Donald J. Trump’s victory and pending return to the White House poses immediate challenges and opportunities in Connecticut for the Democrats who hold every lever of power and the Republicans who have struggled for eight years to establish an identity outside of Trump’s considerable shadow.
Trump’s win set the administration of Gov. Ned Lamont scrambling to assess Connecticut’s potential vulnerabilities to and conflicts with the president-elect’s policies on federal aid, taxation, health care, climate change, mass deportation and education, among other things.
Attorney General William Tong, one of the Democratic attorneys general who spent Trump’s first term on a war-time footing, regularly confronting the administration on everything from abortion to climate and immigration, vowed to once again man the legal firewall constructed during Trump 1.0.
“Let me say that my Democratic colleagues are unified,” said Tong, the vice president of the National Association of Attorneys General. “We are locked arm in arm. This firewall that we built is as strong as it has ever been.”
But Lamont and Comptroller Sean Scanlon, who often have tried to nudge their party towards the pocketbook issues that propelled Bill Clinton to office and began a 32-year presidential winning streak for Democrats in Connecticut, urged their party to examine its failings, not blame Trump or the electorate for the loss.
“It is important that the Democratic Party learn the right lessons from the loss that we experienced last night, because it was a loss,” Scanlon said. “We should not sugarcoat that. We should not avoid that. We should not blame the American people for that. We need to look into the mirror, and we need to think about what it is that we want to do going forward as a party.”
Lamont, a fiscally centrist Democrat who was an early backer of Joe Biden in 2020, but favored his ceding the presidential nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris, concurred with Scanlon.
“I think the election yesterday was a real wake up call for Democrats,” Lamont said. “It was overwhelming. We can point to Trump’s personality, whatever you want to say, but Democrats lost a lot of the working families. We lost a lot of males — lost males of different races, color and creed. And it ought to be a wake up call, and we’ve got to be fighting for the middle class and fighting for them every day. And I think they feel like we lost sight of that.”
Lamont expressed hope that Trump would keep his campaign pledge to reverse a controversial 2017 measure that limited Americans’ ability to deduct state and municipal tax payments on their federal return. It was made amidst a flurry of tax-cutting pledges from both campaigns, and offered with limited details on how it might be implemented.
“It was a little like a game of ‘The Price is Right,’ everybody bidding at the end of the campaign,” said Lamont, who also noted it nonetheless “would be very positive for the state of Connecticut and a lot of states that invest in education.”
Lamont, Scanlon, Tong, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal spoke to reporters for nearly an hour in a post-election briefing at the state Capitol, offering varying degrees of defiance, analysis and self-reflection.
Most noted that the red wave that carried Trump to victory in every battleground state did not reach Connecticut’s shores.
Trump failed to carry Connecticut for a third time, albeit by a smaller margin. Unofficial results showed him losing here by 12 percentage-points, compared to 14 points against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and 20 points to Biden in 2020.
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, were reelected by comfortable margins, as were Connecticut’s other four Democratic members of Congress. And Democrats grew their 98-53 majority in the state House and either maintained their 24-12 state Senate majority or picked up a seat.
Hayes, who won by just 2,004 votes two years ago, saw tenfold growth in her margin of victory Tuesday, but acknowledged feeling a body blow from the failure of Kamala Harris to become the first woman to win the White House.
Blumenthal, whose party will lose control of the U.S. Senate in January, was more combative than reflective. He said Democrats must be ready to oppose Trump if he seeks a national ban on abortion, despite his campaign promise to the contrary. A federal ban would preempt Connecticut’s strong abortion access laws, he said.
“So, we need to be prepared for fighting. There’s no question that people around this president want to ban abortion across the country, but the strong, growing, powerful wave of public opinion in this country is for reproductive freedom,” Blumenthal said, referring to referendums in three states.
Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, who is preparing a run for governor if Lamont does not seek a third term in 2026, tried to reassure Democrats and other Harris voters stunned by the election results.
“We want to reassure the people of Connecticut that our values are still the same, that we will stand up for reproductive rights and health care access, that we will stand up strongly for LGBT- plus rights,” she said. “We will stand up strongly for labor rights. We will continue to lead on gun safety and civil rights and freedom of thought and expression, and we will continue to welcome new people to our state who come from other countries and make our state stronger and more vibrant.”
The Trump era, which now seems certain to stretch to 12 years, has been extraordinarily difficult for Republicans in Connecticut. Trump came to define the GOP during that time, often at cross purposes with elected Republicans, who preferred to avoid conversations about him or his policies.
‘This isn’t something that we have to wait and see,” Scanlon said. “We already watched that movie for four years and watched them pirouette around him at every possible step, when he did something that displayed his habitual lack of self control.”
Ben Proto, the Republican state chairman, said assumptions that Trump 2.0 would be problematic for the GOP in Connecticut were premature. Trump could be a valuable asset to the party if he focuses on the economy as interest rates fall and growth in wages seem to be outpacing inflation.
The Democrats’ assumption Trump will be trouble was a reflex on their part, he said.
“When Democrats get in trouble, they yell, ‘Trump!’” Proto said.
Trump already has affected the 2026 election cycle in Connecticut. By defeating Harris, he has ensured that Murphy will not be resigning to take an administration post, which would have drawn potential gubernatorial candidates into a special election for the Senate.
House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said there is another potential, if more problematic, role Trump could play for the GOP: Would he dictate that the next Republican nominee for governor be a Trump acolyte?
“You can ask my friend Themis Klarides what that means,” Ritter said.
Klarides, a former House minority leader, won the GOP convention endorsement for U.S. Senate in 2022. But she lost a primary to Leora Levy, whom Trump had endorsed.
Republicans had a great election night in 2016, when Trump won his first term while losing Connecticut. They captured half the seats in the state Senate and came within five votes of a majority in the state House. No one suggests Trump’s coattails were the reasons.
Leaders of both parties say the presidential campaign was less a factor in those down-ballot races than Connecticut’s deep financial challenges and the unpopularity of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, a Democrat who had raised taxes, cut services and demanded state employee concessions to close a huge budget shortfall.
Republicans lost those gains and more in the disastrous mid-term election of 2018, when Lamont won the open race for governor, succeeding Malloy. But their legacy was contributing to the passage of a bipartisan budget in 2017 that imposed limits on spending.
House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, said Lamont has used those spending limits to fend off spending increases sought by progressives in his own party — demands certain to be made again in the session that begins in January.
The result was tax cuts that took away a wedge issue for Republicans in legislative races this year.
“The Republican Party was a victim of its own success,” Candelora said. “People vote with their wallet in mind.”
Keith Phaneuf contributed to this story.