From the Mind of Jason Zandri

Party takes stock after big reversal

By Dave Moran
Record-Journal staff
dmoran@record-journal.com
(203) 317-2224

WALLINGFORD — A day after a resounding Republican victory in the local election, Democrats were left to won­der what went so wrong.

In addition to voters knock­ing down by large margins all seven proposed amendments to the Town Charter, which Republicans had vocally op­posed, the GOP also seized control of the Town Council and the Board of Education, while William W. Dickinson Jr., the unopposed Republican mayor, won election to a 14th consecutive term.

But Democrats Wednesday seemed divided on the ulti­mate cause of their defeat, with some placing the blame on low voter turnout or the lack of a headlining mayoral candidate, while others attrib­uted the results to a sense of dissatisfaction with the Demo­cratic Party on a national level or a local backlash against the attempted charter revision.

“I think a couple of things happened,” said Democratic Town Chairman Vincent Aval­lone. “Obviously, we didn’t have a mayoral candidate, which I think hurt us; and, sec­ond, charter revision. I don’t believe in what the Republi­cans did, but they were suc­cessful in turning (the revision attempt) into an attack on the mayor, and that energized the mayor’s base.”

The revision attempt had been a thorny issue through­out, and Republicans continu­ally portrayed it as a veiled at­tempt to whittle away at Dickinson’s powers. Dickinson even made it a campaign issue, repeatedly voicing his opposi­tion to the proposed amend­ments during speeches and in his campaign literature.

Low voter turnout and the absence of a candidate for mayor also appear to have fig­ured prominently in the De­mocrats’ defeat. The only other time the De­mocrats did not field a chal­lenger to Dickinson was in 2001, when the mayor’s sole opponent was Pasquale Melillo, who ran as an inde­pendent. That year, Republi­cans seized a 6-3 majority on both the council and the Board of Education, polling 56 per­cent of all votes cast.

Tuesday’s election will lead to a 6-3 Republican majority on the council and a 5-4 advan­tage on the school board when the new members are sworn in Jan. 4. Party breakdowns for this year’s election were not available Wednesday, but only 8,850 of the town’s 24,870 reg­istered voters, 35.6 percent, turned out to cast ballots. Just over 41 percent of the elec­torate turned out for the 2001 election.

“I’d start at the top of the ticket and look down,” said John Sullivan, a local media personality and one of only three Democrats elected to the council Tuesday. “If we had a mayoral candidate, I think we would have gotten more voters out.”

A bumper crop of eight can­didates for six spots on the council and seven for six avail­able school board posts may also have adversely affected the election’s overall outcome, but many were split on the precise impact.

Because the charter states that no party can occupy more than six seats on the council or the school board, both parties have established an unwritten rule in recent years to run no more than six candidates for either panel. But the Democ­rats successfully broke with that rule in 2007, when Nick Economopoulos petitioned his way onto the ticket as a sev­enth candidate and helped the Democrats secure a 5-4 coun­cil majority.

This year, both parties nom­inated seven candidates for seats on the council and the Board of Education, while Geno Zandri, a former five­ term councilor and the Demo­cratic candidate for mayor in 1999, petitioned his way onto the Democratic ticket after the party held its nominating cau­cus over the summer.

But Robert Gross, who was unsuccessful in his council bid as a Democrat this year, did not attribute his party’s loss to an overcrowded ballot.

“Definitely not,” Gross said. “The Republicans ran seven and they won six of them, they almost won seven if the rules would have allowed it, so I don’t think that was a factor.”

Economopoulos and Vin­cent Testa, the council’s vice chairman, were the only two incumbent Democrats to win. Economopoulos described his party’s poor showing as a “compound fracture.”

He attributed the results to an unfavorable perception of Democrats on the national level, but noted that not having a candidate for mayor and run­ning too many strong candi­dates for council in the same year did not help the party with local voters.

“I already talked to them about that last night,” Economopoulos said. “I told them if they want to do any­thing in two years, we need to start planning now. We need to strengthen our Town Commit­tee. It’s not like there was a weakness here or a weakness there; I think it was just a prob­lem of our whole philosophy.”