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Former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey is thinking about running for governor of, fanfare maestro, if you please,..Connecticut.
A few months ago, McCaughey (pronounced McCoy) was at the forefront of a plea seeking contributors to SaveNYC, “Dear Fellow New Yorker….” The independent expenditure committee’s plan was “to increase voter turnout to 50%” in New York’s mayoral election, “making the math difficult for [Zohran] Mamdani to win. The more voters SaveNYC mobilizes to vote this November, the harder it is for Mamdani to win a plurality, even in a crowded field.” He won, and it was not close.
McCaughey, the founder of SaveNYC, was not one of those crucial voters. The Newsmax commentator warning of the Mamdani apocalypse is a resident of Greenwich, Connecticut. From that tony town, McCaughey also declares life as we know it in Connecticut will end with the recent passage of legislation that makes it a little easier to build housing in the state’s 169 towns. Her target is “Rich Boy Lamont.” Most people find living in the center of ceaseless calamity exhausting. McCaughey at 77 years old, appears to draw sustenance from perpetual grievance.
No one but McCaughey has traveled the singular trail she has been on since the early 1990s. McCaughey, who grew up in Westport under difficult circumstances, won attention among the chattering class in the early 1990s as an emphatic, though some people say not always accurate, critic of Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan.
Developer Donald Trump, right, is joined by, from left, John Dyson, then-Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, New York State Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani during ground breaking ceremonies for Trump International Hotel and Tower in New York on June 21, 1995.
New York Republican George Pataki wanted a woman as his running mate for lieutenant governor in 1994, he picked McCaughey, though the two did not know each other. Pataki eked out a win over the late Mario Cuomo as Cuomo sought a fourth term as governor. Victory transformed McCaughey into the highest-ranking woman in New York politics and a star. She flamed out by her own misjudgments, but she showed flashes of star power in her political debut. She came to Connecticut in 1995 for a fundraising event with our newly elected lieutenant governor, Jodi Rell, and the Senate Republicans. I remember it because I was one of the 19 Republicans who made a majority. Republicans were calmer then, and optimistic.
The New York tabloids found McCaughey the most vivid member of the new administration, especially when in 1995 she married mogul Wilbur Ross. They celebrated their union with a tabloid feast on the aircraft carrier Intrepid, in the presence of 600 of their closest friends. Pataki was not destined to remain one. His people saw the lieutenant governor, any lieutenant governor, as a minor player in his administration. McCaughey brought a bigger vision to the job, as a star does. Trouble followed, including McCaughey accusing Pataki’s people using McCarthyite tactics to smear her as disloyal and unstable.
When Pataki announced he was dumping McCaughey from his 1998 re-election, she became a Democrat to run against him but lost the Democratic primary. With the help of Ross’s money, she carried on in the general election as the Liberal Party nominee, winning 1.7% of the vote while running 25,000 votes ahead of Green Party candidate Al Lewis, known for the ages as “Grandpa Munster” in the 1960s CBS gothic comedy series. Still, McCaughey’s credentials as a survivor were burnished in 1998 when she emerged unscathed from a small plane in which she was a passenger that had lost power during a takeoff, hit the ground and skidded off the runway. Accompanying McCaughey on that ill-fated flight: aide Kevin Lembo, a Democrat, who would become Connecticut’s comptroller 12 years later.
Ross filed for divorce immediately after that campaign. McCaughey told the New York Post’s Andrea Peyser in 2000 that she was supporting Hillary Clinton’s bid for the U.S. Senate, while also admiring John McCain. She eventually found a perch in the Hudson Institute, a think tank that allowed her to continue to study and speak on health care policy. She became a Republican again and eventually bought a home in Greenwich while keeping an apartment in Manhattan. Lately, she’s been seen on Newsmax, the cable news network that in August agreed to pay voting machine manufacturer Dominion $67 million to settle false claims that Dominion rigged its voting machines in 2020 to defeat Donald Trump.
McCaughey is made of more than bombast. She founded Reduce Infection Deaths (RID), a non-profit organization that has successfully advocated to improve hand hygiene in hospitals and using bleach wipes to clean surfaces in patient rooms. Her efforts have been critical to requiring hospitals in dozens of states to report infection rates and make them public. Her dedication to what may appear to be a small issue has saved lives.
A run for governor is always harder than it looks. If McCaughey decides to partake in Connecticut’s generous public campaign financing program, she will need to find a lot of friends in the state willing to give her a maximum of $250 each while also winning the support of 15% of the delegates to the Republican nominating convention in May.
McCaughey would face state Sen. Ryan Fazio, a Greenwich Republican, and Erin Stewart, the popular former mayor of New Britain, for the party nomination. She will have to do more than accuse Lamont of being rich. It lands as more envy than taunt from someone who sued her ex-husband for tens of millions of dollars because he failed to waste as much money as she expected in her 1998 campaign for governor of New York.
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It might elevate both Fazio and Stewart to take on McCaughey, whom columnist Michelle Cottle in 2016 described McCaughey “one of the most dishonest, shameless, and irresponsible conservative thinkers on the scene today.”
To debate McCaughey, with her smiling ferocity and decades of experience as a brawler in the arena, and emerge as winners would raise the two young Republicans’ stature within their party and prepare them for the general election in November.
Kevin F. Rennie can be reached at [email protected]