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Devin Carney Wins Re-Election in 23rd General Assembly District

With a 16 percent increase in turnout compared to his 2018 race, Devin Carney won re-election as representative for the 23rd Assembly District with more than 55 percent of the vote.

His Democratic opponent, David Rubino, earned a total of 7,260 votes—more than the 7,162 Carney prevailed with in 2018, but not enough to beat Carney’s 2020 total of 8,929.

Carney garnered 8,506 votes as a Republican and another 423 as the Independent Party candidate. Rubino earned 7,063 as the Democratic nominee and an additional 197 votes by way of the Working Families Party.

Carney said he wanted to extend a “big thank you to the voters of Lyme, Old Lyme, Old Saybrook, and Westbrook for their support in this election. It’s such an honor to represent these four towns in the legislature and I look forward to getting back to Hartford.”

Despite being what Carney called a “different type of election due to the coronavirus,” voters came out in large numbers, whether they cast absentee or in-person ballots.

Rubino, for his part, said he was proud of the campaign his team ran.

“I’m really happy about the amount of energy and enthusiasm that was behind it,” he said. “We turned out a lot of votes at the beginning of the race.

“We thought we’d need about 7,200 votes to win. We did get 7,200, but there was a much larger turnout that we hadn’t expected and it did benefit both sides pretty evenly.”

The increase in votes for the Democratic candidate from 2018 to 2020 was 1,510, according to Connecticut Secretary of the State tallies (which were still unofficial for 2020 at press time). Carney gained 1,767 votes over his 2018 total in a year when the increase in turnout was expected to largely benefit Democrats.

Rubino said his campaign had a clear vision and never wavered from it.

“I’m pretty proud of the work we did together,” he said. “[W]e ran the best campaign we could for now. And if we decide to, we can try again sometime” in the future.

Carney looks forward to a busy 2021 legislative session. Pressing issues are the “state budget—we are facing big deficits in the out-years. A major priority will be COVID recovery—there will be a lot of legislation based around that: education, business, public health, the economy.

“We need to work to getting the state back on track,” he said.