Ned Lamont is a WASP’s WASP. It’s the sort of thing that shouldn’t matter but, in certain parts of Connecticut, still does: For more than a few Nutmeggers I know, Lamont’s Exeter-Harvard-J.P. Morgan pedigree telegraphs an unappealing entitlement. It fueled the failed insurgency of his longshot primary challenger, ex-con and mayor of Bridgeport Joe Ganim, who saw an opening for a man-of-the-people candidacy and won himself a Bridgeport-sized slice of last week’s primary voters. And it made perennial self-funder Lamont’s loss to hawkish Senator Joe Lieberman in a heated general election 12 years ago all the sweeter. Lamont, a Democrat, won the party’s primary that year only to lose three months later to long-serving Lieberman, who ran as an independent instead and won. Then, Lamont ran for governor in 2010’s Democratic primary, and without Iraq war opposition to galvanize a liberal base, lost to Dannel Malloy.
But now, in a year when the Republican Governors Association actually expects Hartford to flip, Lamont has defeated a thin field of primary candidates willing to run on Malloy’s record—of successive tax hikes that crippled Connecticut in the wake of the recession and drove a diaspora to neighboring states, tax havens by comparison. Earlier this year, he stole the title of least popular governor from Chris Christie.
Even though Lamont wants not to be seen as a second coming of Malloy, he doesn’t promise to govern too differently. He pledges to raise taxes on the wealthy—a message that the state may not welcome, said Yankee Institute fellow Suzanne Bates. “Will a tax increase message at all resonate with a population that doesn’t trust you’ll raise taxes on just the wealthy?” she doubts, adding that anything less than a doubling of wealthy people’s taxes would fall short of filling the budget deficit.
And he has made Malloy-esque promises to labor. “Keeping those promises will be tricky for him,” Bates adds—keeping them without repeating Malloy’s mistakes, that is. “In 2011, when everyone else was slashing budgets, Malloy raised taxed instead. And I think that was why. Here we are in boom times, and Connecticut still has this terrible deficit.”
Lamont’s 2018 slogan and theme song, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” belies the unearned optimism a perennial candidate and adult born to profound privilege needs to keep himself motivated. Believin’ may not be enough. This November, the state has a chance that they may very well take to hand him another general election loss: 70 percent don’t like the direction the country’s headed.
It’s an election of existential import to the state. Corporate tax payers—prominent Connecticut-based businesses—and wealthy families have fled in a costly exodus. The latest IRS data showed that after the 2015 tax increases, a great deal of wealth left the state. The 2015 tax increase was smaller than Malloy’s first, in 2011, but it was for many the final straw. Departures like that of G.E. and Aetna smacked of doom. The blows keep coming. Just Tuesday, Edible Arrangements—a homegrown Connecticut business, a sentimental success story—moved their headquarters to Georgia.
The answer for Lamont will involve deepening public sector union pension debt and increasing public entitlements to attract residents who’ll take more from the pot than they’ll add. The math, Republicans rebut, doesn’t work. Their gubernatorial nominee, as of last week, is Bob Stefanowski: Another self-funder, he’s a banker and former G.E. executive but from a coastal town to the east of New Haven, which in a small state without centralized counties feels very far indeed from the world of Greenwich. Stefanowski, 55, won Trump’s endorsement without voting for him. He hasn’t voted in years—but he knows what a winnowing, tax-burdened populace wants to hear from a candidate: He promises to kill the income tax within eight years, touting a Laffer-esque supply-side tax plan. Stefanowski, at an August 6 debate on the campus of his alma mater Fairfield University, a Jesuit school, said, “I will rip costs out of the state budget like you have never seen in your life.” And in a year that requires both sides to promise, however vaguely, some manner of belt-tightening, having gone to public schools and amassed a private fortune independent of generations’ inherited principal will probably play better than the inverse.
It’s worth noting, though, that in contrast to Trump’s ostentatious wealth and flashy corruption, the old-fashioned WASP’s upright posture of decency does seem more aesthetically preferable to liberals now than it has in the 10 years since the recession hit. Lamont, 64, was never a soldier or a leader of men. He’s of a type Florence King portrayed perfectly, and hilariously, in the Cambridge-dwelling 1970s liberal Boston Brahmin her Southern lady protagonist partners with in 1982’s When Sisterhood Was In Flower. He even ate cereal from a recycled margarine tub, one friend recalled to the Times in 2006. Acquaintances from those days recall Lamont’s subtle-ish “old money” graciousness: If his family name weren’t stenciled under the marble lintel of the library… you’d never know!
Biograpically, Lamont and Stefanowski don’t look especially different from each other to most of the state, Bates believes: “They’re just two rich guys from Fairfield County”—one of the nation’s most affluent. It doesn’t matter, if you live north of Hartford, she adds, that Madison isn’t actually part of Fairfield County: It’s a quaint colonial town on the coast, with a country club. What matters to voters in the struggling state, as these candidates pivot from the primary to the general election, is what they’ll give the constituencies they’re courting. The return of Ned Lamont—and the fact he’ll give them new taxes and, he says, something “to believe in”—comes in a tough year for Democrats, and it tells us something not unfamiliar about the New England preppie’s placid and unearned self-confidence. But it also tells us, in other words, that saving Connecticut from itself will require the defeat, once more, of a foil from a satirical novel.
