Paul Bass Photo
Maria Hunenko doesn’t “vote by party.” She voted in the Tuesday gubernatorial election based on what she learned in a TV commercial about one of the candidates’ personal wealth.
Hunenko actually belongs to Connecticut’s largest political party — the un-party, the 818,389 voters who register as unaffiliated with a political party. They constitute 43 percent of the electorate (compared with the Democrats at 37 percent and Republicans at 21 percent). Democratic governor Dannel P. Malloy and Republican challenger Tom Foley and their supporters aimed tens of millions of dollars of scorching attack ads at those voters leading up to Tuesday’s too-close-to-call election.
In interviews at New Haven – area polling places, from the shoreline through the city to the Naugatuck Valley, unaffiliated voters Tuesday reported selecting different candidates, but they roundly agreed about the quality of those TV ads, which were deemed the most consistently negative among all gubernatorial races across the country this year.
Judy Connelly, for one, said she couldn’t wait for Election Day to come so the TV ads would end.
“I don’t like how they berate each other,” said Judy Connelly, a self-described “domestic goddess” who cast a vote for Foley about noon at Ansonia’s St. Anthony’s Church. She insisted that the election advertising didn’t affect her choice of candidate: “They were talking more about the other guy’s faults than what they want to do.”
Allan Appel Photo
“I didn’t watch TV [ads],” insisted Sandra Trevino Ranalli, an unaffiliated voter at the Nathan Hale School in New Haven’s Morris Cove. She pulled out her phone to show why: “I have two kids under the age of 3! The billions spent make me sick. We should feed our children with those billions.”
Another Nathan Hale voter, who wore shorts (and declined to give his name), said a Malloy attack ad on Foley — for sending manufacture jobs to Mexico — actually helped convince him to vote for Foley: “They harped on how he made money. That’s what business is about.”
Split-ticket unaffiliated registrant Bill Ewen (in video) said he was so turned off that he cast his vote for a candidate whose name did not appear on the ballot — John McKinney, who lost the Aug. 12 Republican gubernatorial primary to Foley.
Paul Bass Photo
Alex Hunenko, a retired art professor (and Ukrainian-born concentration camp survivor), insisted that he would “switch over to another channel or go to mute” every time one of those “revolting” Malloy or Foley ads came on TV. “The thing that bothered me was the enormous funds that were expended on … garbage. Where is that money coming from? And where is it going?”
His wife Maria (pictured at the top of the story), who joined him in voting for Malloy at the New Haven Ward 25 polling place at Edgewood School in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood, did confess to watching one of those commercials — and casting her vote based on it.
“One of the advertisements said it — [Foley’s] yacht. His houses. He fired people. If it wasn’t true, he would have sued them for false claims,” Hunenko reasoned. “Since he didn’t, I assumed” it was true.
Marcia Chambers Photo
Two different unaffiliated voters cited the same ad when discussing their decision to vote for Malloy Tuesday outside two different Branford polling stations Tuesday. Ronald Choronzy (pictured), who has lived in Branford all his life, said he remembered the commercial about Foley’s “luxury yacht and his business acumen.” Similarly, a 92-year-old woman (who declined to give her name) said she did not pay attention to the commercials in general, but did recall the one about Tom Foley’s extravagant living, she said, “the one with the yacht.”
Allan Appel, Marcia Chambers, Ethan Fry, and David Sepulveda contributed reporting.