Connecticut special election brings 2 GOP pickups

AT: Amid a lot of other stories in the press, a good one from Connecticut got a lost in the shuffle: the state held a special election of five state legislative slots, and Republicans unexpectedly won two of them.

Here’s the Washington Examiner’s report, with links to two very good local press stories:

Republican candidates in Connecticut flipped two state legislative seats in a five-race special election held Tuesday.

Gennaro Bizzarro pulled off the biggest upset of the night. He defeated Democratic Rep. Rick Lopes in the 6th District Senate race with 53 percent of the vote, the CT Mirror reports.  The seat was vacated after the incumbent was appointed to a state role by newly elected Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration.

All five vacancies were a result of Lamont appointing legislators to state roles.

Now, this state is deep blue.  So what a result like this suggests is that the press “narrative” about Republicans and President Trump being “unpopular” is downright phony.  Conventional wisdom on midterms is that those elections are referendums on the president.  These special elections look as though they’re referendums on the Democrats, who took a large swath of power in the last midterm.  So this “unexpected” result in Connecticut sounds like a harbinger of things to come in the 2020 election.

Now, it is part of a known trend.  New England has shown some buck-the-orthodoxy electoral results in recent years, as described by Salena Zito, who cited Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine electing Republican governors in 2017.  The addition of Connecticut to the GOP pickup list via state offices falls in line on that front.  more