A thread on that antisemitic mailer from a Republican candidate in Connecticut and why all politics is now national.
1. This is my last column in the @nhregister before next week’s elections. I was going to focus mostly on the governor’s race, as I usually do, but given recent events, I thought it’d be better to write about a leitmotif among pundits: that all politics is national.
2. The events I’m talking about are the massacre of nearly a dozen elders praying in a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday by a psychopath determined “to kill Jews”;
3. and the sending Tuesday of an anti-Semitic mailer by the campaign of GOP state Senate candidate Ed Charamut that depicted his Democratic (and Jewish) opponent, Matt Lesser, as a greedy Jew eager to take your money.
4. This isn’t the first time anti-Semitism has had a cameo in Connecticut politics. I seriously doubt it will be the last. But it’s unlikely this mailer would have gotten any national attention if not for a president doing this best to inflame ethnic hatreds in the country;
5. if not for a lone wolf turning Trump’s race baiting into action; and if all this were not the context for a bush-league politician willing to say anything to get attention in his quest to represent people living in Middletown, Connecticut.
6. As it is, Ed Charamut’s mailer got attention from the Washington Post, CNN and other national media. (I first learned about it on Twitter.) As it is, Charamut’s campaign denies interpretations of the mailer as having anything to do with anti-Semitism.
7. As it is, the state Republican Party appears tone-deaf, as if anti-Semitism were so normal to the state GOP as to be unremarkable.
8. Meanwhile, Matt Lesser couldn’t have bought better publicity. Local politicians struggle for air in a media climate in which the president of the United States consumes most of it.
9. The Middletown Press could have given Lesser a full page every day for the last month, and not have gotten the kind of penetration that comes from getting national press. As it stands, voters may not know anything about Lesser other than that he’s a victim of antisemitism.
10. That’s more information than a lot of voters would have had otherwise. Prior to Tuesday, all politics was local for Matt Lesser. Since then, all politics is national.
11. Connecticut Republicans are doing little distance themselves from Charamut. Sure, Bob Stefanowski clucked his tongue. JR Romano, head of the state GOP, offered a full-throated defense of Charamut before realizing that he needed to walk that back in a hurry.
12. Charamut’s campaign continues to act like as if nothing’s wrong. The impression is of state Republicans walking a line between anti-Semitic voters and more sensible folk sensibly offended by the sight of ancient hatreds.
13. The president believes inflaming divisions is a good strategy. Yet, the underappreciated fact of this election season is that he has been unpopular, is unpopular and will be unpopular as long as his name is Donald Trump. (His approval in Connecticut is 30 percent.)
14. The more he doubles down, the less popular he is; the less popular he is (while also dominating the news cycle every day), the more potential there is for him to pull down Republicans, even those seeking Connecticut office.
15. The latest poll from Quinnipiac University has Stefanowski and Democrat Ned Lamont in a dead heat. But that must be squared with the fact that voter registration applications are at historic levels. According to the state Secretary of State’s office,
16. 103,436 new voters registered as Democrats, 53,371 registered as Republicans, and 168,090 registered as unaffiliated. Some 52,000 of new registrants are 18 to 25. The reason for this? Well, it’s simple: All politics is national.
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