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State Senate Candidate Jason Guidone is running for office in Connecticut's 19th district, which encompasses the communities of Columbia, Franklin, Hebron, Lebanon, Ledyard, Lisbon, Marlborough, Montville, Norwich and Sprague.
His campaign manager, Michele May, felt the best way to reach voters was to take out an election day "ad note" in The Day, the largest daily newspaper in southeastern Connecticut, reaching an estimated 37,000 readers.
May designed the flashy red ad note—stickers featuring Guidone’s name on the front page—in an effort to drive people to his featured ad and his webpage. Approval was secured by her marketing contact at The Day nearly a month ago. The ad was paid for and fully ready to go by October 1st. The plan was for the ad to appear in the election day edition of the free weeklies delivered directly to mailboxes in the campaign’s most competitive municipalities Norwich and Ledyard.
Then May received bad news on October 28th from her advertising contact at The Day who explained the printer "just didn't print the stickers" and unfortunately Guidone's ad note would not run.
The Day subsequently said the "error" was a result of Hurricane Helene's impact on their printer, Century Printing and Packaging, located in Greer, South Carolina.
The Centinal contacted Century to get better insight into what happened.
Century provided the Centinal with a copy of a letter dated October 14th, which was emailed to customers towards the end of the day. But some customers may not have opened the email until the following morning, October 15th.
The letter explained the hurricane's impact on Century's vendors, including a "key vendor located in Western NC" described as a primary supplier of material for "Front Page Advertising labels" like the one that Guidone's campaign manager had ordered from The Day.
The vendor recently started operating again after sustaining considerable hurricane damage, and had a tremendous backlog impacting pre-storm purchase orders, including one from Century.
"As soon as we learned of these delays, we reached out to other vendors for material that meets the tight specifications required for the front page ad notes. We have placed an order with our former supplier to help offset these delays. This order, however, will not be available for several weeks," said Century in the letter to customers.
Century had no choice but to let customers know that all orders scheduled to ship between October 16 and October 25 would have to be cancelled, including Guidone's order.
The Day did not notify Guidone about the printer's cancellation notice until October 28th, a couple weeks after the date of the email Century sent to customers.
The Centinal contacted The Day to find out why it delayed informing Guidone's campaign about the order cancellation.
The advertising head, presumed to be Louvenia Brandt though she declined to provide her name, said in a very huffy voice that she had no comment, other than to say there was "no printing error."
It's important to note that on October 17th, The Day's entire editorial board, including President and Publisher Timothy Dwyer, Executive Editor Izaskun E. Larraneta, copy editor Owen Poole, and retired deputy managing editor Lisa McGinley, endorsed Guidone's opponent, Cathy Osten.
Osten is cross-endorsed by both the Independent Party, which required candidates to take a pledge to reject "the actions on January 6th" and the Working Families Party, which asked candidates to support defunding the police, letting illegal immigrants vote in local elections, expanding Husky to 117,000+ illegal immigrants living in the state, and a host of other radical, left-wing policies.
The Day's endorsement lauded Osten's "record as a pro-worker, pro-small business senator" and alleged she played a "major role in improving the state’s fiscal health"... which is rather ironic considering the state was just named "The Biggest Sinkhole State In The Nation" in the Financial State Of The States report for 2024.
The editorial team goes on to attack Guidone over his alignment with Trump. They attack him for wanting to depoliticize schools and focus on academics instead of woke gender ideology. They attack him for wanting to protect America citizens first instead of illegal immigrants. They argue that Osten should not be replaced "certainly not with the alternative offered" in reference to Guidone.
After the editorial board endorsed Osten, The Day waited another 11 days before it notified Guidone's campaign about the cancelled order, in what appears to be a brazen act of election interference.
Guidone's campaign manager said The Day scrambled late yesterday afternoon and this morning to offer some alternative options for an ad, but May said the campaign already had purchased digital and print ads from the paper. The whole point of the election day ad note was to reach newspaper subscribers in key areas for Guidone's campaign.
But now that The Day appears to have sat on the unfortunate news from its printer, May says she's missed a critical window of opportunity to reach voters at their mailboxes on election day, and noted that The Day's actions were inexcusable.
Had The Day informed May about the issues experienced by the printer as soon as it found out on October 14th or 15th, she could have likely found another printer.
She also could have run a mailer as an alternative, which would have been four times more expensive, but it's too late for that now.
"The Day took an important element of our campaign away from us and blocked us from reaching key areas of the district," laments May. "It's hard to think of this as anything but election interference."
