Forgive the slang, but this ain’t Ohio.
We don’t need Sunday morning insights and analysis from talking heads and politicos to tell us that Connecticut is not exactly a battleground state.
According to a Sept. 28 poll from Real Clear Politics, Barack Obama has a 16 percent lead over John McCain in Connecticut.
So, unless something completely unexpected happens, the Nutmeg State will cast its seven electoral votes for Obama, and we’ll be colored blue on the election night map.
The last time the Republicans won Connecticut was in 1988, so if the state appears to be in the Dems’ column, what about the region?
Perhaps no bordering towns in southeastern Connecticut are as drastically different as Waterford and New London. The former is an ex-farming community with suburban malls and cookie-cutter housing developments. The latter is a small New England town that fancies itself a city and has all the challenges of an urban setting, complete with a small tax base and little to no room for expansion. So, it’s not surprising that Waterford and New London don’t exactly vote the same way all the time.
Although both of the towns have voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 1992, Waterford tends to be more of a bellwether for how the state, and sometimes the nation, leans. New London, on the other hand, has not voted for a Republican for president, the Senate, or the House in at least two generations.
“Waterford votes like a typical New England suburb,” John Sheehan, a member of the Waterford Board of Finance and a regular blogger on Connecticut Local Politics, said. “New London votes like a city.”
Jane Glover, a former New London city councilor and director of the Kente Cultural Center, said the towns have something of a symbiotic relationship, as many families have moved back and forth between the two towns.
New London is the hub of Democratic politics in the region, as the party has held near dynastic control of the city since the end of World War II.
“Just look at the ethnic makeup of the city,” Glover said. “Earlier it was the Irish and the Italians who voted for Democrats, then later the black vote.”
Glover also said New London has a working-class identity, but then again, Sheehan claims the same for Waterford, sort of.
“It’s a blue-collar town, with pockets of high-end residents,” he said. “Most of the people that live here work in the place where most of the region works—the casinos, Millstone.”
But Waterford tends to be more independent minded than its neighbor to the east.
“Waterford is mostly unaffiliated voters,” Sheehan said. “They don’t always go by party.”
True to form, locally, Waterford has a Republican first selectman, Dan Steward, while the Democrats hold one-vote majorities on the Board of Finance and the Board of Education. The Representative Town Meeting, however, has a Democratic majority, 14-8. Out of the 14 electable seats in New London, the GOP controls only three of them.
New London’s leading GOP figure, Councilor Rob Pero, is hardly surprised at Democratic dominance in the city.
“Add to that the colleges, who tend to vote for the Democrats,” he said.
Pero, however, does not rule out GOP victories in New London in the future, though he said it would take an issue voters would rally around.
“Look at what happened after the [Fort Trumbull decision],” he said. “The Democrats were 20 votes away from losing their majority on the City Council.”
Unlike New London, Sheehan said Waterford has a reputation for ticket splitting, or voting for a president of one party, while voting for a senator or representative in another.
Glover thinks New London is becoming more of a haven for independent voters.
“If you look at the number of young, creative people moving here, they don’t usually join political parties,” she said.
Waterford and New London had their greatest separation in which candidate they backed in the 1980s.
In the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan won every electoral vote in the country except Walter Mondale’s home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.
Waterford voters went with Reagan by nearly 1,300 votes, while they voted to send liberal Democrat Sam Gejdenson back to Congress for a third term over the GOP’s Roberta Koontz. And it seems the Waterford Democrats that year, were not exactly sold on Mondale, as Colorado Sen. Gary Hart won the town in the primary.
In 1984, New Londoners were not sold on the Reagan Revolution, as Mondale won by close to 500 votes and Gejdenson lapped Koontz 6,334 to 3,517.
Four years later, the two towns also differed on the presidential ballot, as George H.W. Bush eked by in Waterford by 400 votes, while Michael Dukakis trounced his GOP rival by 2,000 votes in New London.
The year 1988 was also a seminal one in Connecticut politics, as the state’s liberal Republican Sen. Lowell Weicker was denied a fourth term by Joe Lieberman.
Waterford, however, went with the status quo, while New London voted enthusiastically for Lieberman by more than 600 votes.
And both of the towns endorsed Gejdenson by wide margins.
New London has been lockstep with the Democratic candidates, while Waterford went for Edward Munster in 1992, while voting for Bill Clinton for president.
In 1996, Waterford fell to Gejdenson by six votes, setting the stage for Rob Simmons’ capture of the town in 2000. Simmons, in fact, never lost Waterford in his four election bids, though his margin of victory in 2006 was just 84 votes.
This year, Sheehan and Glover think Obama will take each of their towns. Sheehan sees Waterford falling in line with most of New England, save New Hampshire.
Glover sees Obama winning New London, especially since the addition of vice presidential candidate Joe Biden.
“That’s helped Obama,” she said.
In 26 days, we’ll know for sure.