Tuesday night turned into a disaster for Connecticut Democrats, who saw Republicans flip two seats in the legislature, including one shocker on solidly blue turf. That stunning result came in the 6th State Senate District, located in New Britain, where the improbably named Gennaro Bizzarro beat Democratic state Rep. Rick Lopes by a 53-47 margin, even though Hillary Clinton had carried the district 60-37 and Barack Obama 66-33.
The other GOP pickup was less surprising but still dismaying. In the 99th state House District, Republican Joe Zullo defeated Democrat Josh Balter 54-46, but this East Haven-based seat had moved sharply to the right, going from 58-41 Obama to 54-43 Trump. It was, in other words, the exact kind of turf you'd worry about defending if you were the Democrats, only it seems like the party didn't take either of these races seriously.
The problem starts at the top, with Gov. Ned Lamont deciding to raid both houses of the legislature to stock his administration: All five special elections on Tuesday—including three that Democrats mercifully won—came about because Lamont tapped Democratic incumbents to work for him.
And it yielded the exact same result that we saw earlier this month in Minnesota, where Gov. Tim Walz appointed a Democratic lawmaker in a vulnerable district to a government post; Republicans promptly picked up the seat. There's no shortage of qualified individuals who can take these jobs, so there's no reason for governors to undermine their own party by looting their legislatures.
Lamont's at the center of this mess for a whole host of other reasons, though. While his tenure is just two months old, it's been marked by non-stop disaster. Recently, Lamont gave deadly ammunition to Republicans by abruptly proposing a deeply unpopular plan to toll all motor vehicles on state highways, then left fellow Democrats adrift by failing to put forward any kind of strategy to defend his proposal.
At the same time, he's infuriated progressives by floating a tax on groceries while refusing to raise taxes on the rich and seeking to sharply reduce the estate tax. Taxes indeed seemed to be a central issue: Bizzarro called his race "a referendum on tolls and taxes," and Zullo also focused on the topic.
Fortunately, Democrats still hold wide majorities in both chambers: 91-60 in the House and 22-14 in the Senate. But that's not a reason to be complacent. Prior to the November midterms, the Senate was tied at 18 seats apiece and Democrats only controlled it thanks to the lieutenant governor's ability to break ties, while the party held just an 80-71 edge in the House. And what's more, Democrats underperformed the presidential margins across the board on Tuesday, not just in the two races they lost.
Now, turnout was low, and it's often tempting to dismiss the import of special election results as a result. But that would be a mistake. Special elections almost always feature small electorates, but as we argued repeatedly throughout the last election cycle, they nonetheless have a good deal of predictive power. In 2017 and 2018, they pointed toward a strong general election for Democrats, and that's exactly what we wound up getting. Democrats shouldn't hand-wave away these results just because they don't like them.
There are still, however, two mitigating factors. One is that we don't have a whole lot of data points so far in 2019; last cycle, we wound up with well over 100 legislative special elections from which to draw conclusions.
The other is that Connecticut itself is just plain weird when it comes to special elections: Historically, they've been terrible for Democrats no matter the national environment, but occasionally, they've been good news—even as Democrats have been getting lacerated elsewhere. We can't say why, but we do know that nationwide special election results correlate better with future election outcomes better if you simply remove Connecticut's numbers from the data.
Democrats certainly have to hope that's the case, but hope is not a plan. Avoiding unforced errors, letting legislators remain in their jobs, and working hard to win every election is a much better one.
Editor’s note: This piece has been corrected to note that Lamont’s proposed budget would sharply reduce, rather than eliminate, the estate tax.
