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In any statewide contest between Republicans and Democrats in Connecticut, the Republican Party would face, many have argued, odds that cannot easily be overcome.
Current numbers stand against Republicans, Registered Democrats in Connecticut outnumber Republicans by a two-to-one majority.
Voters unaffiliated with either of Connecticut’s two major parties outnumber registered Democrats in Connecticut by a slight majority, and Democrats have for decades held major cities in Connecticut, the holy grail of power politics in the state.
None of these fortifications are impregnable. To believe they are part of the permanent patrimony of the State Democrat Party is to yield to political despair and affirm the political superiority of hegemonic governance over that of a representative republic.
The enfeeblement of the state Republican Party begins with the political ascendancy of Senator Lowell Weicker. When Senator Weicker’s congressional ascendancy ended in 1989, he had long established himself as the premier “moderate” Republican senator in the US Senate. Weicker had provided to other Republicans a winning campaign template. Other Connecticut Republicans running for state office had only to repeat in their own campaigns Weicker’s winning formula – run for office on the Republican line and govern as a Democrat – to gain a step on state majority Democrats.
Someone should take over the state Republican Party, Weicker told his Major Domo Tom D’Amore, who was appointed Chairman of the state Republican Party at Weicker’s urging.
Weicker’s ascendancy in the US Senate came to an end when Democrats -- and Republicans who could not fail to notice that Weicker’s far left Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating during his last year in office was about 20 points higher than that of liberal Democrat US Senator Chris Dodd – combined to elect to the US Senate then state Attorney General Joe Lieberman in Weicker’s place.
Weicker later ran for Connecticut governor on a third-party ticket and won office. His first major act as governor was to muscle through Connecticut’s largely Democrat General Assembly a state income tax that had in the past been successfully opposed by seminal Democrats such as former Governor Ella Grasso. One of Grasso’s biographers, current Democrat Lieutenant Governor Susan Bysiewicz, tells us that Grasso’s fervent opposition to an income tax was a mar on an otherwise exemplary record. Grasso, a notorious penny pincher, thought an income tax would raise the ceiling on state spending to penurious levels, and the state’s long-term debt is unimpeachable evidence of her political foresight.
An October 23, 2025, report by the Reason Foundation tells us, “Connecticut had the highest per capita long-term debt in the nation, at $23,934 per resident. New Jersey was just behind, with $21,197 in long-term debt per capita.”
Most commentators in Connecticut still regard Weicker as a so-called “moderate” Republican. Having gifted neo-progressives within the state’s hegemonic Democrat Party with their long-desired income tax as a one-term governor, the title of “moderate Republican” is in Weicker’s case ill-fitting. The senator who used the state Republican Party as a foil to garner votes among Democrats and frequent bursts of applause among the state’s left of center media was, not even by his own reckoning, a moderate. He titled his own autobiography, written in large part by someone else, Maverick. The book was entertainingly reviewed by then Managing Editor and Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell under the title “Mr. Bluster Saves The World.”
Though he was rejected by his party as a leftist, Weicker – who in his brash political manners bears an eerie resemblance to President Donald Trump – continues to be regarded by Connecticut’s left of center media as a political template for the state Republican Party. Only Republicans who are “mavericks” with respect to a conservative Republican Party and are willing to accommodate the majority Democrat Party on important issues, so it is thought, can win elections in Connecticut.
Although all Republican Delegates to Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional Delegation have been replaced by left-of-center Democrats, many Republicans in the state, as well as political influencers in the media continue to insist that the key to Republican election victories is to offer up for election Republican candidates who are, as they sometimes put it, fiscal conservatives and social liberals, such as former U.S. Representative Chris Shays, the last Republican U.S. Congressperson in Connecticut.
During the current election process, Governor Ned Lamont, who has taken care to present himself to voters as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, will face in a possible Democrat primary contest no challenger on the right – because there is no moderating right wing to the Democrat political juggernaut in Connecticut. The forward movement within the Democrat Party in the northeast corridor and California is propelled by leftists such as Mayor elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani, a boastful socialist.
Neo-progressivism and socialism always have and always will overpromise and under-deliver because both operate in a free-market system that convincingly answers this important question: Who decides what must be done?
In a political hegemony in which all important political, economic and cultural questions are decided by a single party, the ruling single party displaces cultural prerequisites and true democratic opposition to a unitary, costly, inefficient and unobstructed government. The only thing worse than a two-party system is an autocratic one-party system that dispenses – because it can do so – with the niceties of republican governance.
When Ben Franklin, emerging from the Constitutional Convention, answered a question put by a woman – “Sir, what have you given us? – by saying “A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” he likely had in mind the fragility of representative republics, always prey to strongman politics. There is always a Caesar waiting in the wings to rescue the people from their awesome political responsibilities as citizens in a free state.
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