In The Loop – August 19, 2022

“Back to School”(a.k.a. campaign time) and report cards for the 2022 session have been issued!

Right after the primaries, as candidates prep for campaign door knocking and phone banking activity after the Labor Day holiday, there’s also a rush to seek candidates’ opinions on a variety of topics that are on clients’ minds for the upcoming session on January 4th. It is common to see a variety of advocacy organizations publish the annual “report card” for current legislators who are seeking reelection, and I’ve always wondered if the adage – if you can’t say anything nice – why say anything at all isn’t the best path to take?

We all know how it works in Hartford and even Washington DC. The very controversial and HOT topics seem to come down to party-line votes, and even the topics that are not so HOT have back stories on why certain electeds voted a certain way.

How they voted on previous legislation might reflect that there might be in their district a very large and active advocacy group. Or, it might be important to their business community or organizations that decided how they would cast their vote. Each legislator might not be 100% opposed or supportive of the specific language of the bill, but may believe the problem needs to be fixed, just not in that way. It might be that a particular person is a leader of a community organization that finds the proposed bill to be unworkable or goes too far too quickly but the legislator gets tarred and feathered as if they opposed the actual solution and therefore are against the group publishing the scorecard……KEEP READING.