The Red Line

Here’s a “redprint” for GOP victory in Connecticut in 2020.

1. Don’t fight the last war. The 2018 election was contested in the rosy context of an unexpected burst of $2 billion of non-recurring tax revenue. By 2020, the state will be in full blown fiscal crisis. As hockey great Wayne Gretzky says, “Skate to where the puck will be, not where it is.”

Last week’s blue wave rolled over already-blue Connecticut, subjugating its citizens under the absolute one-party rule of Democrats who retained the governorship and grew their majorities to super-majorities in both houses of the legislature.

It wasn’t just reaction to Donald Trump. Connecticut’s mainstream media whitewashed the abysmal record of unpopular outgoing Gov. Dannel Malloy, who, along with his fellow Democrats and allied union bosses, wielded full control over two terms with only slimmer margins.

Just as Tom Sawyer cleverly delegated the whitewashing of Aunt Polly’s fence to his friends, Connecticut Democrats would seem to have lured their media friends into doing their bidding in order to reduce the drag of Malloy’s unpopularity on their candidates.

One Republican who survived the recent electoral wipeout of the state GOP was Rob Sampson, the chairman of the conservative caucus in the General Assembly, not exactly someone you’d have expected to weather a perfect blue storm.

Sampson won big. He won by about 5,650 votes, or 13 percent of votes cast, and he moved up from House District 80 (Southington, Wolcott), a seat he has held since 2012, to Senate District 16, adding Prospect and parts of Cheshire and Waterbury to his constituency.

In contrast, the GOP lost every statewide contest, all six federal contests and 115, or 61 percent, of 187 legislative contests, including a House seat held for more than a century and a Senate seat held since 1932.

“There is a solution.” So proclaims Democrat Alex Bergstein in a recent op-ed in this paper and in her glossy campaign literature.

State Senate candidate Bergstein’s Eureka-like announcement concerns the state’s severely underfunded public employee pension funds, a problem which many people view as almost intractable.

“The solution” is a “shared risk model,” which Bergstein says the Province of New Brunswick in Canada “moved to” in 2012 and “reduced its liabilities by 30 percent.”

“There are no easy undiscovered instant solutions to the pension problem,” responds five-term Senate incumbent, Republican Scott Frantz. “Besides, the problem is cost, not risk. The state already has unaffordable pension costs. There’s no risk about it.”

Hank Aaron is baseball’s career home run leader with 755 — excluding one player from the performance drug era — despite the fact that, in his best season, he tallied only 47, placing him 77th on the single-season record list.

Outgoing Gov. Dannel P. Malloy is Connecticut’s Hank Aaron of tax hikes, the undisputed career leader, and he has a much better single-season record than Aaron. Malloy’s $2.9 billion in career tax hikes place him way ahead of Lowell Weicker, whose $2 billion increase in 1991 earned him both second place on the career list and the top position for single-season performance.