Democrats Sweep Connecticut, Flipping Nearly 30 Towns Blue Again

Tuesday’s elections saw big Democratic wins in a lot of small towns: In 29 Connecticut cities and towns, residents flipped local leadership from red to blue.

Governor Ned Lamont and Danbury Mayor Roberto Alves celebrated the wins as a blue wave.

“That is remarkable. That is historic, and we did it with a broad spectrum of folks in the electorate,” said Alves to the CT Mirror. “We had moderate candidates, we have progressive candidates. We are the big-tent party.”

In Connecticut, Democrats now control local government in 102 of the state’s 169 cities and towns, as well as two-third of the seats in the General Assembly, and every constitutional office like governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general.

Chris Anderson, the local Democratic chair of a district that flipped blue, said this was a sign the electorate was rejecting what’s happening nationally. “This was an absolute referendum on the direction that the city and country is going. New Britain voters, for the first time in a very long time, elected Democrats to represent every single seat in the city,” Anderson said.

Connecticut’s races point to the broader pattern observed in the recent off-year elections across the country: Voters are rejecting Trumpism. This leftward course correction from the 2024 elections isn’t altogether unexpected; usually, the out-of-power party gains back ground in the midterms. But with a rightward shift observed across the United States in 2024, Democrats are hungry for confirmation that they could take back power in Congress in 2026.

Democrats’ blue wave this week swelled into areas of the country that haven’t voted liberal in more than a century.

Beaver County elected Democrat Lincoln Kretchmar as its new mayor Tuesday, ending a 113-year losing streak in the Pennsylvania commonwealth.

The shock win followed a national trend, as people across the country voted blue on Election Day, securing major wins in New York City, New Jersey, Virginia, and Georgia. The massive turnout—and the pro-Democrat results—have been interpreted as a nationwide reaction to Donald Trump’s second-term policies.

In Beaver County, local anti-Republican sentiment was just strong enough to oust Republican incumbent Thomas Todd Hamilton by a margin of 13 votes. In the end, Kretchmar received 917 votes compared to Hamilton’s 904. Incredibly, the mayor before Hamilton—Robert Linn—served a whopping 58 years in office, first entering City Hall in 1946.

It remains to be seen whether Beaver County’s twisting political perspectives could be a bellwether for the larger state of Pennsylvania, which has become an unpredictable swing state in presidential elections since Trump won over its electorate in 2016.

Democrats in the borough were ecstatic by the sudden shift in fate for their local party.

“We were very excited with all our wins up and down the ticket on Tuesday evening,” Erin Gabriel, chair of the Beaver County Democratic Committee, told Newsweek. “Voters were certainly responding to the high cost of living and increasing affordability crisis. Our new Mayor-Elect was especially effective in his response to a recent tax increase in Beaver Boro and voters really responded to his calls for more transparency in government.

“At a time when Republicans are focused on tearing things down it’s been Democrats lifting up our neighbors and communities. Voters can see that clearly and responded emphatically on Tuesday across the country,” Gabriel added.

The Trump administration has “found more room” in the SNAP contingency fund and will only be cutting benefits by 35 percent, the Agriculture Department said Wednesday.

The USDA had previously announced a plan to cut the food stamp program by 50 percent—so why did it suddenly change its tune? The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report Wednesday that concluded that the Trump administration, based on its spending plan, planned to release two-thirds of the contingency fund—only about $3 billion, compared to the $4.65 billion available.

The CBPP quickly filed its findings in court, and the USDA then said it would fix the “error.”

“Further analysis found more room in the contingency,” a USDA spokesperson told Axios. “All of this would be solved if Senate Democrats vote to reopen the government.”

The USDA had initially said, after being ordered by a court, that it would only fund 50 percent of SNAP benefits for November and that the benefits could take months to be paid out. Then, adding to the confusion, President Trump went on Truth Social to say that benefits wouldn’t be paid out at all, which White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was quick to write off as a misunderstanding.

There’s no way to know whether the USDA made a genuine mistake or purposefully tried to shortchange families. But when it comes to how the money is paid out, some states believe that the administration is delaying payouts unnecessarily. In a letter to the agency, Pennsylvania said USDA had chosen the “most complex and labor-intensive approach possible” to issue the benefits, according to CNN.

What’s more, the courts have already affirmed that there’s no legal reason for the USDA to cut benefits at all: It could transfer funds from other food assistance programs, like it did earlier this month with WIC, the child nutrition program, to provide families with their full November payments.

Rumors about Donald Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein have gripped the Republican Party.

A few conservative representatives with ties to the FBI and the Justice Department have spilled that the true details of the Epstein files are “worse” for Trump than previously reported, according to journalist David Schuster.

Michael Wolff, a longtime chronicler of Trump’s White House who conducted extensive interviews with Epstein prior to his death, told The Daily Beast last month that Epstein had shown him photos of Trump with half-naked “young girls” in his lap.

These rumors have galvanized into a legitimate movement among Republicans, who are now, Schuster wrote on X Wednesday night, clamoring for the files’ full release.

For months, just four Republicans had penned their signatures on a discharge petition demanding transparency into the investigation of the pedophilic sex trafficker and his potential associates. Those conservative lawmakers include Representatives Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace, and Lauren Boebert.

Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won the special election in Arizona in September, has also vowed to sign the bipartisan petition. She’s the last signature that the House needs to force a vote on the issue—and Speaker Mike Johnson has conveniently refused to swear her in for more than a month.

But the disturbing new rumor has dredged up far more support, with “more than 100 Republicans” planning to vote alongside Democrats in an effort to “get in front of what’s coming,” reported Schuster.

The Trump administration has failed at every turn to mitigate anxieties about the president’s longtime friendship with the child sex criminal. The typically bombastic Attorney General Pam Bondi was silent when asked about the photos during a Senate hearing last month, a choice that further “spooked” several GOP lawmakers, with many interpreting her nonresponse as a very vocal “yes.”

“The question is, did the FBI find those photographs that have been discussed publicly by a witness who claimed that Jeffrey Epstein showed them to him?” asked Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse in early October.

But Bondi could only blink with her mouth agape.

“You don’t know anything about that?” Whitehouse said. “OK.”

Donald Trump’s Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy announced Wednesday that flights would be cut 10 percent at 40 U.S. airports due to the government shutdown beginning this week, complicating Thanksgiving travel later this month.

“We had a gut check of what is our job,” Duffy said, adding that a confidential document showed that the impact of the shutdown was hurting air traffic controllers’ ability to perform safely. “Our job is to make sure we make the hard decisions to continue to keep the airspace safe.”

The FAA told major carriers that cuts would start at 4 percent on Friday and go up to 5 percent Saturday and 6 percent Sunday before reaching 10 percent next week, sources in the air industry told Reuters. International flights are exempted from the cuts.

While the 40 airports were not named, CBS News reported the expected list of airports:

1. Anchorage International (ANC)
2. Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International (ATL)
3. Boston Logan International (BOS)
4. Baltimore/Washington International (BWI)
5. Charlotte Douglas International (CLT)
6. Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International (CVG)
7. Dallas Love (DAL)
8. Ronald Reagan Washington National (DCA)
9. Denver International (DEN)
10. Dallas/Fort Worth International (DFW)
11. Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County (DTW)
12. Newark Liberty International (EWR)
13. Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International (FLL)
14. Honolulu International (HNL)
15. Houston Hobby (HOU)
16. Washington Dulles International (IAD)
17. George Bush Houston Intercontinental (IAH)
18. Indianapolis International (IND)
19. New York John F Kennedy International (JFK)
20. Las Vegas Harry Reid International (LAS)
21. Los Angeles International (LAX)
22. New York LaGuardia (LGA)
23. Orlando International (MCO)
24. Chicago Midway (MDW)
25. Memphis International (MEM)
26. Miami International (MIA)
27. Minneapolis/St Paul International (MSP)
28. Oakland International (OAK)
29. Ontario International (ONT)
30. Chicago O`Hare International (ORD)
31. Portland International (PDX)
32. Philadelphia International (PHL)
33. Phoenix Sky Harbor International (PHX)
34. San Diego International (SAN)
35. Louisville International (SDF)
36. Seattle/Tacoma International (SEA)
37. San Francisco International (SFO)
38. Salt Lake City International (SLC)
39. Teterboro (TEB)
40. Tampa International (TPA)

The cuts come as a result of 13,000 air traffic controllers and 50,000 TSA agents having to work without pay, and Duffy blamed Democrats, saying that flights would be fully restored if Democrats reopened the government. Already, 3.2 million air travelers have had to deal with flight delays and cancellations.

Duffy is echoing the same Republican line throughout the 36-day record shutdown to blame the other party. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson has refused to reopen the House or swear in Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election more than a month ago.

The GOP refuses to budge on extending health care subsidies, and instead of coming to a deal that gets Senate Democrats on board, Trump wants to ram through a government funding bill by getting rid of the filibuster, which would hurt Republicans in the long term. Tuesday’s election results show that the American public blames the GOP not just for the shutdown but for everything else wrong in the country, and maybe Republicans ought to change their behavior.