There’s more than just urban/suburban demographics at work here

State Rep. Toni Walker is aiming to become House majority leader

Look around the loftier regions of Connecticut electoral politics and you’ll find a nearly colorless landscape, one seemingly out of sync with a state that helped put Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

Connecticut’s governor is white. The lieutenant governor is white. So is the attorney general and secretary of the state. Every Connecticut member of Congress is white, as is every top leader in the General Assembly.

The only person of color in a high-level elective office is Denise Nappier, an African-American from Hartford. She is serving her third term as state treasurer, a low-key post that’s become a sort of electoral ghetto for black Connecticut politicians. Being the state’s banker may be important but it’s never been much of a springboard to higher office.

Some minority politicians and civil-rights leaders in Connecticut are reluctant to use the “R” word when searching for explanations for this out-dated state of affairs. They say the reasons are more complex and perhaps more difficult to solve than simple racism. Twenty-six states now have at least one minority included in their congressional delegation. At the moment, both Massachusetts and New York have an African-American as governor.

The cultural and social terrain Connecticut’s blacks and Hispanics must cross to reach the political high ground is fragmented by jagged, persistent fault lines. There are deep divisions between cities and suburbs, between rich and poor, and between old-style political patterns and the ambitions of rapidly growing minority populations.

“I hesitate when people start talking about racism,” says Gary A. Holder-Winfield, a young black state lawmaker from New Haven. “You don’t have to be racist to operate within a traditional [political] system ... even though race can influence that system.”

Others, like state Rep. Andres Ayala of Bridgeport, see no way around the conclusion that race continues to play a significant role in Connecticut state politics.

“Unfortunately, I would have to say yes,” says Ayala. “From the stories and comments people make, I don’t know how comfortable people are with saying they could have a Latino running for statewide office, or another African-American beyond the ‘quota.’“

The “quota” Ayala refers to is that slot for treasurer on their state ticket that Democrats have unofficially reserved for minorities since the mid-1970s. The first African-American politician to hold that office was Henry E. Parker, a New Haven Democrat who held the office from 1975 to 1986. According to local political legend, the Democratic machine in that city was glad to push Parker for the state ticket because that would keep him from running for mayor and disrupting the status quo.

Former state Rep. William R. Dyson, once considered the most powerful African-American politician in Connecticut, believes the black political community has become tangled up by its long involvement with the treasurer’s office.

“They feel that slot is theirs,” he says, explaining some blacks feel restricted about running for any other statewide office because, “there’s only one spot for one black and that’s it.” The fear is that running another black statewide candidate could open up the treasurer’s slot for unwanted challenges, risking the African-American community’s hold on that office.

Dyson is a tall, lean man who ended his 32-year legislative career in 2009 after several unsuccessful attempts to win top leadership posts in the state House.

The speaker and majority leader are elected by the party that controls the chamber. Many Democratic lawmakers argue Dyson failed to begin his leadership campaign early enough or didn’t work hard enough at stroking potential supporters. Dyson blamed his leadership disappointments on underlying racism. “I still feel that,” he says.

Nappier, who is now seeking a fourth term as treasurer, declined to be interviewed for this story. Her campaign spokesman said Nappier’s schedule prevented her from even doing a short telephone session with the Advocate.

It’s no surprise, really, that Nappier and several other minority politicians approached for comment decided to stay far away from this topic.

Scott McLean, chairman of Quinnipiac University’s political science department, says that’s probably a smart political move. He points out that Obama’s successful presidential campaign, for all its historic racial significance, avoided playing the race card. “You’re more likely, as an African-American, to get elected to higher office if you don’t run on your race,” McLean says.

McLean says the problem for Connecticut minorities “isn’t just racial attitudes, it’s much more a matter of how this state’s political structure works.” And one key to that structure is the split between our increasingly black and Hispanic cities and our largely white upper- and middle-class suburbs.

Blacks and Latinos are concentrated in Connecticut’s relatively few large urban centers. According to U.S. Census Bureau 2008 estimates, about 10.3 percent of the state’s population is black and 12 percent is Hispanic or Latino.

Most minorities are concentrated in the cities, which means that’s where minority politicians tend to develop their careers. The vast majority of white voters are suburbanites and, based on recent state political history, many white suburbanites appear uneasy about voting for urban politicians of any color.

Jonathan Pelto, a former political director for the state Democratic Party, recalls attending a meeting New Haven Mayor John DeStefano (who is white) had with a (very white) suburban group when he was the Democratic candidate for governor four years ago.

“DeStefano said he wanted to do for Connecticut what he’d done for New Haven,” Pelto recalls, remembering how proud DeStefano was about the economic and educational gains his city had made. Pelto says, “But the suburban people heard that and they were [virtually] crossing themselves as they left” as a protection against another urban politician.

“Anti-urban-ism is a significant electoral factor in Connecticut,” Pelto says, noting that DeStefano was crushed in that year’s election by that safe, white, Republican from rural-suburban Brookfield, M. Jodi Rell.

No big-city mayor in modern Connecticut history has managed to jump directly to the governor’s office. White suburban distrust of urban politicians hasn’t improved by a string of recent mayoral convictions in Waterbury, Bridgeport and Hartford. (Only the last of those, by the way, involved a minority mayor.)

“Connecticut has a huge divide between the urban and suburban worlds,” explains Scott X. Esdaile, president of the Connecticut chapter of the NAACP. “From Greenwich to New Haven, there is a huge disparity in education, economics, health and power...And politics is based on economics.”

At least one minority lawmaker in the General Assembly has managed to bridge the gap between city and suburbia. His name is Jason W. Bartlett, and he represents a district that includes the nearly all-white suburbs of Bethel and Redding, as well as the western neighborhood of Danbury. “Only 3 percent of my district is minority,” he says. Bartlett also happens to be one of the few openly gay African-American legislators in the nation.

Bartlett says minority urban politicians with ambitions to achieve statewide or congressional office must develop a vision that goes beyond the city limits and strictly minority issues.

“You don’t approach issues from a city prism or a black prism,” he says.

Bartlett believes there are several veteran African-American lawmakers who might make excellent candidates for higher office, but are just comfortable where they are. As examples, he points to long-time state Sens. Eric Coleman of Hartford (who failed to return telephone calls for comment) and Toni Harp of New Haven.

Harp says one problem for minority politicians looking to move up the political ladder in this state is that so many of the higher rungs have been occupied for a long time by incumbents who don’t want to move. Most of those incumbents are Democrats and Harp says “it’s very difficult to get party support” to challenge a long-time incumbent.

Chris Dodd, who is white, has held his U.S. Senate seat since 1980 and Joe Lieberman, also white, has been cemented to his since 1988. The two U.S. House seats where minority pols might have a realistic shot are the First District, where John Larson of East Hartford has been entrenched since 1998, and the Third, where New Haven’s Rosa DeLauro has been locked in since 1990.

There’s been a similar lack of opportunity to move up for other statewide offices, where long-term incumbents have been clinging to their posts for decades. This year, when a number of incumbents have decided to move on, there’s been a virtual stampede by hordes of white politicians who have also been sitting on the sidelines for years.

“These are positions everybody wants,” says Harp, a calm, careful lawmaker from New Haven who has risen to become Senate chair of the legislature’s powerful Appropriations Committee. “I don’t think it’s racism...It’s not an easy thing to do, whether you’re white, black or Hispanic.”

Some city pols have managed to overcome suburban suspicions to win election to Congress. They include DeLauro, Lieberman (who was raised in Stamford and lived in New Haven), and the only black ever to win election to Congress from Connecticut, Gary A. Franks of Waterbury.

Franks was a fairly conservative Republican candidate who served three terms in the U.S. House in the 1990s representing what was at the time a fairly conservative 5th Congressional District.

Despite his barrier-breaking achievement, Franks isn’t popular within Connecticut’s minority community.

“He was probably one of the worst congressmen in our history,” says Esdaile, who puts Franks in the same right-wing basket as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Esdaile and other minority politicians say the state Democratic Party has “taken advantage of the minority vote” by simply assuming blacks and Hispanics have no other place to go with their votes. “The Republican Party hasn’t taken advantage of that,” says Esdaile.

Gary A. Holder-Winfield, the young state House member from New Haven, agrees. “It’s almost heresy for me as a Democrat,” he says, “but I think it’s almost short-sighted [for the minority community] not to give a look to the Republican Party.”

There is another potential roadblock for both African-American and Hispanic politicians with high ambition: the danger of divisions between the two voting blocks. The Hispanic population in Connecticut is rising faster than the black population, and if they start to fight in the scramble for political office, both are likely to lose out.

Ayala feels the white power structure in Connecticut has, at least in the past, tried to keep that tension alive. “A lot of things that happen are done to keep the two communities fighting,” he says.

State Rep. Toni Walker, a black lawmaker from New Haven aiming to become House majority leader after this election, agrees. “What happens is you get minority against minority...The majority says, ‘Whoever comes out of this fight alive, we’ll give them a piece of the pie.”

Other minority pols, black and Latino, insist there are no serious divisions, that both communities have far more common interests than differences.

Both Bartlett and Holder-Winfield say that’s one reason they’re supporting former New Haven Alderman Gerry Garcia, who is the only minority candidate running a primary for a statewide office this year.

Garcia pulled in more than enough delegate support at the Democratic State Convention to qualify for the August primary against the endorsed candidate for secretary of the state, state House Majority Leader Denise Merrill.

The statewide Democratic Hispanic Caucus last week endorsed Ned Lamont in his primary contest against Dan Malloy for the Democratic nomination for governor. The caucus didn’t get any commitment from Lamont to support Garcia’s candidacy, most likely because Lamont wouldn’t want to piss off any of Merrill’s supporters in the lead-up to what could be a close primary vote.

Garcia acknowledges the difficulties of running as an urban politician in this state, but insists he can overcome that challenge by creating a statewide coalition like the one that elected Antonio Villaraigosa as the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles in more than a century. Garcia believes he can pull support from blacks and Hispanics, whites and the business community.

Although he says he’s not basing his campaign on his status as a minority candidate, Garcia says he’d like to do for Latino kids in Connecticut what Obama’s election has done for minority children across America.

“Others have opened doors ahead of me. I seek to open doors to others,” Garcia says. “No Latino child in the state of Connecticut has ever experienced a constitutional officer of Latino heritage.”

Dyson is convinced, despite his own disappointments, that it is possible for minorities to make the very tough climb to the highest rungs of Connecticut’s political ladder.

He chuckles when asked if that means be believes he’ll see a black governor of Connecticut in his lifetime.

“I’ll be 70 this month,” says Dyson. “But I’m hopeful.”

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