As I write this I am sitting in the room adjacent to the Registrar of Groton’s office. Early voting is going on in the registrar’s office, and we are taking care of new registrants in the room in which I am planted. Early voting for the municipal offices has been ongoing for a week and it’s my understanding that the turnout has been fairly good. I thought when I agreed to work some of these days that I’d be assigned to log in the folks who came to vote, but I am in fact helping to register new voters, and as you can imagine, the number of people coming in to register for the first time is far lower than those already registered who are coming in to vote. In fact, as of the time I write this, the number of new voters is in the single digit. It may be a little more busy here on Election Day itself, but it won’t be like last year’s Election Day, when I also helped register voters and we were pretty busy.
The municipal elections here in Groton may well be a test of how informed the average voter may be. Before the orange fascist came along the Republicans in Groton usually held majorities in our municipal offices and were either the majority or close to the majority in the Representative Town Meeting (RTM). That all changed after Trump’s first election. The year after he won, the Democrats won not just a majority on the Town Council (the Board of Ed and the RTM both have minority representation requirements) but, if memory serves, either all nine seats or all but one.
The Republican Party here in Groton is now a shell of its former self. Until that time years ago it was headed by fairly reasonable people. You know, people whose parents were Republicans in the olden days, who became Republicans themselves and really didn’t focus on what was happening to their party nationally. They have been displaced by whackjobs and the party itself has, this year, been unable to field a full slate of candidates. In the district in which I live, in which a fairly high percentage of Republicans reside (It contains Groton Long Point, a rich person enclave that sticks out into Long Island Sound), the party has failed to nominate a single person to the RTM, despite the fact that at least one of them would win no matter how many votes he or she got.
Realizing that their brand has fallen into disfavor, many of the whackjobs have rebranded themselves as members of the Groton Independent Party, the candidates being indistinguishable from a policy perspective from the Republican candidates. It is not the refuge of those old fashioned Republicans I described above, who have dropped out of politics and/or become Democrats. However, that is something of which not every voter is aware. We will soon be finding out how many people will blindly vote for a rebranded Republican because, after all, doesn’t voting for an Independent prove you’re not a captive of either party?