Tony Hwang says he won’t seek reelection, ending long run in Hartford
State Sen. Tony Hwang, a Fairfield Republican who has represented the 28th District since 2015, said Monday that he will not seek reelection. The announcement will bring to a close a legislative career that began with his 2008 election to the state House; Hwang told News 12 he will serve out his term, which ends Jan. 6, 2027.
Hwang is now chief deputy Republican leader in the Senate and serves as ranking member on the Aging, Transportation, and Insurance and Real Estate committees. His current district includes Bethel, Easton, Fairfield and Newtown, and his official Senate biography identifies him as the first Asian-Pacific American state senator in Connecticut history.
Over that span, Hwang built his profile more through committee work and issue-specific legislation than through a single signature law. His Senate biography credits him with work on support for family caregivers, firefighter cancer benefits, tougher penalties for school threats and road-safety policy. More recently, he co-sponsored bipartisan laws on patient health-data privacy and online and social-media privacy protections, and he was repeatedly recognized by the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters for his environmental record.
His retirement also comes as Senate Republicans are smaller in number than when he entered state politics. National Conference of State Legislatures records show Republicans held 12 of the Senate’s 36 seats when Hwang entered the legislature in 2009 and 15 when he entered the Senate in 2015. As of March 2026, Republicans hold 11 seats.
On fiscal issues, Hwang was generally aligned with current Senate Republican leadership. Minority Leader Stephen Harding and the caucus have made tax cuts and lower electric bills central to their message this year, and Hwang’s own policy agenda and public statements have similarly emphasized affordability, energy costs and the state’s fiscal guardrails.
Where Hwang more often diverged was on abortion rights, voting access and Donald Trump. He publicly backed early voting and the constitutional step that led to no-excuse absentee voting, has said abortion decisions should remain between a woman and her health care provider, and in 2022 condemned Trump’s call to suspend the U.S. Constitution. Earlier, in 2016, when he chaired John Kasich’s Connecticut presidential campaign, Hwang said Republicans needed leaders known for governing, “not just rhetoric and anger.” Hearst Connecticut Media also reported that Hwang said in 2016 he had never supported Trump because of Trump’s insults toward women, minorities, immigrants and people with disabilities.
That record put him at some distance from more conservative voices in the state GOP and from national Republican trends. Sen. Rob Sampson, for example, praised the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, while Hwang issued his own statement in support of reproductive choice. Nationally, the gap was also clear: the Republican Party’s 2024 platform was explicitly branded “Make America Great Again.”
For some Connecticut observers, that made Hwang a representative of a different style of Republican politics in Fairfield County. In its coverage of his 2024 reelection, Hearst Connecticut Media described the result as a win for the “moderate tone” Hwang had tried to strike in Fairfield County Republican politics. With his retirement, the caucus will be losing one of the lawmakers most closely associated with that approach.
