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Weston’s First Selectwoman and Democrat nominee for State Senate District 26, Sam Nestor, showed up to the Wilton Pumpkin Festival this week dressed as a Handmaid from The Handmaid’s Tale.
Standing alongside State Sen. Ceci Maher and State Rep. Savet Constantine, Nestor donned a red robe and white bonnet as she urged voters to “refuse to live in a real-life Handmaid’s Tale,” vote Democrat, and bring their crew to the polls.
Because nothing says “protect our rights” better than cosplaying dystopian theocracy while handing out Halloween candy in-between the bounce houses and the cider donuts.
It’s hard to decide what’s more remarkable: the costume, or the fact that she treated it as a serious get-out-the-vote tactic in one of the wealthiest corners of Connecticut.
Nestor's district covers Weston, Westport, Wilton, and parts of Ridgefield, New Canaan, Darien, and Stamford—places where people are usually more worried about property taxes, energy costs, and whether their kid’s school library is stocked with explicit graphic novels than they are about the imminent arrival of Gilead, the fictional theocratic regime in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale where women are stripped of rights and forced into reproductive servitude.
Yet here was the candidate, channeling her very best June Osborne under the autumn trees, while her caption warned that Gilead “belongs on TV, not on the ballot.” She might have also added that the graphic novel version of the book appears in school libraries in her district, including Darien, Stamford and Westport, especially since she's running on “Sam’s Banned Book Club” as part of her campaign platform.
As the Centinal reported earlier this month, Nestor's book club selections have included titles with LGBTQ themes, a novel framed around gun violence and white supremacy, and The Cardboard Kingdom, a graphic novel that has drawn challenges elsewhere for its portrayal of gender-nonconforming children. The campaign’s own framing—“Books are always more fun when someone tries to ban them”—treats parental and community objections as the problem, not the controversial content.
Of course that is to be expected since Nestor made it clear she is carrying forward the agenda of outgoing Senator Ceci Maher, who helped pass Connecticut’s Freedom to Read provisions that make it harder for parents to challenge library materials.
The Handmaid’s costume is the logical endpoint of Nestor's approach: maximalist symbolism over actual substance. In a state where parents have raised concerns about explicit sexual content, gender ideology in schools, and the erosion of single-sex spaces and sports, the response from her campaign is not engagement with those concerns. It is a red robe and a pumpkin-festival photo op that equates any pushback with theocratic oppression. Meanwhile, actual issues in the district—affordability, infrastructure, school budgets, and what children are exposed to in public institutions—get less theatrical treatment.
Nestor, who has signaled her alliance with the “No Kings” network—the same network DataRepublican has linked to a color revolution against the Trump administration, faces Republican and Independent candidate Alma Sarelli on November 3.
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