The race for governor changed yet again Monday as one candidate dropped out and another joined the race.<\/p>\n
Danbury Mayor Mark D. Boughton became the latest Republican to join the race, while state Sen. Gary LeBeau, a Democrat, dropped out. That brings the number to 12 candidates for the seat being left vacant by popular Republican Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who is not seeking re-election after more than five years as governor.<\/p>\n
Boughton, who has served as mayor since winning his first term in November 2001, said in an interview that he is the only candidate to have served both as a mayor and a state legislator. Boughton followed in the footsteps of his father, who also served as both Danbury mayor and a legislator in the 1990s.<\/p>\n
Although Greenwich multi-millionaire Tom Foley and Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele had higher ratings in the latest Quinnipiac University poll, Boughton noted that he had 6 percent of the vote in the poll without yet having declared his candidacy. By far, the leading response among Republicans in the poll was “undecided” at a whopping 59 percent – followed by Foley at 17 percent and Fedele at 8 percent.<\/p>\n
“It’s a wide-open race on the Republican side,” Boughton said Monday in an interview. “I would not say there are any front-runners in the race.”<\/p>\n
Pushing for more jobs at a time when the state’s unemployment rate is 8.9 percent, Boughton said the state needs “one-stop shopping” for companies to receive financial help in either expanding or relocating to Connecticut. The Senate Democrats called for the same idea Monday – a concept that has been touted for years but never seems to get accomplished.<\/p>\n
In another long-running idea, Boughton said he favors property tax reform that would involve removing unfunded mandates for cities and towns. Some politicians favor allowing Danbury to keep part of the 6 percent state sales tax from the millions of dollars in sales at the city’s gigantic shopping mall near the New York State border, but Boughton did not immediately embrace that proposal Monday.<\/p>\n
“Everything should be on the table,” Boughton said. “I don’t favor one particular method over another.”<\/p>\n
Boughton, who turns 46 in less than three weeks, is a Danbury native who graduated from the city’s high school and later attended Central Connecticut State University in New Britain. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in American history, he later earned a master’s degree in his hometown at Western Connecticut State University. He began teaching social studies at his high school alma mater five years after graduating.<\/p>\n
After winning elections for state representative in 1998 and 2000, he won his first race for mayor in November 2001 and has won multiple elections since then. His blog already has a picture of himself with Rell.<\/p>\n
While Boughton was getting into the race, LeBeau was bowing out. He had fared poorly in the latest Quinnipiac University poll and had not gained much traction in his campaign since his announcement in late July in his hometown of East Hartford.<\/p>\n
A former member of the state House of Representatives for four years, LeBeau lost a race for the state Senate in 1994 to Republican Kevin Rennie by 76 votes. Two years later, he defeated Rennie, who is now a Courant columnist, in a year when the Democrats regained control of the Senate.<\/p>\n
A retired public school teacher, LeBeau, 62, has served for the past 13 years in the state Senate. During 11 years as co-chairman of the legislature’s commerce committee, LeBeau has been heavily involved in various business initiatives involving tax incentives and new technologies like fuel cells. LeBeau had been raising money for the campaign with the help of his treasurer, former East Hartford Mayor Tim Larson, who lives on the same street as LeBeau.<\/p>\n
LeBeau was among a large group of candidates for governor that former state Democratic chairman John F. Droney calls “second and third-tier players.”<\/p>\n
When he started running for governor, LeBeau conceded that relatively few people knew who he is because he has never run for statewide office.<\/p>\n
“The state has no idea who Gary LeBeau is,” LeBeau said in an interview with The Hartford Courant in late July. “My guess is my name recognition, statewide, is maybe 5 or 6 percent. Even town committee people, they don’t know who I am.”<\/p>\n
But state Republican Chairman Christopher Healy said LeBeau’s name recognition statewide was even lower – at “less than 1 percent.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The race for governor changed yet again Monday as one candidate dropped out and another joined the race. Danbury Mayor Mark D. Boughton became the latest Republican to join the race, while state Sen. Gary LeBeau, a Democrat, dropped out. That brings the number to 12 candidates for the seat being left vacant by popular […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4001,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4001"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}