Gov. Ned Lamont of Connecticut on Tuesday joined a select few politicians who have been elected to a third term leading the state, according to The Associated Press. He overmatched Ryan Fazio, a Republican state senator, tightening Democrats’ grip on power.
Mr. Lamont, 72, is only the second Connecticut governor to earn a third consecutive term in the past 200 years. The first was John G. Rowland, a former rising star in the Republican Party who resigned from office in 2004 because of a corruption scandal. He was twice imprisoned and received a pardon from President Trump.
During World War II, Raymond Baldwin, a Republican, was elected to three nonconsecutive terms of two years each. (Governors in the state now serve four-year terms.)
On the campaign trail and in television ads, Mr. Lamont sought to tie Mr. Fazio’s candidacy to what the governor argued was the extreme agenda of Republicans, led by Mr. Trump, on immigration, education, cuts to the social safety net, gun control laws and the environment.
Mr. Lamont, who was first elected in 2018, said that Mr. Fazio’s election would undo the progress he had made toward wiping away fiscal deficits and cutting taxes for middle-income residents.
Mr. Fazio, 36, who represents Greenwich and parts of Stamford and New Canaan, entered the race with little name recognition and failed to gain significant traction, trailing the governor by double digits in a mid-October Quinnipiac University poll.
In stark contrast with Mr. Fazio, who was running for statewide office for the first time, Mr. Lamont has spent the better part of two decades getting acquainted with voters in Connecticut.
His introduction came in 2006 as a little-known primary challenger to Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, a Democrat and former vice-presidential nominee who was heavily favored to win re-election.
Tapping into Democratic opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq, Mr. Lamont achieved a stunning upset in the primary, only to lose in the general election to Mr. Lieberman, who petitioned his way onto the ballot as an independent and later caucused with Democrats.
In 2010, Mr. Lamont ran for governor, but lost in the Democratic primary to Dannel P. Malloy, who served two terms.
Since his successful second run for the state’s highest office, Mr. Lamont, a J.P. Morgan scion from Greenwich who expanded his wealth in the cable television industry, has enjoyed durable approval numbers.
He has developed a reputation of avoiding flare-ups with political foes on both sides of the aisle and has managed, unlike several of his blue-state counterparts, to avoid the wrath of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Fazio had sought to present Mr. Lamont as a plutocrat who was detached from everyday concerns about the high costs of living and doing business in Connecticut, pointing to what he argued were crippling taxes and electricity rates.
The challenger’s path to the ballot was virtually untested.
In May, two days before Connecticut Republicans were scheduled to choose a nominee, Erin Stewart, one of Mr. Fazio’s chief rivals, withdrew from the race amid fraud accusations tied to her time as mayor of New Britain. She endorsed Mr. Fazio, who easily secured the nomination.
Casting himself in television ads as Connecticut’s Clark Kent and as a healer saving a patient from death, Mr. Fazio accused Mr. Lamont of undercutting local control over zoning and supporting a tax climate favorable to data centers. (Mr. Lamont supported a 2021 law that provided tax incentive agreements to some data centers, but has since said he opposes the largest such facilities.)
But that criticism did not land with voters in reliably blue Connecticut, which has not elected a Republican to statewide office in 20 years. The last was M. Jodi Rell, a former lieutenant governor who replaced Mr. Rowland after his resignation and then secured a full term as governor in 2006.
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