Over the past few days, the mailers have been piling up about on our kitchen table about the State Legislative races in Woodbridge, CT, and I thought it was time to offer a few comments about them.

Woodbridge is in the 114th Assembly District. Our State Representative is Themis Klarides and she is being challenged by Marc Garofalo. We moved to Woodbridge a little over a year ago, and to the best of my knowledge, I’ve not met Ms. Klarides, but I’ve met Marc several times. He’s bright, energetic and is running a great campaign.

So far, he’s knocked on over 2,500 doors in the district. Will it be enough to over take a popular incumbent? We shall see. Ms. Klarides was unchallenged in two of the past five elections. Most recently, she won by a margin of over 3,000 votes, getting over twice as many votes as her opponent. However, in 1998, and 2000, Ms. Klarides won by much smaller margins, 605 votes and 1742 votes respectively.

Besides the strong door knocking, Mr. Garofalo has sent out several mailers, and is perhaps being able to have a closer race due to the public funding of campaigns in Connecticut.

His mailings talk about his leadership, is community service, and provides endorsements from notable people around the district. The Marc Garofalo for CT State Representative website is well done, and while according to various web metrics, it doesn’t get a lot of traffic, it is reported to be the busiest website of the State Legislative candidates in Woodbridge.

There are almost no attacks on his opponent, with one minor exception. He has a page that links to different political sites. Included on this page is a link to a YouTube video put up by the CTHouseRepublicans, of Themis Klarides which makes her look like a bit of an airhead.

The mailing for Ms. Klarides that we received lists a few endorsements but doesn’t have much else to say. Her website isn’t as good as Mr. Garofalo’s. Yet she is very popular, and has a good chance of getting re-elected. We’ll see if Mr. Garofalo can pull off an upset.

Over on the State Senate side, Woodbridge is part of the 17th State Senate District. Sen. Joe Crisco has been in that seat for 16 years. In the past five elections, he was unopposed once, faced only a candidate from the Working Family party in one election, and in the other elections one by pluralities of 7,174, 15,797 and 23,086. However, this year could be a very different race. Sen. Crisco’s Campaign Election Program form was signed by the secretary of his campaign treasurer, which is not allowed, and he is not receiving public money for his campaign.

His opponent, Tamath Rossi is receiving public financing and has used it to send several nasty mailings. The ones that I’ve seen lack any descriptions of why Ms. Rossi would be a good candidate. There are no references to any leadership or community service. There is not serious discussion of issues or how she would make Connecticut and Woodbridge a better place. Instead, it is negative politics that is so damaging to our country.

I went online to find out a little bit about Ms. Rossi and found a blog post at Derby Politics saying Tamath Rossi is a Hypocrite. The post talks about her working for Tort Reform, but then suing Wallingford when she bumped her leg on a bleacher.

The big question is if Ms. Rossi, who appears to have nothing going for her other than $85,000 of public funding for her campaign can defeat an incumbent who has done a lot for the district but isn’t receiving public funding.

So, as we head into the final weekend of the campaign, I’ll do what I can to help Marc Garofalo and Joe Crisco and then I’ll watch with interest the results on Tuesday.