Democratic former Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz's name hasn't come up much this cycle as a potential candidate to succeed Connecticut’s retiring Democratic Gov. Dan Malloy, but she recently revealed that she has received encouragement to join the race and is considering it. Bysiewicz served three terms as secretary of state from 1998 to 2010, which would make her the only candidate in the current Democratic field who had held statewide office before.
Bysiewicz has been exploring a state Senate campaign for several months already, but it wouldn't be the first time that she sought higher statewide office. However, her prior runs for governor, attorney general, and Senate all ended in spectacular failure. Bysiewicz joined and later dropped out of the 2006 gubernatorial race against GOP Gov. Jodi Rell to seek re-election. She ran for governor again in 2010 when Rell retired, but also dropped out of that race before the Democratic primary after spending a year on the campaign trail. Bysiewicz then tried to run for attorney general in 2010, but the state Supreme Court embarrassingly found that she lacked the legal qualifications to run under state law because she hadn't actively practiced law for the necessary 10 years.
Adding insult to injury, Bysiewicz earned negative headlines over her role as the state's chief election administrator in the 2010 gubernatorial election, where Malloy defeated Republican Tom Foley by just a few thousand votes. Bysiewicz called that race before all votes had been counted, even though there were major voting problems, with a shortage of ballots in Connecticut's largest city of Bridgeport.
Bysiewicz tried to resuscitate her once-promising career by running for Senate in 2012, but she got demolished 67-33 in the Democratic primary by Sen. Chris Murphy, who was serving in the House at the time. In one infamous incident, Bysiewicz ran an attack ad against Murphy in which she claimed he "has taken more hedge fund money than any other Democrat in Congress." That turned out to be an amateurish mistake, though, since the report she relied on pertained to a former New York congressman named Scott Murphy.
While none of the current Democratic gubernatorial candidates is particularly well-known, Bysiewicz's notoriety could prove to be more of a hinderance than an asset if she runs. Fortunately for Democrats, she sounded more likely to defer to Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman, who has previously said she's considering joining the race to succeed her boss.