Connecticut votes town by town — all 169 of them — which makes its political map the finest mosaic in the country. The largest change of the past generation is on the shoreline. Fairfield County’s Gold Coast — Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan, the hedge-fund suburbs that were the Republican base of New England — has realigned Democratic. Greenwich, the home of Prescott and George H. W. Bush and a Republican town for most of a century, backed the Democrat by sixteen points in 2024; Westport by forty-four, New Canaan by fourteen.
The old industrial cities have stayed Democratic and grown more so: Hartford by sixty-five points in 2024, New Haven by sixty-three, Bridgeport by forty-seven. The red that remains keeps to the rural edges — the Quiet Corner in the northeast, where Sterling votes Republican by forty, and the Litchfield Hills in the northwest. Connecticut slipped five and a half points toward Trump in 2024, from a twenty-point Democratic margin in 2020 to fourteen and a half, but the move concentrated in working-class Waterbury, a heavily Hispanic city that stayed Democratic by only eleven — the state’s own small echo of the national Latino shift.
It is a wealthy, old, and Catholic state: eighth of the fifty in median household income, sixth in the share of adults holding a bachelor’s degree, the seventh-oldest in median age, and sixth in Catholic adherence, the legacy of Irish, Italian, and Polish industrial migration. In 2026 Governor Ned Lamont, a Greenwich Democrat, seeks a third term against a Democratic primary challenger, state Representative Josh Elliott, and the Republican state senator Ryan Fazio; both U.S. Senate seats sit out the cycle.
Akashic