CT GOP Chair Healy to Step Down
Connecticut Republican state chairman and one-time Republican National Committee chair candidate Chris Healy announced this week that he would not be running for reelection.
“Yes, our long national nightmare is over,” he quipped in an interview with FrumForum.
Healy sounds weary. Maybe it’s been a long day. Or perhaps he’s just tired of the grind of politics.
“No, not at all! Not until my last breath. I love it,” responds Healy to the suggestion, perking up a bit. “You can go crazy listening to your critics, but you have to understand where it comes from, who’s saying it,” he continues, unprompted, almost as if reassuring himself.
After four and a half years – and some mixed results – Healy decided he could not devote himself entirely to another two-year term. “Once in a while you get a moment of clarity in politics… [being a state chairman] requires the total commitment of mind and body, and I think that if I ran again I don’t think I could have kept that full two-year commitment… it’s time for someone else to do it,” said Healy.
Just a few months ago, Chris Healy was vaulted to the national stage with talk that he would challenge former RNC chair Michael Steele for the chairmanship. But almost as soon as his name was mentioned, he decided against it. “My whole purpose there was to flush Steele out… At that point in the game, he wasn’t going anywhere unless people were made to be ashamed to stand with him,” he said.
But no doubt the disappointing November 2010 election results in Connecticut had something to do with it. “Maybe if I had won a few statewide offices, that would have put me in a position to” win the chairmanship, said the Connecticut state chairman.
And therein lies the most common criticism of the outgoing state chair. Despite a national wave of Republican support in November 2010, Connecticut Republicans failed to win any of the major elections in the state: losing the races for governor, senator, and all five House seats.
In his defense, Healy points out that Republicans gained 14 seats in the state House, and dominate local governments in Connecticut as well. “Our bench is pretty solid… out of the 169 cities and towns in Connecticut, [Republicans] now hold 100 of them,” said Healy. When he first took over in 2007 Republicans held just around 70.
His frustrations, he says, aren’t centered on getting blamed for losing, or even the losing itself. His problems were with the party infighting. “While the [candidates] might behave publicly, their supporters sometime don’t. We’re a small state, we don’t have many Republicans to spare,” he said.
The specific target of his disdain? A low threshold for getting on the ballot in a primary meant that in the excitement of the 2010 wave, many of the most vitriolic battles were between Republicans themselves.
“The last thing we needed is inter-party squabbling over a small number of votes – the winning candidate is going to need the support of all the defeated people,” says Healy. “In a state where Republicans are outnumbered three-to-two… our margin for error is a lot smaller than that of the Democrats. That’s what I tried to teach and stress when I was here.”
But this policy was never changed, Healy says, and ended up being “just a huge waste of time and resources… ultimately when all of our candidates got to the final round, the Democratic incumbents had the advantage of money and union support, and our candidates didn’t.”
This low threshold, and not the Connecticut Republican Party’s poor showing at the polls, was what he deems as his greatest failure. “I wish I had been able to stop this, but I had no mechanism [to do so] other than the power of persuasion, and I wasn’t very persuasive,” he said wryly.
In fact, Healy lays the responsibility for Republican losses at the feet of the candidates and their campaigns. “It’s not our role to run campaigns, [we’re not] in the day to day operations… Ultimately it’s always the candidates’ responsibility whether they win or lose. I’ve never seen a winning campaign give credit to the state party,” Healy said with a chuckle.
Instead, on the matters of his responsibility, he claims he exceeded the performance of most state chairs. “Our job is to mobilize our voters and to identify the generic number of votes that we think would vote for our ticket… our Victory Program did it almost better than any other state, over a million [voter] identified phone calls,” he said.
Now with his tenure as state chair nearly over, Healy will resume work with Summit Financial, a business development and investment group that he has done some work for.
And while he says he will continue to play some role in politics, he will avoid playing in the upcoming campaign to replace him, telling FrumForum, “I don’t think it’s really helpful. I don’t think I could really help anybody… I’m not going to be like Chairman Mao [by] picking my successor.”
The 72 members of the Republican State Central Committee will meet next month on June 28 to choose a new state chairman.
Tweet