Originally posted on eurorscgpr.com.
A little over a year ago, I was arguing that Illinois was the new trend capital. Trendspotters like me had looked at New York and L.A. to death, and the time had come to look at the Midwest. Illinois is, after all, the state that gave us Oprah and Obama. Its residents ranked high in donating to charities and embracing family values—and political vice (most notably, Blagojevich). It was the yin and yang of America, all concentrated in the heart of the country.
Now that center of gravity is shifting eastward. Connecticut is becoming the new Illinois. I explained why Connecticut would sit in the middle of the political universe on the Fox 61 “Morning Show” in Hartford earlier this month: My home state has a trifecta of high-profile political races on the horizon. Or, as the Stamford Advocate warned last week, it’s time to brace ourselves for a wild year of “noisy campaigning and public bickering.”
Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd’s departure after 30 years when facing record-low poll numbers sets the stage for a big Senate race this fall. In turn, longtime Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has announced his intention to run for Dodd’s seat, putting the AG spot up for grabs. Republican Governor M. Jodi Rell has also announced she’s retiring, creating a free-for-all among more than a dozen candidates on both sides.
As I read in the Hartford Courant, this is the first year since 1946 that Connecticut’s gubernatorial and senatorial candidates include no incumbents. “Pent-up ambition” is an understatement. After years of being a “blue” state with a “red” governor, Connecticut’s political colors could change. People far west of the Hudson River are watching.
And the state’s rise isn’t a one-year deal. Our political lightning rod, Senator Joe Lieberman, is up for reelection in 2012, and you can bet that will be an ugly, and closely watched, race. I suspect it will be a three-way contest that’s really a referendum on how people feel about President Obama. We already saw something similar in the Stamford mayoral race, which I think had nothing to do with the candidates and everything to do with people turning the change message against the Obama administration.
This will train a lot of national spotlights here and give local media enormous pull. We’ll see new candidates rise, and maybe even the most famous name in American politics. People are already speculating about Ted Kennedy Jr.’s possible entry into the 2012 race. He told the AP last fall that he had thought of running for office, and all we know what that means: Connecticut could soon give the country a new Senator Kennedy.
In the meantime, the political realm isn’t the only area in which Connecticut is at the center of trends. Our real estate market remains stubbornly depressed. The most e-mailed article in the Stamford Advocate over the weekend explained the steep dip in housing prices across the state in 2009. The numbers from Bridgeport are less bad than previous years (“less bad” being the new “good”), suggesting maybe the worst is over for the blue-collar communities that first suffered the brunt of the financial crisis. But the declines in wealthy towns such as Greenwich and New Canaan were more than 13 percent, as the Wall Streeters who live in them face their own overleverage and come to terms the new normal—no Bear Sterns or Lehman Brothers, job security or guaranteed cash bonuses.
And then there’s this: A study by University of Warwick in the U.K. and Hamilton College in the U.S. ranked the happiness of people in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Connecticut came in second to last, which the researchers attributed to congestion, high housing prices (still) and bad air quality. Another hypothesis: Money doesn’t buy happiness, something the past year has forced a lot of people to figure out.