Today, I introduce a new, occasional feature: The Connecticut Political Power Rankings. The CPPR’s are arrived at through a scientific review of relevant polling blended with empirically useful data, medium-roasted coffee beans and a pinch of cinnamon.

I make them up. That’s how they’re arrived at.

1. Chris Murphy. 93.1. I considered leaving Murphy out of the rankings because whatever the next stage of his career turns out to be, it won’t involve Connecticut at all. But right now he casts a huge shadow here, especially with his singing role in the hit opera “L’impeachment del Grande Uomo Arancione.” (Trans.: “The Impeachment of the Large Orange Man.”) He’s a big deal on cable news, but he still does that thing where he walks across the state^[1], ringing your doorbell and asking if he can use the bathroom.

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.^[2]

2. William Tong. 89.8. I am never in any doubt about how the new attorney general is spending his time^[3], because he and his staff are in danger of breaking the record set by Richard Blumenthal for most press releases in a single year. I don’t know what that record is. All I know is that in the time it takes me to write this paragraph, I will get another one. Most of them take the form of “TONG ANNOUNCES COURT VICTORY TO COMPEL [ENTITY YOU NEVER HEARD OF] TO STOP [ISSUE YOU WERE UNAWARE OF].” Yes, this can be annoying, overweening. But Connecticut likes hard-working AGs who are protecting the little guys from the big guys. Especially the big orange guy.

3. Themis Klarides, 79.2. This is quite a fall-off from Tong, which is dangerous, because Klarides knows where I live. Klarides is indisputably the most visible and vibrant Republican politician ^[4]in Connecticut, which is like being the greatest basketball player in Indonesia, in the sense that it might not matter. She’s also very good at riding her horse in a circle around the Democrats, huddling and shivering by their Conestoga wagons, while she fires her (fully licensed) six-shooters in the air. Her weakness is that she’s not prominently associated with a set of positive, constructive, coherent policies. She has also not separated her party from the big orange man, and 2020 could turn out to be one of those years when a ham sandwich can beat a Republican in a lot of districts. But only if the ham sandwich has Grey Poupon.