Top 10 of 2022: #5: Hayes, Other Democrats Win Big in New Britain

What Republicans sought and Democrats feared never happened. The anticipated 2022 Republican wave victory fizzled out and Democrats rolled to big wins in New Britain.

Republicans had high hopes nationwide. Buoyed by predictions of the “red wave”, they were blaming President Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats for the runaway inflation that was much more caused by too little market competition and too much greed in the present, big corporate economic era. They hoped that this would clinch the deal with the voters after Republicans at all levels, including in New Britain, had spent months campaigning on shamefully racist crime politics.

But Democrats, including Gov. Ned Lamont (D-CT) had earned great credibility with the voters, after being widely viewed as very competently leading Connecticut through the global pandemic crisis.

And a large impact on the election was the fruition of the Republicans’ decades long campaign to overturn abortion rights at the national level via the now legitimacy-challenged, right wing United States Supreme Court. Republicans became the proverbial, “dog that caught the car”, and Republican candidates who claimed to be, “not one of those Republicans,” who oppose abortion and LGBTQ+ rights and support racism, lacked credibility with many voters, just by running on the Republican line.

In New Britain, all of the Democrats won, including Sen. Rick Lopes (D-6) and newly elected Probate-Judge-elect William Rivera, both of whom had victories in New Britain more than enough to offset losses in increasingly Republican-leaning Berlin.

Voters in New Britain delivered large majorities for statewide Democratic candidates, helping them along to victory. But in no election was this more important than in the narrow re-election of Congressperson Jahana Hayes (D-5). Hayes won a solid majority in New Britain. No other city or town delivered Hayes a larger plurality and Hayes’ edge in New Britain was greater than her entire margin of victory in the Fifth Congressional District.

It is no exaggeration to say that Hayes’ re-election depended on her lopsided victory among New Britain voters. Likewise votes from the Working Families Party exceeded Hayes’ total margin of victory and also was pivotal to her re-election.

Yet, Democrats would be wise to note that their victories had more to do with factors beyond their control. A late and weak Democratic grassroots campaign statewide, including and perhaps especially in New Britain, depressed voter turnouts in a way that made elections, like Hayes’, closer than they would have been with higher urban turnout.

That lesson can be seen in the comparison between the elections in 2022, under national and state coattails, and the city elections a year earlier. It still remains to be seen whether Democrats in New Britain can build a winning grassroots campaign organization.

As in every year, there was so much news that the New Britain Progressive covered 2022 that choosing our traditional Top Ten stories of the year is difficult. But the 2022 election campaigns and results were one of the New Britain Progressive‘s Top Ten Stories of 2022.