Voigt Decries Labor’s Election $$

When union-backed aldermanic candidates swept aldermanic primaries Tuesday, they were fueled by $200,000 in labor support. That money marks the end of ​“local” races, proclaimed Democratic Town Committee Chair Susie Voigt.

Voigt made that argument Tuesday night at BAR as she watched the returns come in during the official victory party for Mayor John DeStefano’s campaign.

Meanwhile, across town, union-affiliated aldermanic candidates held a victory party of their own at Leon’s on Long Wharf Drive. They were celebrating a string of citywide upsets that toppled local lawmakers backed by the Democratic establishment. Candidates backed by Yale unions won 14 out of 15 races against candidates backed by City Hall and Voigt’s town committee.

Gwen Mills, the central organizer behind the union campaign, said UNITE HERE (parent organization to Yale’s blue-collar and pink-collar locals) and AFSCME unions spent about $200,000 in those 15 races.

Mills pointed out that that’s far less than Mayor John DeStefano raised for his reelection campaign. He raised over $425,000 as of last week’s campaign finance filing — and his troops were out in force all Tuesday working alongside pro-City Hall aldermanic candidates who were opposed by union-backed candidates. Much of DeStefano’s money came from city contractors — many of whom live out of town and/or out of state — and city employees. (Read about that here.)

Campaign finance filings posted on the New Haven City/Town Clerk website show that union-backed candidates took in a total of about $54,000. Those filings cover the period up to seven days before the primary. Mills said the discrepancy is due to the different ways union spend money, including in-kind donations, and the fact that some of the money was spent directly by unions on materials to elect candidates, rather than given to those candidates to spend for themselves.

Voigt said the spending of such large amounts of money marks a fundamental shift in aldermanic races.

“This is a local race, and we’re going to lose that quality to it,” she said.

“This is not to deny that people voted for change,” she hastened to add.

Historically, aldermanic candidates have raised and spent between $1,000 and $4,000, Voigt said.

In the weeks leading up to the election, union candidates sent ​“six full-color mailings, six days in a row.”

“There’s not anything wrong with it,” Voigt said. ​“It means you can afford it.”

Mills countered that the mayor had been spending money to buy mailers and lawn signs for the establishment-backed slate of aldermanic candidates

“Facing nearly half a million raised by the mayor, ordinary working people running for office need all the help we can get,” Mills said in response to Voigt’s criticisms.

“With us, what you see is what you get,” she said. ​“We don’t have City Hall and mayoral staffers pretending to do one thing and really doing another.”

Voigt drew a connection between union spending and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Citizens United case, which freed corporations to make virtually unlimited campaign donations. That decision also enables unions to spend freely, she said.

“Every penny that we spent [would have been] legal to spend prior to Citizens United,” Mills said. The money was all spent through established political committees, she said,

“Every last penny” of the money is properly documented, Mills said. And the money comes from ​“cooks, secretaries, and housekeepers. It’s collected a few dollars at a time and pooled together.” That’s in contrast to the hundreds of thousands raised by the mayor, which included money from city contractors and developers, most of whom don’t live in the city, Mills said.

The spending is a ​“harbinger” of things to come in next year’s national presidential race, Voigt warned. ​“I think there are bigger implications.”

The City Hall/party establishment team also ran with union support in Tuesday’s elections, including from the city firefighters union, which has long been active in elections and whose members largely live out of town.

Voigt stressed that she is not anti-union, and is a founding member of Yale’s Local 34.