues, but come from very different backgrounds.

The Republican GOP governor primary features a crowded ballot with five candidates. Longtime Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton was selected by delegates as the party’s nominee. Three candidates, Bob Stefanowski Steve Obsitnik and David Stemerman are Fairfield County businessmen who are political newcomers.

Former Trumbull First Selectman Tim Herbst has been an elected official since 19-years-old and was elected first selectman at 29-years-old. (To sign up for free, local breaking news alerts from more than 100 Connecticut communities, click here.)

Ned Lamont

Ned Lamont served as a one-term Greenwich selectman before his 2006 bid for U.S. Senate where he beat incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary.

Lieberman came back to challenge Lamont as an independent candidate and ultimately kept his seat.

Lamont first tried to run for governor in 2010, but lost to now-Gov. Dannel Malloy in the Democratic primary.

His business background is in the telecom industry where he started his own company Lamont Digital Systems. The company’s Campus Televideo provides cable television solutions to more than 220 colleges across the country. The division was sold in 2015.

Lamont supports paid family and medical leave, a $15 minimum wage and strong labor rights. He also wants a Medicaid buy-in option that would allow younger participants to join.

He wants to make the first two years of public college or university free for residents who commit to living and working in Connecticut after they graduate.

Lamont would push for legalized recreational marijuana. Taxes from sale and regulation could be used to fund opioid treatments.

Lamont would push to make Connecticut’s Education Cost Sharing formula more transparent and based on a community’s need.

Lamont has come out in favor of electronic tolling of heavy trucks.

He also believes that air service should be expanded at Bradley, Tweed and Sikorsky airports.
Upgrades to the New Haven Metro North line could bring a trip from New Haven to New York down to one hour and 15 minutes. He also wants to invest in high speed rail that would bring the commute to an hour.

To tackle the opioid addiction crisis Lamont wants to increase the number of practitioners who can prescribe buprenorphine for addiction treatment and increase funding for proven addiction treatment. Lamont also wants insurers to cover the entire cost of the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone.

He also wants to cap out of pocket drug prices at $275 per month for consumers.

Joe Ganim

Ganim served as Bridgeport’s mayor from 1991 to 2003. He was convicted on 16 federal corruption counts for accepting gifts from contractors that did business with the city. He served seven years in federal prison and was re-elected mayor in 2015.

During his run for governor he hasn’t shied away from talking about his conviction and said he regrets the mistakes he has made. One of his focuses as governor would be on criminal justice reform that emphasizes job training over punitive incarceration.

Ganim supports legalizing and regulating recreational marijuana in Connecticut.He also supports a $15 minimum wage and paid family medical leave.

Ganim also wants to invest in state infrastructure and defend collective bargaining rights.

Republicans

Tim Herbst

Herbst is the former first selectman of Trumbull and was elected to the position at 29-years-old in 2009. He was first elected to public office at 19-years-old as a Trumbull Planning and Zoning Commission member.

He is running as a Hartford outsider who promises to get tough on insiders and institute wide-ranging reforms.

He wants to reinstate the death penalty and eliminate the Risk Reduction Earned Credit program that allows prisoners to get out early for good behavior.

Herbst said he would refuse a state pension as governor and move all agency heads and political appointees to a 401k-style plan instead of a pension plan. He also wants to end pensions for General Assembly members.

On his campaign website he highlights that Trumbull schools are consistently ranked among the state’s best. His time in Trumbull wasn’t without controversy. The town settled several lawsuits against Herbst, including a $25,000 settlement after his brother-in-law sued him. He said the lawsuit was settled due to an insurance carrier decision in order to mitigate litigation costs.

He would eliminate income tax for anyone making $75,000 or less, eliminate business entity tax and cut corporate rates. Abolish estate tax and taxes on social security and retirement income.

Herbst was awarded an “AQ” rating by the NRA, which is the highest rating possible for a non-incumbent. He recently made an appearance on Fox News to criticize Haddam Selectwoman Melissa Schlag who took a knee during the pledge of allegiance for the Board of Selectmen.

Mark Boughton

Longtime Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton was selected as the Republican Party’s nominee at the convention.

He is in his eighth term as mayor. He was a social studies teacher at Danbury High School and was elected as a state representative for three years.

Boughton often engages with residents via Twitter where he has more than 37,000 followers.

Boughton said he plans to reduce income tax rates across the board and repeal the estate tax. He wants to end the income tax in 10 years, something critics say is near impossible as it currently makes up more than $10 billion of the roughly $18 billion general fund.

He is advocating to finish the I-84 Mixmaster replacement in Waterbury which could cost $12 billion and the I-84 Viaduct Hartford project that could cost between five and eight billion dollars.

He is against a proposal to widen I-95 between Greenwich and Rhode Island and instead believes spot widening near on-ramps and merge lanes would help at a fraction of the cost. His stance on project prioritization recently came under fire from Gov. Dannel Malloy, a former mayor of Stamford on the I-95 corridor.

He wants to privatize some functions of the state Department of Transportation, including cleaning of rest areas on highways.

Boughton would use his authority as governor to prohibit parole until an inmate has served 95 percent of his or her sentence instead of the current 85 percent. He also wants to ban parole for convicted rapists and certain first-degree assault charges.

He also wants to block a loophole that allows drug dealers to plead guilty to a lesser misdemeanor charge for possession. Boughton wants to keep the misdemeanor level charge for drug users, but prohibit drug dealers from pleading down.

Steve Obsitnik

Obsitnik grew up in Connecticut, served in the U.S. Navy and has been the CEO of several technology companies.

He wants to overhaul state regulations and impose a regulation freeze while making the government smaller and more efficient, according to his campaign bio.

Obsitnik would put all new state employees on a 401k-style plan and have state employees pay more toward health care costs. He also wants to adopt some legislative Republican ideas.

Obsitnik wants to eliminate taxes on social security and pensions and reduce taxes for the middle class and look to phase out certain business taxes. He also wants to eliminate the real estate conveyance tax and other “nuisance” taxes that don’t bring in a lot of revenue, but annoy people.

He also wants to eliminate tax deals for specific companies and instead use the funds to reduce taxes for businesses across the board.

Obsitnik said he plans to create “Career Corridors” similar to how cities like Boston attract students to world-class universities and then keep them in-state with good career opportunities.

David Stemerman

Fairfield County businessman is a Harvard Law School graduate who started Conatus Capital in 2008. He closed the fund in 2017 when he began exploring his gubernatorial run, according to Bloomberg. The fund managed $1.6 billion.

Stemerman and fellow GOP candidate Bob Stefanowski have being going back and forth with attack ads about both their affiliation with the Democratic Party in the past. The two candidates have been trying to differentiate from the other as both are newcomers to seeking public office and are Fairfield County businessmen.

Stemerman donated $2,300 to President Barack Obama in 2007 and was a registered Democrat in New York from 1996 to 2003. He has however made more than $40,000 in donations to Republicans.

He argues that Connecticut’s single-party rule in the state legislature is caused by the state employee labor union. He wants to see state employee pay and benefits come in line with private sector benchmarks and eliminate collective bargaining for benefits.

Stemmerman wants to bring income tax to zero percent for lowest bracket and five percent for the highest with three brackets overall.

Stemerman aims to trim at least $1 billion from the state’s budget through increasing government efficiency.

He wants a private-public partnership on transportation infrastructure with the aim of reducing train times to 60 minutes from New Haven to New York City instead of the current 110 minutes.

Like some other Republican candidates he wants to eliminate special tax breaks that are given to specific companies.

He also wants to privatize mental health and developmentally disabled care for cost savings.

Bob Stefanowski

Stefanowski was most recently the CEO of DFC Global Corp. in London and Philadelphia. Prior to that he worked at several other businesses including a division chief executive officer position at General Electric from 1994 to 2007.

Stefanowski has been attacked by fellow candidate David Stemerman for his time at DFC Global, which offered payday loans, according to the Hartford Courant. Stefanowski said he was hired to clean up the company and fired 20 of the top 30 executives. He also hasn’t voted for more than a decade, something he attributes to being overseas most of the time.

Stefanowski was briefly a Democrat for eight months and switched last July to the Republican party, according to the Courant. He asserted that other prominent Republicans including President Donald Trump were at one time Democrats.

Stefanowski plans to phase out the corporate income tax and business entity tax over two years and the state income tax over eight years. He would also work to eliminate the gift and estate taxes.

He argues the gift and estate taxes drive people to other tax-free states and Connecticut is the only state that has both taxes. About $6 billion of adjusted gross income has left Connecticut for Florida.

They only raise about one percent of the state’s revenues, but are a drag on the state’s economy.

Stefanowski said he wants to contract out certain government services including the DMV and implement zero-based budgeting that would start Connecticut’s budget off with a blank piece of paper and add in only necessary services.

Stefanowski also wants to impose a 10-year term limit for state legislators and an 8-year term for governor along with the ability for voters to recall elected state officials.

He also wants to give voters referendum powers.

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