Trump tweets support for Stefanowski
Bob Stefanowski is excited to continue his campaign to become the chief executive officer of Connecticut after winning the Republican nomination for governor in Tuesday’s primary.
A businessman with no government experience, CEO is a role Stefanowski, knows and an approach he seems to believe will appeal to voters fed up with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.
“For the first time in decades, Connecticut will actually have a real CEO — whose primary focus will be putting people back to work — and creating a competitive environment where working families can afford to stay here,” said Stefanowski, 56, in his victory speech Tuesday night at a hotel in his hometown of Madison. “I learned that eight years of Dan Malloy and the special interests that he is beholden to have damaged our unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.”
Stefanowski, the former UBS investment bank chief financial officer, won 30 percent of the GOP primary vote Tuesday, topping endorsed candidate Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton by 10,000 votes.
“I was optimistic,” said Stefanowski in a phone interview Wednesday. “I thought it would be a little bit closer.”
Democrats and Republicans alike chose wealthy, self-funding outsiders as their party nominees over mayors Tuesday. The November battle between Democrat Ned Lamont, a Greenwich cable television entrepreneur, and Stefanowski promises to be a proxy fight over the policies of Malloy and President Donald Trump, who endorsed Stefanowski on Twitter on Wednesday morning.
“Tough on crime, Bob is also a big cutter of Taxes,” Trump wrote. “He will win in November and make a Great Governor, a major difference maker.”
Stefanowski would love for Trump to campaign with him, Stefanowski said, because Trump has buoyed the national economy and Connecticut could use a similar boost.
Democrats already starting using the endorsement to drive a wedge between Stefanowski and Democrats and unaffiliated voters, many of whom oppose the controversial commander-in-chief.
“Stefanowski wants to bring Trump to Connecticut,” Malloy said Wednesday. “If Trump wins in November in Connecticut, then we are all in trouble.”
Lamont in a tweet renamed his general election opponent “Bob Trumpanowski” Wednesday. Stefanowski tweeted back calling Lamont “Ned Malloy.”
"Connecticut is facing one of the worst financial crises in the country thanks to policies of Dan Malloy and Ned Lamont,” Stefanowski said in a statement. “I look forward to a vigorous debate on my plans to fix Connecticut and rid once and for all, the culture of corruption in Hartford, even if Malloy and Lamont want to do nothing more than play politics."
For months ahead of the primary, Stefanowski favored taking his message directly to voter through early television commercials, on which he dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars. As of July, he had spent $2.4 million on his campaign, much of it his own money.
He also skipped the Republican state convention in May. He attended the event at Foxwoods Resort and Casino, but opted instead to gather signatures there and petition his way onto the primary ballot, claiming the convention favors career politicians.
“I don’t mean this is as a knock, but the process has definitely changed,” Boughton said Tuesday night, after conceding a loss to Stefanowski. “Get up on the air, ignore the convention process, go get signatures, don’t waste your time with delegates and all that stuff, and just go out there and go up on TV. You can win this thing.”
Stefanowski agreed that gathering signatures helped him because “we had already touched those people, we had their name in a database so we could call them.”