Two millennial Republicans are competing to be the Republican nominee for Connecticut governor. Who will the party decide has the best chance of winning?
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Mark Pazniokas to discuss his article, “Erin Stewart is testing CT GOP’s appetite for ‘something different’,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Mark’s story here.
WSHU: Hello, Mark. The Connecticut Republican Party has traditionally been run by wealthy elites from Fairfield County. So it must be interesting to sit down with former New Britain Mayor Erin Stewart (R) to figure out how she hopes to change that. How does she want to change that in her run for governor, considering she's a 38-year-old firefighter's daughter from New Britain?
MP: Erin Stewart leans in very heavily to how different she is from the previous two Republican gubernatorial nominees, Bob Stefanowski, who ran twice against Ned Lamont and Tom Foley, who ran twice against Dan Malloy. They're wealthy businessmen. Tom Foley from Fairfield County and Bob Stefanowski from the shoreline town of Madison. Erin Stewart has been successful in a city that is democratic and where 63% of the people who live there are people of color, a big Hispanic population, and a decent Black population as well. And her pitch is that the party needs to expand the base, and that she is somebody who's been able to do that. She is also very different stylistically from the time she was elected mayor of New Britain at the tender age of 26, she has shown herself to be a digital native. She's very comfortable on social media. She has, you know, kind of this salty way of talking to people.
WSHU: Tell us a little bit about that.
MP: Yeah, I mean, there are some casual profanities as you talk to her, which is unusual when you're talking to a gubernatorial candidate who is speaking on the record, and she makes no bones about that. In the run-up to her announcement last month, she did a series of YouTube videos that were deliberately a bit provocative. The first one was a story about this very weird incident that happened at city hall in Britain, where there was a democratic alderman who later acknowledged he was drunk and had an issue and was questioning her legitimacy as mayor, using vulgarities that I think would make a marine blush, and she quoted him in full on this first video. And you know that that kind of caused some ripples in Republican circles, or, as Erin said, caused some pearl clutching.
WSHU: That's kind of edgy stuff. Could you tell us a little bit more about her? She's won several re-elections as mayor in a largely Democratic city. Isn't that what Republicans would be looking for?
MP: Well, that's certainly her pitch. And when she was elected 12 years ago, New Britain was having some serious financial difficulties. She stabilized finances in New Britain, there's been new school construction. And even, you know, Democrats said, you know, she's done a good job attracting some new downtown development, some housing that has been inspired at least somewhat by mass transit. The terminal of the busway is in New Britain. And it actually has attracted some investment there. Now, of course, like every urban mayor who has some success, it also comes with a lot of help from the state of Connecticut; her budget was certainly backstopped by significant state funding, which, again, is certainly the norm in urban districts throughout the state. On the downside, you know, her school district is one of the 10 lowest performing ones. Again, that is a challenge for a lot of urban mayors. Still, as her campaign goes forward, because she does have a 12-year record as mayor, there's good and bad in that. She will have to live with that and make the case that she was, overall, shown to have some executive experience, as well as being different politically, as someone who can talk to a broader audience, quite frankly.
WSHU: Now she's going up against Ryan Fazio, who is from Greenwich and also young. She's 38, I believe he's 35. There's an issue here with how close either one of them want to be to the Trump administration, considering that they're running in Connecticut, one issue that has come up between them is the fact that she went to a meeting in Washington that Fazio decided not to and his big thing has been energy.
MP: So she went to a meeting that did have an energy angle, and she met the interior secretary, Doug Burgum. She said she invited Senator Fazio to accompany her. He remembers the conversation a little bit differently — that she was calling with a desire to get some background. But in any event, both of them are trying to walk the line. You have to walk in Connecticut if you're a Republican. One is that they have to qualify at a nominating convention for a primary. Two is that one of them has to win the primary, and to do that, you need to be on good terms with the president. And both of them, who have kind of kept their distance over the years from the President, were very quick to note that each of them has voted all three times for Donald Trump.
WSHU: In my interview with Erin Stewart, she did offer some criticism, or at least some regrets, about his immigration policies. She applauds very much the efforts to have greater border security that really faltered during the Biden administration. But she questions whether or not the emphasis on rounding up undocumented immigrants who do not have any criminal involvement, whether that's a you know, whether that's a good use of federal assets. She also, when I asked her about the Trump administration's effort to stop the wind project, Revolution Wind offshore project, and she, like some other Republicans I've spoken to in Connecticut, had said that it seemed to be a bad decision. It was 80% done. Whatever you feel about wind, as far as how affordable wind-generated electricity is, that seemed to be a bad move by the Trump administration. But on the other hand, again, in Trump's first term, she was very happy to go to the White House when he announced opportunity zones, which provide tax incentives for distressed municipalities. New Britain is one of those municipalities that has taken advantage of that. And she said, along with state grants, that has been a factor in New Britain's downtown revitalization.
WSHU: Now, something interesting was that she mentioned the fact that Bob Stefanowski was kind of startled a little bit about the audience that came out to celebrate her re-election, when she got re-elected as mayor, at one point, when he was considering her to run as his running mate, when he was running. So just tell us a little bit about that. And that's kind of an anecdote for what she has to deal with going into this.
MP: Yes. So the story is something she said, Oh, this is so embarrassing to tell this story, but I have to tell it. And then quickly did, and because it was a jab at Bob Stefanowski, as well as pointing out how she attracts a more diverse base. But the story she tells is that Bob Stefanowski and his wife were attending her inaugural ball, which she does for charity every two years. And then he looked around the room, he said, Boy, there are a lot of people of color here. You know which you can read in any number of ways. She read it as a bit of discomfort on Mr. Stefanowski's part. When I called him, he declined to comment on it or her. He has spoken favorably on talk radio about Ryan Fazio. He did not offer her the spot of his running mate in 2022. There does not appear to be any great warmth between the two of them. But again, that's part of the deal with Erin Stewart. I think, you know, people go either very hot or very cold on her and her style. For years, people have viewed her as being too young to make this move. She tried for the first time in 2018. It was kind of a clumsy effort to run for governor, and she quickly jumped into a primary for lieutenant governor, which didn't go particularly well either. But the interesting thing is, if people look at her as very young, not only is she a bit older than Ryan Fazio, she actually is five years older than John Roland was when he won the nomination for governor in 1990. He lost that year, but he was elected four years later, and he was a year younger than Erin Stewart is today when he actually got elected.
WSHU: Yeah, so basically, her biggest hurdle right now is getting the Republican nomination. How does it look?
MP: It's hard to know. You know, she is fairly well known in Republican activist circles, but the question is, you know, there's already some, there's an independent group that has run that has done two mailings against her, suggesting that her Republican bona fides and perhaps not as strong as they should be. She is pretty liberal on social issues, conservative on fiscal issues, criminal justice, that kind of thing. But you know, she's very comfortable with issues like gay marriage. She's in favor of gay marriage. She describes herself as a pro-choice woman, and there's always some tension among Republican primary voters in that regard. Those are positions that actually do well statewide and a general election. But of course, let's be honest, the conditions right now for any Republican are pretty difficult in Connecticut.
We're seeing what we saw after Trump's first election victory, which is the first municipal race after he entered the White House was disastrous for Republicans. We saw that in 2017, we just saw that this year. In 2017, that was a preview of what happened in 2018, which was a horrible year for Republicans in Connecticut. At the time, they had held half the seats in the State Senate; they quickly lost a half dozen or so seats. Since then, it's been very difficult for Republicans. You know, Democrats have roughly a two-to-one advantage in the House and the Senate. They hold all the congressional seats. They hold all the statewide constitutional offices. So whoever wins the primary, whether it's Senator Fazio, former mayor Stewart, or if anybody else jumps in, it's going to be considered an uphill battle in 2026.
WSHU: And if it's Erin Stewart, she also will be taking public financing, going up against a Democrat who can self-finance.
MP: Ned Lamont spent $25 million last time. Now, the state, the General Assembly, has bolstered what a publicly financed candidate for governor will get in a general election. It's $15 million, which is really enough to compete. It's another $3 million plus for a primary. So, I mean, it's a significant sum. She clearly will be able to qualify. You have to raise a certain number of small-dollar donations. It looks like she may have already done that through an exploratory committee that's been open since January. So she seems to be in good shape for that. And of course, anybody who participates in public financing has to agree to spending limits. You cannot go above that. So you know, the governor would certainly have an advantage financially. He also has pretty much 100% name recognition after two terms as governor, and his approval rating is pretty good. You know, the polling shows that people do have mixed feelings about a third term for anybody, but he seems to be going into 2026 in pretty good shape.
WSHU: Okay, so whichever way you look at it, it's all uphill for Erin Stewart.
MP: It seems to be, and this primary will be fascinating, because it will be a test of really how the Republican party sees itself. Is it more comfortable with a sort of blue-collar direction, which, if you look at the results, those are the districts that have been doing better in. They have certainly lost ground in the wealthier communities, certainly down in Fairfield County. So I mean, that will be one of the things that's interesting. It's not just who wins or loses, but really what it will say about the identity of the Republican party at this moment.
