Is Connecticut’s Grand Old Party ready to be led by a firefighter’s salty daughter? Erin Stewart is betting it is.
Erin Stewart is chronically unfiltered, casually profane and rarely off the record. Over coffee at Cafe Busy Bean, a brisk one-minute walk from her recently vacated office in New Britain’s City Hall, Stewart inquired about the recording app on a reporter’s iPhone. She wanted to make sure it was on.
For the past dozen years, Stewart has been viewed in political circles as occupying a space between curiosity and bona fide phenomenon — a young, white Republican woman elected mayor at age 26 in a Democratic city of 74,000, where 63% of the population are people of color.
Now 38, she is one of two declared candidates for the Republican gubernatorial nomination, hell-bent on testing the notion that the Grand Old Party is ready to be led by a firefighter’s salty daughter, a blue-collar product of New Britain’s public schools and its Central Connecticut State University.
She is a digital native who began posting an edgy series of YouTube videos 11 months ago titled, “Erin It Out.” In the debut, she described a drunken alderman questioning her legitimacy as mayor, bullying her with vulgarities that Stewart quoted in full. Another off-color episode was titled, “WTF?”
Her campaign video announcement posted on Nov. 18, a week after exiting City Hall with an undefeated record in six mayoral elections. It was devoid of f-bombs but opened with a 10-second parody mocking typical campaign promises and pieties, followed by a pivot to a candidate promising something different.
“When we were talking about what we wanted to do, I said, ‘I don’t want to do some cookie-cutter bullshit.’ I just want to be me,” Stewart said. “If you think that anybody’s gonna not let me be me, I got a problem, and I’m out. I can’t. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to pretend to be somebody that I’m not.”
In her first public campaign event, a rally two days later in the chilly concourse of the New Britain ballpark abandoned in 2015 by the Colorado Rockies Double-A affiliate for flashier new digs in Hartford, she told supporters that the rationale for her campaign was simple.
“You are going to hear this a lot,” Stewart said. “Because it’s time for something different.”
Something different.