Have the wheels come off a crucial State Senate campaign?

Troubles continue to mount for Newtown Republican Amybeth Laroche.

The State Elections Enforcement Commission is investigating Laroche’s use of a mobile video billboard that appears often on the streets of the 28th Senate District, but hardly at all in Laroche’s campaign finance reports. Those vehicles are the very model of a modern mobile billboard—and fetch a hefty daily—or even half day fee.

Laroche, who was disobliging about incumbent Senator Tony Hwang when she announced early in the year that she was running against the five-term Fairfield Republican whether or not Hwang sought a sixth term. When Hwang ran in a February special election for first selectman of Fairfield, the largest town in the 28th, by far, Laroche was seen not at all assisting him in his unsuccessful bid, though she now hails his wisdom in all things.

Campaigns do make difficult demands, real or imagined, on candidates. Laroche appears to have thought that paying preposterously lavish tribute to Hwang on the occasion of an annual Easton Republican dinner might put it all right. Laroche loaded paragraph after paragraph of saccharine praise featuring a suffocating digital embrace of Hwang with words she has likely never uttered before.

The Laroche post includes photos from the Easton event—-but none of the candidate with the man she now sees as an ideal public servant. Laroche was able to pose with the Easton resident who appeared in a Ryan Fazio ad purporting to feature Democrats who support the Greenwich Republican’s bid for governor. The popular poseur is Easton’s RTC chair and appears pleased to be seen with Laroche.

And what of deputy commissioner-in-waiting Hwang? He’s never been accused of photophobia in his two decades in the General Assembly. And Hwang continues to fear no lens. He found a moment Saturday to standstill for a still with Rob Blanchard, the Democratic nominee for the 28th. Hwang and Blanchard faced each other in 2024, but blessed are the peacemakers. The two are models of grinning cordiality in this fractious age.

”Sometimes party loyalty asks too much,” John F. Kennedy confided to an aide he told he would be supporting a Republican for statewide office against a Democrat JFK deemed unacceptable.

Hwang and Blanchard have appeared in nearly as many photos this campaign as Senator and Mrs. Jason Perillo. The Shelton Republican, who has served in the legislature for more than 20 years, calls the campaign “a family affair.” Perillo said in one video he and Becky Perillo “are always trying to identify new issues….” He invites comments. Perillo is known to keep a close eye on his mailbox.

As Mrs. Wendell Willkie said, in a phrase for the ages, when she returned to living with her wayward husband and 1940 Republican presidential nominee, “Politics make strange bedfellows.”

An uneasy truce between the two parties held that year. Democrats decided to remain silent about Willkie’s open affair with influential New York Herald Tribune book editor Irita Van Doren because they knew Republicans possessed nutty letters from FDR running-mate Henry Wallace to a Russian mystic. That was how gentlemen and ladies handle such things as France fell to the Nazis, the Battle of Britain began, and the Soviet Union remained in a murderous alliance with Hitler. On the eve of that year’s Republican nominating convention, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed two prominent Republicans, Henry Stimson and Frank Knox, to his cabinet to show that in a perilous hour, party loyalty must find a new place—much like Hwang and Blanchard are doing on a smaller scale in four towns.

Published September 13, 2026.