All of Connecticut’s state Senate and House of Representative seats are up for election this year. How is Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump affecting down-ballot races in a historically Democratic state?
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Mark Pazniokas to discuss his article, “Ask Greenwich Sen. Ryan Fazio about anything. Except Trump.,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read his story here.
WSHU: Hello, Mark. Former President Donald Trump is playing a role in this year’s elections in Connecticut. How so? And is that why you decided to have a look at how Republican senators are trying to get reelected to the state Senate while having to deal with the issue that Donald Trump is not very popular in Connecticut?
MP: Yes, I spent some time in Greenwich for several reasons. One, Greenwich is such a symbolic place. It’s one of the most affluent places in the United States. Historically, it has been a symbol of the Eastern establishment, Republicanism.
WSHU: It’s home to one of the country’s marquee presidential families.
MP: Absolutely. Prescott Bush Sr. was a U.S. senator. He is the father of George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush. So, absolutely, Greenwich has been associated with the Bushes and sort of a middle-of-the-road form of Republican politics for a long time.
WSHU: You followed Ryan Fazio, a young Republican who currently holds a Senate seat from Greenwich and is seeking reelection. Could you tell us a little bit about his background and what you found when you went out stumping with him?
MP: So Ryan Fazio got a little bit of national notice in 2021 when he recaptured a state Senate seat. Ryan Fazio is a former commodities trader who’s now an investment advisor in Greenwich. That state Senate district had been in Republican hands for really most of a century. The exception was in 1932; it turned out that even in Greenwich, Herbert Hoover and the Depression were really too much for voters to stick with the Republicans for two years. However, in 2018, in the first election after Donald Trump became president, a Democrat won that seat very narrowly, 50.4%. She resigned. She was in the middle of an ugly divorce in 2021, and then it was an open seat, and Ryan Fazio won in 2021 with 50.1%. So it doesn’t get much closer than that. He was reelected to a full term in 2022 again, with 50.1%.
So Greenwich is an interesting place to look at the struggles Republicans have to keep on good terms with the Trump voters, but yet not be too closely associated with the former president, because that does not help you in a place like Greenwich, which, believe it or not, Greenwich now has more registered Democrats than Republicans. That’s been true since 2021. On the other hand, the biggest block of voters are unaffiliated, and that’s been the case since 2016. So clearly, if you are a Republican running there, you have to walk a really thin line.
WSHU: And there’s also an irony there that former President Donald Trump lived in Greenwich briefly in the late 1980s.
MP: He did during his first marriage, absolutely.
WSHU: What did you find as you watched Fazio in Greenwich?
MP: Well, both the Republican Ryan Fazio and the Democrat Nick Simmons, when they are door knocking, they each are campaigning really against polarization. They emphasize their ability to work across party lines, which is an interesting kind of departure in this age of super-polarized politics. But I think it does show there is a sense of these two candidates, of the exhaustion that voters have with the current sense of politics, as well as it’s just good strategic ground to try to occupy where you are not too left, not too right.
The Democrat, Nick Simmons, will point to two votes that Ryan Fazio cast against an abortion bill and a gun control bill. In each case, Mr. Fazio says he had concerns with specific parts of those bills, and he is very much in support of maintaining the status quo, which in Connecticut means very stringent gun controls, as well as a state law that essentially codifies Roe v. Wade, guarantees a woman’s right to access to abortion services in Connecticut.
WSHU: I think one interaction that really illustrates this was when Fazio was door knocking, and there was a Ms. VanDemark, that he knocked on her door. Explain what happened in their interaction.
MP: A woman was standing at the end of her driveway, and she was very in a good mood, and she told Senator Fazio that her husband was, certainly going to vote for him and she might, and she made it clear that she was not a fan of President Trump but she asked Senator Fazio, this was the day of the debate, and she asked, ‘Will you be watching the debate?’ And Fazio smiled and said, ‘Well, there’s a Yankee game on.’ And in other words, he did not want to go anywhere near that topic. And this voter referred to Mr. Trump as the other one; “Oh yes, the other one is so divisive,” and she was appreciative of Senator Fazio’s description of his own approach to politics, which is trying to be bipartisan wherever possible.
WSHU: Talking about being bipartisan, Nick Simmons tells us a little about his background. That’s Fazio’s opponent in this race.
MP: So Nick Simmons actually is a former Republican, when he was young. He is, as I note in the story, the product of a mixed marriage in a political sense. His father was a moderate Republican, and his mother a liberal Democrat. Nick Simmons’ sister is Caroline Simmons, the mayor of Stanford, a Democrat. And Nick Simmons says he was a Republican until he left for college. He went to Yale. He actually interned for Chris Shays, who was the last Republican to serve in Congress from Connecticut. He represented that end of Connecticut, the Fourth Congressional District.
But presidential politics is easier for Nick Simmons. Democrats are not nervous about being associated with their party’s leaders, either nationally or in the state. In fact, Simmons had worked one year in the Biden administration in the White House, and he was an aide to Governor Ned Lamont before and after that. He left the Lamont administration in January as the Deputy Chief of Staff. And Ned Lamont is very popular in Greenwich. He lives there. His fiscal policies are more centrist, and it plays well down there. And so if you look at the two candidates’ websites, you see a big picture of Nick Simmons, and then Lamont. And on Ryan Fazio’s, we’ll see a picture of him with Bobby Valentine, a very popular major league ballplayer from Stanford who actually ran against Nick Simmons’s sister.
WSHU: Quite an interesting race there. So, what’s your takeaway from spending some time on this race?
MP: Look, it’s a reminder that Donald Trump continues to be a very difficult figure for elected Republicans in this state. All polling, including one that I’m looking at right now, a new poll that we did, shows, for example, that Kamala Harris has been strongly favored over Donald Trump by Connecticut voters, which is no surprise. I mean, given the past two elections in which Donald Trump got 39% in one and then 36% of Connecticut votes in the other.
But the thing that’s striking to me is the deep depolarization that Donald Trump remains popular among the vast majority of Republican voters in Connecticut, and oh, by the way, they share some of his suspicions and complaints about the accuracy and fairness of the election system. And so that indicates that people like Simmons and Fazio who are trying to knit together kind of these, these, you know, different aspects of the electorate. It’s a very difficult task. And when people complain about elected Republicans being reluctant to denounce former President Trump when he says and does some of the more outrageous things, this all indicates the reason why. That again, in the Republican voter base, even in the northeast, even in Connecticut, Donald Trump remains a popular figure among the Republican base.