Rob Hotaling, the Independent candidate for Governor of Connecticut, says that he is the true moderate in this year’s gubernatorial race.

In general elections, where politicians jockey for the title of “moderate” in an effort to appeal to a wider swath of voters, Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont and Republican candidate Bob Stefanowski have positioned themselves as moderates within their own parties, and have sought to discredit the other’s bipartisan bonafides. In a race where Stefanowski says he is center-right, and Lamont center-left, Hotaling has laid claim to being directly in the center.

“I think it’s disingenuous for them to paint themselves as moderates when you look at their positions,” Hotaling said of the major party candidates. “The point of the Independent Party is, I don’t have thousands of members saying, ‘If you say this, we disown you,’ like the Republicans do, or the Democrats do. I’m only beholden to the best ideas… Only I can break through the blue-red divide.”

Arriving at Independent

A senior vice president at Webster Bank and a Cheshire resident, Hotaling started his career in politics as a Democrat working on former Gov. Dan Malloy’s 2010 campaign. He said that over time, he came to disagree with the fiscal policies of the Democratic Party. After a stint as an unaffiliated voter, he went on to join the Republican Party, “But then with Trump and the direction the party was going, I went back to being unaffiliated again.”

Michael Telesca, the state Independent Party Chair, asked Hotaling to run because the party wanted its own candidate.

“I think I’m fundamentally different than other candidates in that I was asked to run,” Hotaling said.

In 2018, Stefanowski also ran on the Independent Party line. He attempted to do the same this year, but was stifled, as Telesca broke a 79-79 tie between Hotaling and Stefanowski at the party caucus.

“I’m an Independent Party member, I arrived at that point over a long period of time, it’s unfathomable for someone to come into the Democrats and say, don’t vote for Ned Lamont, vote for me, or to go to the Republicans and say, don’t vote for Stefanowski, vote for me,” Hotaling said. “Stefanowski spent a lot of money and bused people in” to the caucus, Hotaling went on. “He had two or three buses outside with people to bring them in. I think he thought it was in the bag.”

Stefanowski sent The Day a statement on the matter but did not comment on the veracity of Hotaling’s claims of busing in votes.

"Mr. Hotaling is welcome to live in the past; I am focused on the future and ensuring neither Ned Lamont nor Rob Hotaling is the next governor of this state, since both support bringing tolls to our highways, treating criminals better than our brave cops, and mandating low-income housing in all of our towns," Stefanowski said in the statement.

Hotaling added, “You can’t buy votes in Connecticut.” But he acknowledges that it’s difficult for someone who isn’t wealthy to run for governor. Hotaling has spent around $43,000 of his own money on his campaign, whereas Lamont has spent almost $15 million and Stefanowski more than $9 million.

“Unfortunately the higher the office, the more money you need to compete. From the beginning no one challenged my qualifications, what they challenged was my viability. And they say, viability equals money because money allows you to multiply your message,” Hotaling said.

He argued the state should open its primaries because right now, 930,000 people, or 41% of eligible voters, are subsidizing closed major party primaries. “People are paying for this, and they don’t get too participate,” he said. He also made the point that the Citizen’s Election Program meant to offer public financing and even the playing field has almost prohibitive requirements to qualify as a gubernatorial candidate.

Top priorities

Hotaling has made tolls and reforming the Education Cost Sharing system two of the hallmarks of his campaign. He said residents are weary of tolls — Lamont backed away from them, and Stefanowski flat-out rejects the idea — because the state already has an onerous tax burden.

“Bob said it on the debate stage — we’ll be the most taxed. I don’t think he’s wrong, because Lamont has no intention of dropping the taxes,” he said. “40% of our traffic is people from New York and Massachusetts coming through our state. They tear up our roads.” New York and Massachusetts funds their roads and bridges with toll dollars.

“If we drop taxes elsewhere and make the cost of living, the cost of doing business, more affordable in Connecticut, then tolls aren’t a problem,” Hotaling said.

Education Cost Sharing funding is about $2 billion in aid the state annually distributes among school districts based on a fixed formula that is driven by population.

“If you want better student achievement, what’s the best correlation? Student to teacher ratio, classroom size, competitive pay for teachers, and certain types of curriculum,” Hotaling said. “What we have now is, what’s your home, what’s your car, where do you live, that has nothing to do with student achievement.”

Economy

Hotaling took issue with Lamont’s criticism after a gubernatorial debate last month when the governor said his opponents want to spend too much of Connecticut’s $4.1 billion surplus.

“He tried to say about me and Bob, ‘These two spent the rainy day fund two or three times over.’ He may have been right about Bob, not me. I explicitly have told everyone I would spend 5% to 15% of the surplus,” Hotaling said.

He said he would spend the money on closing the achievement gap by investing in infrastructure and energy and addressing cost of living.

Hotaling called the State Pier deal “mismanaged.”

“If you go back and look at the records, Lamont already knew that it was under projected, and he still proceeded to sell it at $92 million. Now it’s ballooned to $255 million,” Hotaling said. “Should we invest in wind? Yes. Should we invest in solar? Yes. We should invest in clean energy. But we have to do it in an affordable way that doesn’t sink taxpayer money. Taxpayers are paying for this. And really what you hear from the administration is, ‘Oops.’ Oops isn’t good enough.”

Affordable housing

Stefanowski has argued the state should repeal a law — 8-30g — that seeks to bolster the number of Connecticut’s affordable housing units. He said it threatens local zoning control. Hotaling and Lamont disagree.

“Last time I checked, the legislature’s Democratic-led. You’re going to repeal it and replace it with what?” Hotaling said. “I think we should restructure 8-30g, rather than repeal.”

Hotaling has a variety of ideas on affordable housing.

“There’s a lot of abandoned homes in the state, and we should do something there in terms of refurbishing them for people to live in,” he said. “There’s also classifying affordable housing as affordable. $1,000 a month in rent may be considered affordable, but once you go to $2,000, is that really affordable?”

Hotaling echoed affordable housing advocates in saying the state should look at mother-in-law apartments, carriage houses and apartments not under deed restriction to rent out. He argued that in some cases, commercial buildings should be re-zoned to mixed residential to fill some of the empty office spaces in the state.

“The fundamental point is we can’t have marginalized citizens who work in a community often not be able to afford to live in that community,” he said.

Guns, democracy, abortion

Hotaling, who noted that he once founded a tech startup meant to help public safety workers with gunshot detection, said he is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, “but I’m also a supporter of common sense gun laws.” He is supportive of the recent bipartisan legislation signed by President Joe Biden, which included some modest gun control measures. He doesn’t plan on trying to change or add to Connecticut’s gun regulations.

Hotaling said Biden won the 2020 election fairly and that the democratic process worked.

“But I would also say this is exactly why you need an Independent Party, a third party, because it will stop this tribalism of Democrats and Republicans going after each other on this issue,” he said. “If you had an Independent registrar, and an Independent Secretary of the State, no one can call foul.”

While Hotaling didn’t explicitly say he supports no-excuse absentee voting, he did say the reasons for being able to vote absentee should be expanded. Like the other candidates for governor, he is in favor of early voting. Unlike the other candidates, he is a fan of ranked choice voting.

Hotaling joins his competitors as a pro-choice candidate.

The Independent candidate said abortion “needs to be safe, legal, but rare.” To make it rare, he suggested investing more in family planning. Hotaling agrees with the safe harbor abortion law passed in 2022 that protects out-of-state women from prosecution for getting an abortion in Connecticut and Connecticut medical providers from legal actions taken against them from another state.

“It’s not right that you can have a patient come from out of state and a doctor or nurse could be sued and have their license removed,” he said. “I’m a fan of choice. I’m a choice candidate. It may not be my choice, but I don’t believe the government should stand in the way of your decisions.”

s.spinella@theday.com