Sanderistas Swarm To (Local) Victory

New Haven-area supporters of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign regrouped and made their ​“revolution” local, catapulting a first-time candidate to victory Tuesday in a Democratic primary.

The group of 50 – 60 volunteers coalesced around fellow Sanders veteran Joshua Elliott to help him win the primary for the 88th General Assembly District seat being vacated by House Speaker Brendan Sharkey.

Elliott, a 31-year-old first-time candidate and the manager of Hamden’s Thyme & Season natural food store, defeated the establishment candidate, Town Council President James Pascarella, by 56 – 44 percent (1,053 to 812, according to the Secretary of the State’s website). Pascarella, who formally conceded a half hour after the polls closed, had been endorsed by Hamden’s Democratic Town Council.

Elliott will face Republican Councilwoman Marjorie Bonadies in the general election in November.

The primary race was a test of a broader proposition: whether the outpouring of energy and enthusiasm by young people and political newcomers nationwide for Bernie Sanders’ now-concluded Democratic presidential campaign could translate to grassroots victories in the less-sexy world of local elections, where debates over the surface of the high school baseball diamond can weigh more heavily than grandiose statements about international trade deals or income inequality.

In Hamden’s 88th District, at least, the answer was yes, as dozens of Sanders supporters knocked on doors for weeks, made phone calls, and then pulled out the vote on Tuesday. (Another Sanders supporter, Christy Matthews, was trounced 82 – 18 percent in a Bristol primary. Statewide, five candidates supported by the pro-Sanders Working Families Party, including Elliott, won state legislative primaries Tuesday.)

Elliott, who like Sanders made support for a $15 hourly minimum wage a centerpiece of his campaign, met several of his campaign staffers while canvassing in New Hampshire. He won Tuesday’s state representative primary through a spirited get-out-the-vote effort fueled by the skills his team acquired during the presidential primaries. More than 1,900 Democrats voted in the primary Tuesday — an even higher turnout than the roughly 1,400 people who voted in the district in 2012 Democratic U.S. Senate Democratic primary.

Elliott told the Independent the election was shaped as much by the budget crisis in Hartford as by Sanders’s call for political revolution.

Still, he said, ​“it was the right time and the right place for this.”

Sarah Ganong — a 25-year-old environmental activist who managed the Elliott campaign and also played a leading local volunteer role for the Sanders campaign — attributed the success of the campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort to the hard work and political savvy of her team of ex-Sanderistas.

“All those skills we learned on the Bernie campaign and all those connections we made are going to continue this new politics,” she said. 

Campaign Treasurer Nick Smith, another Sanders volunteer, said the victory will help advance Sanders’ vision of a more progressive America.

“This is proof of concept of the Bernie movement,” he said. ​“This would not have happened without the Bernie Sanders campaign. It’s a direct result of what Bernie started.”

The Kitchen Table

For Ganong, Tuesday night’s victory started at Josh Elliott’s kitchen table.

Over the last year, Ganong, Smith, and other local volunteers frequently gathered in Elliott’s home on MacArthur Drive to make phone calls for Sanders’ Connecticut operation. Sometimes the makeshift kitchen headquarters got uncomfortably crowded.

“If I never have to smash my abs into one of these chairs accidentally again, I will be very happy,” Ganong said as she reached for a laptop while overseeing the get-out-the-vote effort Tuesday afternoon.

On Tuesday, about a dozen volunteers congregated in Elliott’s kitchen, chewing Swedish Fish and Animal Crackers as they talked strategy and made last-minute phone calls. Like many Sanders supporters nationwide, the group skewed young: One volunteer had to explain to the pizza guy that the card he was using was in his mother’s name. 

The Elliott campaign picked up steam months ago in the wake of a demoralizing defeat. Ganong — who works for the Connecticut Fund for the Environment and drives a car plastered with lefty bumper stickers — was for years involved in political activism.The Sanders effort was the first electoral campaign that captured her imagination. After Sanders lost the Connecticut primary in June, Ganong and Elliott swiftly pivoted to the next political challenge: a local campaign designed to channel the energy of the national movement.

“It’s really nice to have a local person to transition from Bernie,” Ganong said. ​“I didn’t feel like I was sitting and mourning alone. We had this other thing that I got to use my skills toward.” 

Ganong soon realized that foregrounding Elliott’s history with the Sanders movement might not make for a successful canvassing strategy. Hillary Clinton defeated Sanders by a wide margin in the 88th District, an area with a large population of elderly voters.

“I talk about Bernie at the door if there’s a Bernie sign,” she said. ​“The other day, we saw a house that had a Bernie sign and a Pascarella sign, and we were all like, ​‘That’s sad. Do we knock?’”

“Not-At-Homes”

Jeff Eckert — a 27-year-old former Bernie volunteer who works as a substitute teacher in Litchfield — did a lot of door-knocking Tuesday afternoon.

Eckert met Elliott during a four-day canvassing marathon in New Hampshire last February before the presidential primary. After the Sanders campaign fizzled, Eckert joined his new friend at kitchen headquarters to help launch the campaign in the 88th District. He’s also now leading Green Party candidate Jill Stein​’s efforts to earn a place on the general-election ballot in Connecticut .

“One of the great things about the Sanders campaign is that it’s got more progressives running locally, and that’s what’s gonna create change,” Eckert said. ​“I’m more excited now, because I know Josh, and I know he can make a difference on a local level.”

Still, in the August heat Tuesday afternoon, the prospect of political transformation felt like a distant fantasy.

The campaign had dispatched Eckert to Central Avenue to touch base with neighbors who had previously committed to voting for Elliott.

But no one seemed to be home. In two hours of canvassing, only a handful of people — most of them uninterested in talking politics — answered their front doors.

“That’s a pretty typical canvassing experience: a lot of not-at-homes,” Eckert said. ​“But even if you only get one person, it still matters.”

Eckert grew up in an apolitical household; his parents didn’t even vote. He canvassed with a light tough, adhering to the strict guidelines he learned from Sanders staffers during the presidential primaries. At each house, Eckert knocked four times, waited for an answer, then knocked again, not once ringing the doorbell or banging loudly. 

“A ​‘friendly knock’ is what I was taught,” he said.

In the Sanders campaign he also came to grasp the fundamental importance of grassroots politics — and to appreciate that the power of a progressive movement transcends the appeal of its cranky messiah.

“I’ve been seeing people I’ve been in Bernie meetings with running for office all over,” Eckert said. ​“For me, the Bernie Sanders movement was about a movement, getting people organized.”

Crumb Rubber Politics

As a Sanders volunteer, Nick Smith — the treasurer for the Elliott campaign — spent the best part of a year talking to voters about universal health care and income inequality.

On the Elliott campaign, he had a different focus: crumb rubber.

Over the past few months, Smith has plunged into hyper-local issues like a debate over the surface of the new baseball field at Hamden High School. A plan to install synthetic crumb rubber turf was approved earlier this year. After the Elliott campaign called for that decision to be reversed — citing troubling though as-yet-unverified concerns about the safety of artificial turf — the town eventually agreed to install an organic surface mix called GeoFill.

The crumb-rubber debate represented a change of pace for Smith, who joined the Sanders campaign in the summer of 2015, acting on what he felt was a moral obligation to do whatever he could to get Bernie into office.

“It wasn’t a feeling of ​‘rah-rah, I’m gonna get into politics,’” Smith recalled. ​“It was a dejected realization that if I didn’t get involved, I would hate myself.”

Smith said the transition to the Hamden race required a change in thinking, as he tailored his political ideals to a smaller-scale enterprise. But, he added, the two campaigns turned out to be more similar than he expected.

“People are people,” he said, ​“and the average person has the same wants and needs.”

“It’s different in that it’s hyper-local,” he added of the crumb-rubber controversy. ​“But it’s similar to the environmentalism of the Bernie campaign.”

Besides proposing a $15 hourly minimum wage that would then rise with the Consumer Price Index, Elliott called in his campaign for closing the state budget gap in part by raising the top rate of 6.99 percent to 7.3 percent on annual income above $500,000 and 7.7 percent on income above $1 million. He also called for installing highway tolls at the state’s borders.

Above all, Smith said, the Hamden campaign has taught him an important lesson: it’s easy to get involved in politics. A year and a half ago, he was just a local property manager acting on a moral impulse. Now he’s moving to Nevada to work for Democrat Jacky Rosen as she campaigns for a seat in the U.S. House.

“It doesn’t come out of a place of ​‘I love politics,’” he said. ​“It’s the only way that the issues I care about are gonna happen.”