2014 Connecticut Governor's race

Politics & Elections
1

A few weeks ago, Daily KOS had a story about a press conference that GOP candidate Tom Foley had called at a recently-closed paper plant and how it quickly turned into a PR debacle for the candidate. I found the accompanying 30 minute video highly entertaining.

A week or so later, they had a follow-up story that highlighted the fact that Mr. Foley appears to have made some less-than-true assertions about his own history of business deals and corporate raiding.

So, when I was watching the video from his disastrous press conference, I couldn’t help but think “this guy’s just lost himself the election” and I doubled down on that when he called all government workers lazy or stupid or whatever it was.

But, I see that nearly all polls show him with a substantial lead over incumbent Dannel Malloy, some as much as 7%. Cite.

So what’s the deal in Connecticut? Why is Foley showing such a lead in the first place, and how did he survive the clear idiocy of that press conference?

2

Connecticut has become a blue state in the 21st century, but it still has large pockets of conservative voters. Although the population is dense along the Long Island shore, that includes mostly suburbs, which have traditionally been Republican strongholds. And the rest of the state outside that strip is heavily farm and rural, which also tend Republican.

A big wedge issue in the state since the gun massacre at Newtown is gun control. Foley is pushing heavily on opposition to the governor’s gun control bill. Foley only lost to Murray by a fraction of a percent in 2010, and the previous two governors were Republican. A single issue candidate can pull in new voters without caring that people who weren’t going to vote for him still won’t.

3

I lived in CT until last year, and these same two candidates ran in the last election, so I like to think that I have a pretty good handle on the race even though I’m a bit removed now. The TL:DR version? Tom Foley is a giant tool-bag, but Dannel Malloy is a giant tool-bag who has been governor the past several years in one of the states that has recovered slowest from the recession by a number of measures. Not to mention how poorly the economy has fared compared to Massachusetts and New York, the two states that CT always likes to compare itself to.

(Rhode Island has been crappy, but they don’t count; in fact, as far as most of CT could care, the state ends a few miles east of the Connecticut River, and then there’s fifty or sixty miles of emptiness until you hit the southeast part of Mass.)

CT has always had a significant block of fiscally conservative, socially liberal voters. This has resulted in a lot of democratic votes for national-level politicians, as the tea party stuff doesn’t really play at all except for the most rural parts in the east and northwest. For state politicians, there’s a long tradition (much like in Mass) of voting for the occasional Republican governor, and the state has been served very well by split government at times. The best example in my lifetime was John Rowland: a corrupt ass in the end, but a remarkably successful decade as governor by most measures. Budget surpluses, progress in education and health care, re-elected with huge majorities. We’d be talking about him as a Republican presidential candidate right about now if, you know, he wasn’t forced to resign and spend ten months in federal prison. In retrospect he is and likely always was a terrible human being, but most of CT would love to get into that same sort of situation with a highly effective Republican governor working with the highly Democratic state legislature to compromise and have the state prosper.

… of course, a lot has changed over the last decade, and from everything I’ve seen, Tom Foley is no John Rowland. Well, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he’s corrupt as hell, but I also think he’s probably a lot better at covering that sort of thing up. I just don’t think that Foley would be at all effective as a governor. He’s a pretty typical cut taxes, cut government, big business Republican (which plays well to the same groups in CT as it does nationally, the wealthy in Fairfield County and rural whites). He’s exactly as socially liberal as he has to be in CT (“wouldn’t change the gay marriage law but personally against it”; “not against all gun control but supports the second amendment”). His absolute best talking point, and the reason he’s probably going to win is that he isn’t Dan Malloy. Malloy hasn’t been a total train wreck, but even his supporters would agree that things have gone more poorly for the state during his term than under either of the Republican governors that preceded him. He wasn’t dealt the greatest hand, but he’s made many of the mistakes and overreaches that you think about as a worst-case scenario for a governor with a big congressional majority in his own party. He’s not a top notch politician, his results as a governor have been below what most hoped for, and as much as I’m against Foley it’s hard to get really passionate about a second Malloy term.

4

Thank you both for clarifying what’s going on in CT. I apologize for not thanking you both sooner.

I’m now doing my best to watch this race fromn afar as it goes into the home stretch. From here, it doesn’t look like much if anything has changed as far as the race goes, although I understand the debate was, ah, entertaining.