Statement on Gov. Malloy’s & Minority Leader Klarides’s Post-Election Remarks

Lori J. Pelletier, President of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, made the following statement in response to Minority Leader Themis Klarides’s and Governor Malloy’s post-election remarks where they claimed that candidates who lost were outworked:

“Gov. Malloy and Minority Leader Klarides too easily and snidely dismiss the countless hours these candidates and their many volunteers spent knocking on doors and working the phones. It’s a convenient rationale to say they were ‘outworked,’ but the truth is far more complicated than that.

“We saw an unprecedented amount of spending by anti-worker, pro-corporate groups that often deceptively linked the Governor to many of our labor-endorsed candidates, even those who were not incumbents.

“Hillary Clinton, Richard Blumenthal, and all of our congressional candidates easily won their races in Connecticut. But when some voters moved down the ballot to state senator and state representative races, they sent a message with their vote that they were opposed to the Governor, helping elect candidates with agendas openly hostile to working families.

“The vast majority of candidates who decide to run for public office do so selflessly and with an admirable work ethic. Criticizing losing candidates for not working hard enough is simply a way to minimize the real reasons for the election results – unprecedented outside spending, the wildly unpopular 2016 budget, and a governor whose diminishing popularity was exploited by Republican leadership and their wealthy backers.”

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