Good morning and welcome back to the Tip Sheet, a weekly newsletter from Tom Dudchik’s Capitol Report written by Mike Cerulli.

First, our condolences to all the Patriots fans out there.

This week, we’re discussing Gov. Ned Lamont’s 2026 state of the state address.

Plus, the latest from GOP world: Stewart’s response to Lamont, Pavlock-D’Amato’s eye-catching wardrobe and Somers’s scathing op-ed.

Let’s dive in…

In an election year, a more serious state of the state

It was apparent from the very first sentences of Gov. Ned Lamont’s state of the state address that this year’s speech, delivered about nine months before the November election, was a bit of a departure from the previous seven he’s delivered in the hall of the state House of Representatives.

Perhaps the best distillation of how much has changed in the last seven years can be found in those first few lines. In 2019, Lamont opened his address by quoting the Broadway musical “Hamilton.” He was upbeat and excited about being “In the Room Where it Happens.” This year, he ditched Hamilton for Thomas Paine.

“These are times that try men’s souls,” Lamont said, quoting Paine’s “The American Crisis.”

Lamont’s belief that America presently faces a crisis that mirrors the one faced by the founding generation framed the entire speech. Even when the speech cut through familiar territory – utility rates, economic development, smartphones in classrooms – it returned to the central idea that a larger, more existential threat faces the state and nation.

By far the longest, loudest applause came after the governor bluntly told officers of U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to “go home.”

The sustained applause emanated solely from the Democrats in the room. A few Republicans walked out. State Rep. Cara Pavlock-D’Amato stood and turned her back on the governor. The words “ICE In” were printed on the back of her blazer – an inversion of a popular anti-ICE rallying cry that later drew an unusually sharp rebuke from House Speaker Matt Ritter.

About that blazer…

Pavlock-D’Amato’s display during the state of the state quickly took on a life of its own. The day after the governor’s speech, media coverage of the House vote on extending the governor’s authority to direct spending from the novel “Federal Cuts Response Fund” was pushed to the back seat by the speaker’s remarks and Pavlock-D’Amato’s response.

“I’d ask for the doors to be sealed,” Ritter told the House chamber on Thursday morning.

News outlets variously described Ritter’s remarks as a dressing down, a reprimand, and a warning that the Democratic majority could move to enforce the House rule barring the display of political slogans in the chamber.

“This is the historic House of Representatives,” Ritter said. “It’s not an elementary school.”

The speaker brought no official sanctions against Pavlock-D’Amato but made it clear that consequences could come in the future.

“Do I make myself clear that we’re not gonna have this tomfoolery and riff raff ever again this session?” Ritter bellowed. “Don’t test me.”

For her part, Pavlock-D’Amato said she had no regrets, adding that she has respect for the chamber and the speaker.

“I think some of the things that were said yesterday were out of line,” she said, referring to the governor’s speech. “I’m supporting ICE. I’m supporting those officers who support us, who protect us, protect our children. And I think that’s the most important thing here.”

Pavlock-D’Amato was not alone among her Republican colleagues in assessing the governor’s speech as divisive.

House Minority Leader Vincent Candelora told reporters that he spoke privately with the governor following the Wednesday address to express his disappointment.

Candelora’s Senate counterpart, Steve Harding, said the speech was “extremely partisan.”

What about everything else?

While the debate over ICE undoubtedly dominated the discourse following the state of the state address, it was not the only thing that had people talking.

One big takeaway? Many Democrats read Lamont’s proposal for a one-time $500 million tax rebate as a signal that the governor is willing to spend…big time. Ideas for what to do with such a large sum of money, all of it derived from volatile revenue, are already starting to fly.

Rotisserie chicken in tow, Stewart gives her own state of the state

Traditionally, Republican responses to the state of the state are delivered in the back of the House chamber to a scrum of cameras and reporters. Harding and Candelora did not deviate from that norm when they fired their return volleys back at Lamont. They had a guest with them this year: State Sen. Ryan Fazio.

Fazio delivered sharp, almost sassy replies to many of the governor’s points.

“Oh, it would come out in the summer and the fall right before the election?” Fazio said of Lamont’s tax rebate proposal. “I mean, what a coincidence.”

By any objective measure of political performance, Fazio hit his marks. His soundbites featured heavily in news broadcasts that evening – earning him free eyeballs in the critical months before the Republican state convention.

But the most-viewed response to Lamont’s annual address likely didn’t come from Fazio, Candelora, or Harding. In fact, it probably didn’t come from inside the Capitol at all – it came from inside a Costco.

Pushing a grocery cart packed with paper towels and a rotisserie chicken, Erin Stewart delivered a minute-and-a-half long rebuttal to Lamont.

“This is where the real state of the state shows up,” Stewart said.

The video served to reinforce Stewart’s economic messaging – she hit Lamont over high grocery prices and threw in a line about utility bills, too – and her populist positioning. She labelled Lamont the “Greenwich governor” and juxtaposed her chosen backdrop with the “fancy halls of the Capitol.”

Critics of the former Hardware City mayor continue to carp at her attempts to draw a populist line between herself and the rest of the field. Reacting to her state of the state response, some detractors noted that Stewart herself once worked in those fancy halls.

Stewart posted her video across all her social media platforms. On Facebook alone, she racked up more than a quarter million views. The video garnered nearly 100,000 impressions on Twitter/X another 21,000 on Instagram.

Ouch. Somers op-ed targets Stewart and Healey

In a sign of where things might be headed (if they’re not already there) in the Republican gubernatorial contest, State Sen. Heather Somers issued a scathing op-ed targeting Stewart – and invoked the name of John Healey, the longtime Stewart ally and Somers’s former colleague in the Senate Republican Office.

“There’s something impressive about the audacity of Erin Stewart’s campaign for governor,” Somers wrote, before effectively accusing Stewart and Healey of plagiarizing Ryan Fazio’s energy policies.

Healey had previously criticized the rollout of the Fazio campaign’s energy policies as “reheated soup” that merely recycled ideas that have long been priorities for Senate Republicans.

“Let's be clear,” Somers wrote. “If it's reheated soup, it's only because they're the ones warming it back up and serving it as their own.”

The notion that the Republican candidates might put forward plans that sound similar is something Stewart recently spoke about in an interview on Melissa Sheketoff’s morning radio show.

“When you have multiple candidates that come from the same party, you’re all going to be singing the same tune,” Stewart told Sheketoff. “All the Republican candidates right now, we’re all advocating for the same thing, for lower energy costs, for lower taxes, for less regulation in government.”

Soup aside, the most consequential takeaway from the Somers op-ed might not be the points she made about the provenance of energy policy ideas but rather what it's tone portends for the brewing GOP primary. It’s not exactly a secret that there’s no love lost between Somers and Stewart. The op-ed demonstrated a willingness on Somers’s part to take those longstanding tensions into the public arena and punch in a way that Fazio has so far avoided doing himself.

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back next week with another edition of the Tip Sheet!