Unofficial election results show that incumbent Democrat Christine Palm of Chester won by a wide margin re-election for the 36th State House District, which represents Chester, Deep River, Essex, and Haddam.

She defeated Republican Robert “Bob” Siegrist, earning 8,411, or 55 percent, of the vote while Siegrist garnered 6,977, or 45 percent, according to vote tallies from the Secretary of the State’s Office.

A Winning Campaign Strategy

Palm said that she credits her win to “the most incredible coalition of volunteers,” and campaign staff, adding “I had this team that had both passion and military precision. They were unbelievably hard-working and detail-oriented, so our ground game was incredibly strong.”

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Palm and her staff conducted “wellness check-in calls” with constituents over the age of 70, regardless of party affiliation. She also qualified, very early on, for public financing, which she said helped her focus on helping constituents in the district rather than fundraising.

Palm also said that a focus of her campaign was on her accomplishments. For her first term, Palm served on the Environment, Judiciary, and Regulations Review committees.

“I ran on my record…I talked about the things that I actually accomplished while he [Siegrist] was still talking about things that he would do,” she said, adding, “I was very proud of the work that I’ve done so far.”

Her approach to campaigning, she said, was “more forward-looking” with goals “to enhance health care for everybody, protect the environment, put people back to work, get more young people to move to Connecticut, reboot the economy…and I think the voters really responded to that because they are tired of negativity.”

At press time, Siegrist had not issued a public concession statement, though Palm said he had called her to concede, and he and his campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Priorities for Second Term

In terms of priorities for her second term, Palm said “the first thing we have to do is recover from this pandemic and bring fiscal stability to our budgeting and make sure that we do it in a way that doesn’t harm working families.”

Palm discussed how she took part in efforts to raise the minimum wage and enact paid family and medical leave.

“We had hundreds of thousands of people newly out of w’ork or furloughed or sick with COVID and all those people lost income,” she said. “Had paid family and medical leave been enacted 10 years ago like it should have been, all of these people could have had partial wage replacement while taking care of family members or themselves.”

She said that the pandemic “has shown us where our work needs to be focused and it has shown us the cracks in the systems and one of those cracks is the insolvency of working people.”

The pandemic has especially highlighted the importance of supporting essential workers and working families with an adequate minimum wage and with “policies that have teeth,” she said.

Another crack in the system highlighted by the pandemic was the labor shortages and information technology infrastructure at the Department of Labor that precluded the timely processing of unemployment claims, according to Palm.

“It was an unbelievable confluence of crises that made it very, very hard,” she said. “So, had we invested in our IT infrastructure long ago, had we retained state workers or retrained younger workers, and had we had family and medical leave in place, that would have been a much better and less painful scenario.”

Another priority for Palm is healthcare reform, especially if the Affordable Care Act is repealed.

“A public option, or Connecticut option, or somehow broadening the choices for Connecticut residents, if there is no national plan, would be a very, very important thing to do,” she said.

Asked about the Democrat’s majority in the House, Palm said that the party had picked up approximately seven seats after Election Day. This would bring the Democrats up from 91 to 98 seats and the Republicans down from 60 to 53, based on unofficial results from the Secretary of the State’s Office.

In terms of making progress on some of the priorities of the party, Palm said it’s a question of “how bold” Democrats and the governor are “willing to be” on issues such as raising revenue or recreational marijuana.

“I would also like to see really meaningful tax reform, but there has to be the political will to do that,” she said.

Connecticut’s voting procedures is another area that Palm would like to focus on.

“Connecticut is very progressive on many things, but our voting regulations are byzantine,” she said, adding that things such as “no-excuse absentee, early voting, online registration” with a move to online administration of procedures, are “ways we could get into the 21st century.”

She also supports ranked choice voting, or preferential voting. This would give voters the option of ranking candidates based on preference, with a candidate being declared a winner when that individual receives the majority of the vote (more than 50 percent).

Vote tallying continues until a candidate receives a majority. A voter’s second preference is counted if that individual’s initial preference is removed in the prior round, according to a May 2018 report from the Office of Legislative Research.

Palm said this type of voting is a way to ensure that the candidate with the higher number of popular votes is elected.

“We’re seeing what is happening with the Electoral College and this is a way to prevent that,” said Palm

Legislation that makes it mandatory for public schools to incorporate climate change into the curriculum is also “one of my personal priorities,” she said.

“I want every single school-aged child in Connecticut to learn about the severity of the problem and also what they can do to help,” she said.

It’s also important, for Palm, to ensure that nationally, Connecticut is known “as a state that welcomes people who increasingly are endangered elsewhere,” she said, pointing to state statutes that “protect communities of color…same sex marriage…women’s health care rights.”

Gratitude

Palm also expressed, “how grateful I am…to the people in this district.”

She discussed how her campaign won by an increased number of votes compared with the 2018 election, saying “I am very glad that people trusted me to go back to the Capitol to go back to working on these things.”

Palm said that she was thrilled to have “so many young people working on my campaign,” adding, “I owe it to them to work my hardest for them and their future.”

Palm’s campaign for re-election was managed by the following individuals: Campaign Manager Sarah Ficca of Deep River; Field Organizer Emmer Teran, who grew up in Higganum; Social Media Strategist Connor Riordan of Chester; and Arjun Badami of Haddam, who was responsible for youth engagement.