And They Shouldn't Get Away With It

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Senator Bob Duff and Senate President Martin Looney put out a statement last week that reads like it was written by someone who needs the spotlight anywhere but on their own record. They called Jadon MacCormack’s nomination proof of a “deeper problem” in the Republican Party. They said it shows Republicans are attracting people with “views that have no place in a pluralistic democratic society.” They questioned how local delegates could have picked him without knowing his public positions, including his biography of that extreme pastor Steven Anderson.

They’re lying. Not about what the 23-year-old said — that part is ugly enough on its own. They’re lying about what it means for the rest of us.

I had Jadon MacCormack on this program. When the questions turned to his social media posts and that noose image, he didn’t flinch. He told listeners he wants the government to restore the death penalty for sodomites. He called them perverts destroying society. He said Connecticut used to do it back in colonial days and it was “very, very Christian.” When a caller pointed out how that kind of talk lands with Black folks who remember real lynchings, he answered he’s “race-inclusive” — the death penalty for anyone who engages in same-sex relations, simple as that. He doubled down on wanting “harder legislation against the sodomites” and said rejection of his views was a “badge of honor.”

That’s his position. It’s fringe. It’s a young man taking Old Testament capital punishment for private sin and trying to paste it onto a constitutional republic in 2026. Most Republicans don’t believe that. Most Christians who actually read the New Testament don’t believe the state should be executing people for bedroom behavior. And that’s exactly why Connecticut Republican leaders and local activists are out right now gathering signatures to put a primary challenger on the ballot against him for the August primary. They’re not circling the wagons. They’re trying to replace him. That’s what a party doing accountability looks like.

Duff and Looney know all of this. They saw the statements from House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora and others condemning the rhetoric. They read the Connecticut GOP’s own call for him to withdraw. But they leave all that out. They act like the entire Republican Party in this state just nominated and celebrated a theocratic extremist and moved on. That’s the lie. It’s deliberate. And it’s coming from a place of weakness.

Ned Lamont is running for a third term, and a University of New Hampshire poll already showed 44% of Connecticut voters didn’t want him to. That’s not the sign of a confident incumbent or a party that feels secure about its grip on power. When your own voters are that lukewarm about another four years, you start looking for distractions. You find one 23-year-old in a rural eastern Connecticut district whose biblical literalism went off the rails, and you try to stretch his comments over every Republican in the state like a cheap tarp.

Why? Because on the issues that actually decide elections in Connecticut — the ones that hit people in the wallet every month — their record has no leg to stand on.

Look at housing. Over half of Connecticut renters are cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income just to keep a roof over their heads. Rents have jumped sharply. The income needed to buy a typical home in the Hartford area has exploded. Housing costs in this state have risen dramatically over the last decade and a half. Families are feeling it in groceries, in Eversource bills, in property taxes that keep climbing while services don’t keep pace. Young people look at the math and head for states where the cost of living doesn’t eat their future before they even get started. Working families who stayed are stretching every paycheck thinner.

Duff’s statement tried the usual move — “Connecticut Democrats believe working people deserve a stronger hand against corporations and that affordable housing should be accessible to everyone.” It sounds good in a press release. The results after years of Democratic control tell a different story. High spending, heavy regulation, tax policies that punish success and drive out the very people who pay the bills — those are the things that make housing scarce and expensive. You don’t fix affordability by talking about it while your policies keep supply locked down and costs climbing.

That’s why they need Jadon MacCormack to be the story. If voters start focusing on why it costs so much to live here after decades of one-party rule in Hartford, the conversation gets uncomfortable fast. Better to shout about one young candidate’s extreme comments and hope nobody notices the pattern: when Democrats are nervous about their record on the kitchen-table issues, they reach for the culture-war paintbrush and try to tar the entire other side as intolerant bigots.

It’s the same play every time. They don’t have to defend why Connecticut keeps losing people and businesses. They don’t have to explain why working-class families — Black, White, Hispanic — are getting squeezed harder every year. They just need enough noise about “hate and extremism” that the real questions get drowned out.

The Connecticut Republican Party is handling MacCormack the right way — through a primary, not by pretending he doesn’t exist or by defending the indefensible. That’s how you deal with fringe voices. You don’t let one 23-year-old’s radical interpretation of Scripture define the whole party any more than you let the loudest voices on the other side define theirs.

Duff and the rest know this. They’re counting on voters not to notice the difference between one extreme candidate and the actual direction of a party that’s trying to clean it up. They’re counting on people being so focused on the outrage that they forget to ask why their own lives keep getting more expensive under the current arrangement.

Connecticut voters are smarter than that. They can spot desperation when they see it. And the louder the accusations fly about Republicans being defined by one kid’s comments, the clearer it becomes that the real nervousness isn’t about bigotry on our side. It’s about a record on affordability and results that won’t hold up under honest scrutiny.

That’s the game they’re playing. The question is whether enough people will keep falling for it.

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