Stamford state Rep. Anabel Figueroa, a member of the city’s Board of Representatives, may be a bit of a demagogue. But is she really a hater of Jews? That’s the charge leveled against her by the Democratic City Committee, which is moving to expel her this week.

Figueroa is in trouble for a comment she made as she campaigned for renomination for state representative by the Democrats in a primary last month. She said her district, heavily Hispanic, couldn’t possibly consider electing her challenger, Jonathan Jacobson, because he’s Jewish. The context of this comment and others Figueroa made during the primary campaign seems not to have been prejudice or malice but rather ethnic entitlement and pandering — the premise that, being so Hispanic, her district just had to be represented by a fellow Hispanic, especially since its people are disproportionately poor and need the special understanding only an ethnic compatriot can provide.

Figueroa’s comments became controversial during the campaign and her district — or at least the Democrats who voted in the primary — repudiated her premise, nominating Jacobson with 63% of the vote. Religion and ethnicity may not have mattered much if at all to anyone who voted, aside from Figueroa herself.

Only Figueroa can be sure of what’s in her heart. But she didn’t say Jews should be persecuted. Instead her remarks probably were motivated by the chance to engage in old-fashioned ethnic politics. She may have thought that stuff mattered, or she may have wanted it to.

Quite unconsciously, Connecticut long has been acquitting itself of its past in that regard.

From the 1850s to the early 1960s the state’s politics sometimes pitted Yankee Protestants and immigrant Catholics against each other, and then Irish, Italians and Poles against each other. Eventually the political parties tried to smooth over these conflicts by balancing their tickets ethnically and religiously. As time went on, Jews were fit in.

This ticket balancing was a primitive but well-intended and integrating practice, if sometimes silly, as during the many years when both major parties reserved their nominations for U.S. representative at large for candidates of Polish descent.

Blacks were invisible in state politics until the 1960s but as the civil rights movement gained during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, their new allegiance to the Democratic Party won them a place in ticket balancing. Indeed, for the last 60 years the party has reserved its nomination for state treasurer for a Black candidate, as if no white Democrat has any mathematical ability.

With the exception of the Democratic nomination for treasurer, the ethnic obsession in state politics has faded away. But in recent years something very much like it has been making a comeback with the Democrats — their celebrating themselves for nominating the occasional gay candidate. This practice presumes dubiously that any gay person who has made it to adulthood in Connecticut must have overcome terrible challenges. It also seems to presume dubiously that minority sexual orientation may be more of a qualification for public office than experience with government and familiarity with issues.

But of course Democrats wouldn’t celebrate candidates for their minority sexual orientation if the party didn’t think that these days almost any minority status is politically advantageous, since nearly all state residents favor equal opportunity. Connecticut is overwhelmingly libertarian on sexual orientation, having decriminalized homosexuality 53 years ago and having declined to enforce the law for decades before that.

So should Figueroa be banished from Stamford’s Democratic committee for her clumsy political opportunism? Or would that just embitter some Hispanics against the Jewish candidate who bested her? Is Figueroa’s defeat for renomination as state representative not enough of a lesson? Does she need to be denied renomination to the city's Board of Representatives as well?

Or should Figueroa be forgiven on account of the service done to Connecticut by her humiliation — for her showing the state that contriving ethnic, racial and religious rivalries is finished as a formula for political success?

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. He can be reached at CPowell@cox.net.