Heading into last week’s municipal elections, Ellington First Selectman Lori Spielman seemed well positioned to hold her grip on town hall.
The Republican had won five straight terms, all by a comfortable margin or with no opponent at all. That made sense. The smallish, mostly rural eastern Connecticut town has a far larger number of registered GOP voters than registered Democrats – a gap that widened over the last four years.
To her credit, Spielman in this year’s election exactly matched her largest ever vote total, 2,250 – the same as in 2021. That year, she snagged a 501-vote victory.
But it was not enough in 2025. Spielman’s opponent, Laurie Burstein, drew a groundswell of Democrats and beat Spielman by more than 150 votes – making Burstein the first Democrat elected to Ellington’s corner office in 22 years.
Across Connecticut, we saw pretty much the same pattern in the Nov. 4 election. As most observers know by now, Republicans suffered a rout, ceding the top office in 28 cities and towns to Democrats – or 30, depending on how you count oddities in Killingly (no mayor or first selectman) and Putnam (a mayor who switched parties), up in the state’s odd corner.
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The GOP took back exactly one town, Easton, by five votes after a recount Wednesday.
With lopsided results like that, you might assume Democrats lured swing voters to their side as Republicans saw their support shrivel. Not true. Republicans didn’t lose voters; Democrats gained them.
A close look at the numbers shows that just as Spielman did in Ellington, Republicans running for mayor and first selectman held their ground in 2025, actually adding 2,300 votes compared with GOP candidates in the same towns four years earlier.
Democrats? Across Connecticut, the local candidates for mayor and first selectman turbocharged their combined votes by a powerful 22.5 percent compared with 2021, a hike of just over 50,000 votes amid a backlash against President Donald Trump’s actions and the federal shutdown.
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And they did it across all counties, in towns large and small, rich and poor, liberal and conservative. The richest towns swung further toward the Democrats, speeding up a shift we’ve seen in state and federal races for years. Many of the towns that flipped parties at the top are from the industrial heartland and the rural conservative base.
The big question, of course, is whether this municipal mauling of Republicans, echoed across the United States on Election Day, tells us anything about what will happen in 2026 and beyond. Democrats and Republicans don’t agree, to no one’s surprise. Either way, the numbers offer clues.
Highlights of a rout
We closely examined the town-by-town results, comparing the 124 municipalities that held direct elections for their mayors and first selectmen (and in Farmington, the town council chairman) in both 2025 and 2021. With help from our friends at the nonprofit CTData Collaborative (CTData.org) we looked at the breakdown by population, median income and educational attainment in each city and town.
We chose 2021 because that’s on the same four-year cycle as 2025, the year following a presidential election. Hartford, Bridgeport and Waterbury, among other places, did not hold elections for mayor in either year.
The rout swung control of a majority of city and town halls from the Republicans – their last bastion of power in this state – to Democrats, who now control 102 of 169 cities and towns. Some highlights:
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TRUMP SWOON: The GOP won in 78 of the 124 cities and towns four years ago, in the year following former President Joe Biden’s defeat of former and current President Donald Trump. They had a combined average margin of 1.9 percentage points in their favor. This year, Republicans won just 48 of those races even though they had a nice head start with 21 unopposed races. And when this year’s votes were tallied, the average margin showed Democrats ahead by 7.3 percentage points – a 9.2 percentage point swing.
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A FACTORY SHIFT: Among the 30 that swung from Republican to Democratic control, all except six of them are either rural or old-line industrial towns, not high-income. The flips include Bristol, Ansonia, Stratford, Windsor Locks and New Britain, all notable factory towns. Ten of the flipped towns sided with Trump in 2024. Translation: Blue-collar, “Reagan Democrats,” perhaps coming back to the party.
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GOP HUGS THE MIDDLE: The CTData Collaborative focused on the 83 races in 2025 with a Democrat and Republican vying head-to-head for a top office. Democrats won this group 57 to 26. CTData divided the towns and cities into quintile groups based on population, income and percent of adults with a bachelors degree or higher. Their conclusion: Democrats won evenly in all population groups. By income and education, Republicans fared somewhat better in the middle quintiles. As I see it, that appears to reflect a target audience of MAGA Republicans.
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THE RICH SWITCH: A reversal happened in the 30 richest towns among the 124. Republicans took 19 corner offices in those town halls four years ago compared with 10 for Democrats. This time around, Democrats claimed 16 of them and Republicans settled for just 12. (Two went to petitioning candidates.)
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EARLY VOTING: Democrats handed in more than their share of early and absentee ballots, as 104,000 registered party members voted that way – nearly 30,000 more than what we would expect based on their registration. Republican voters submitted 45,000 early and absentee votes, exactly what we would expect based on their numbers. We know who they are, by name, but we don’t know whether those early-voting Democrats would have cast ballots on Election Day.
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HEFTY GAINS: In 62 towns, Democrats and Republicans faced each other head-to head for first selectman or mayor in both 2025 and 2021. At the midpoint of that list in 2021, Republicans won by 8.8 percentage points. The midpoint for 2025 had Democrats winning by 9.1 points. Forty-three times in those races this year, Democrats posted a vote increase of at least 15 percent over 2021. For example, Stratford’s David Chess bested Republican Mayor Laura Hoydick by fetching 3,171 votes more than Hoydick’s 2021 opponent, a 67% leap. GOP candidates, by contrast, logged 15 percent gains just nine times in last week’s balloting – and lost seven of those races.
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THIS DOESN’T REGISTER: The Republican Party expanded its statewide voter rolls by 26,250 between 2021 and 2025, reaching 21.7 percent of all registered voters. Democrats lost 32,400 over the last four years, falling to 35.2 percent. Remarkably, Democrats gained 50,000 votes for top town candidates despite losing nearly 59,000 people from their registration buffer. They needed a sharp rise in turnout and they got it – as 81,000 more voters showed up in 2025 than in 2021, most voting for Democrats.
‘It gave hope to folks’
What does it all mean? Clearly, a backlash against Trump and the federal government shutdown helped Democrats in Connecticut and across the nation. But every local race has its own story. One incumbent Republican fired a popular town employee and lost narrowly. Another had an open family feud play out on social media. Another ran afoul of the police and fire unions.
Was Spielman, in Ellington, a victim of Trump’s plummeting popularity? She didn’t return my messages for a comment about her race.
“The reality is that Democrats in Connecticut have been delivering and will continue to deliver,” Roberto Alves, the state party chairman and mayor of Danbury, where he won a resounding reelection victory on Nov. 4.
Incumbent Danbury Democratic Mayor Roberto Alves, who is also the state party chairman, speaks to his supporters at Stanziato’s Restaurant on election night, November 4, 2025. (H John Voorhees III/Hearst Connecticut Media)
Alves and other Democrats say the Trump effect, drawing voters out of the woodwork, should hold up. “It’s galvanizing,” Alves said to me. “It gave hope to folks who were just upset, possibly disengaged.”
Not true, Ben Proto, the Republican state chairman, countered. Presidential wins are always bad for their parties in the local elections that follow, he told me. It’s rarely this bad, although, as Proto said, we’re not likely to see a threat to both SNAP food assistance and health care subsidies loom so large in 2026.
It’s hard to imagine Connecticut Republicans advancing while Trump holds office. Proto disagreed strongly when I said that.
“The Democrats I think were clearly better organized and I think it had more to do with the shutdown than with Trump in particular,” Proto told me. “Somehow the Democrats are going to have to keep all these Democrats who turned out, all hopped up for another year.”
For that task, Democrats have a powerful ally in the Oval Office.
dhaar@hearstmediact.com
This article originally published at Dan Haar: A deep dive into the Democrats’ rout of local Republicans in CT cities and towns.
