A 25-year-old first-time challenger apparently toppled a 24-year incumbent in a Democratic primary Tuesday.
The challenger, Michael DiMassa, claimed victory Tuesday night over incumbent Lou Esposito by about a 30-vote margin.
Esposito told the Independent at 10 p.m. he was waiting for absentee ballots to be counted before officially conceding, but he recognized that it appeared he had lost.
The primary was for the nomination for the 116th General Assembly seat, which represents much of West Haven and a slice of New Haven’s Hill neighborhood.
Just 68 people voted at the New Haven polling place, at Truman School. DiMassa beat Esposito there 41 – 27. The official statewide tally for the full race from the Secretary of the State showed DiMassa leading 567 – 545.
Following is an earlier version of this story, a preview of the race and interviews with the candidates:
Lou’s Last Stand?
David Yaffe-Bellany Photo
Esposito Monday at campaign headquarters.
As voters — at least a few of them — in the Hill go to the polls for a primary election Tuesday, it’s not so simple to figure out who’s the “insurgent” and who’s the “insider.”
State Rep. Lou Esposito faces a challenge from Michael DiMassa for the Democratic nomination to represent the state’s 116th General Assembly District. The district covers about half of West Haven, as well as a slice of the Hill neighborhood, where 419 registered Democrats were added during redistricting four years ago. Polls stay open at Truman School in the Hill until 8 p.m. Tuesday. The winner will face Republican Richard DePalma in November.
Esposito, who’s 76 years old, has held the seat since 1993, since DiMassa has been a toddler.
But West Haven’s Democratic Town Committee has endorsed 25-year-old DiMassa, who is the West Haven city clerk.
DiMassa supported party establishment choice Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primaries; Esposito, a retired auto body shop owner, supported insurgent Bernie Sanders.
In this election, DiMassa is the one promising to bring change.
DiMassa and Esposito both said they have spent significant time in the New Haven section of the 116th, which includes streets like Ann, West and Bond, as well as parts of Columbus and Congress avenues, despite the fact that it represents only one half of one low-voting ward.
On Sunday, Esposito and Hill Alder Evelyn Rodriguez rode a fire truck through the neighborhood, tossing candy to neighbors who cheered from their front yards.
But not everyone in the 116th is happy with Esposito’s performance. West Haven Democratic Town Chairman Jim Morrissey told the Independent that Esposito has neglected the Hill and failed to keep tabs on constituents in West Haven.
“He’s never been in contact with me in two years,” Morrissey said. “He never even made a phone call to ask for the party’s endorsement.”
Esposito called that narrative “bullshit.” He attributed the rejection to “revenge politics” brought on by his refusal to support Democratic Mayor Edward O’Brien in his reelection battle last year. In the spring, after the party rejected him at its nominating convention, Esposito filed papers in Hartford to put himself on the ballot and force a primary election.
“I’m not part of the establishment,” he said. “I’m a people person. I’m more concerned about constituent work than I am about partisan politics.”
Like an Omen
An Esposito ad that was supposed to come with the New Haven Register last weekend.
In 1983, Esposito found a small, gold-colored medal lying in the driveway of his garage on Boston Post Road. On one side, it said, “Do Right and Fear No Man.” On the other: “Government by the People Shall Not Perish.”
Since that day, Esposito has saved the medal as both a material testament to his most deeply held principles and as an old-fashioned lucky charm.
“When I found this thing, it was like an omen,” he said. “This medal has been with me forever.”
The year he picked up the medal, Esposito ran for fire commissioner against an incumbent who had been in office for nearly two decades. He focused on the issues rather than personal attacks, he said, and ultimately secured an upset victory.
On Monday morning, however, the inspirational energy of that prized trinket seemed a distant memory. Esposito said he was “strangely confident” of victory in the primary. But as the clock ticked toward the next day’s election, he grew increasingly frazzled.
A couple of poll workers had bailed at the last minute, leaving him three volunteers short of the number needed to supervise the five polling locations in the district. And to make matters worse, an expensive campaign ad that was supposed to appear in the New Haven Register last weekend had somehow failed to make it into the paper.
“I’ve got enough stress today. This has really put me over the top,” he said on the phone with his contact at the Register. “You don’t know how close I am to really losing everything.”
Like Bernie Sanders, his choice for president this spring, Esposito speaks passionately about the plight of the working class: the need for higher wages, more job opportunities, affordable college.
But despite his Sanders-style talking points, Esposito doesn’t pitch himself as an outsider trying to rewrite the rules of state politics. He said he believes that his experience within the political system — his ability to negotiate with state agencies and strike compromises with rival legislators — makes him more qualified than his youthful rival for the state House seat.
And, he said, he understands his constituents better than anyone in West Haven.
“I see people who might seem intimidating to someone else, but I see them as people,” he said. “I go talk, and it’s not a bullshit story. I talk to them like real people.”
This year’s campaign — which briefly featured another challenger, former NFL player Ulish Booker, who had to withdraw after missing a deadline for submitting paperwork — has tested the limits of Esposito’s patience.
An attack ad that slammed him for missing more than 100 votes in 2015 was especially alarming, he said. He admitted skipping the votes — but said he missed most of them during a two-week period in which he was laid low by a stomach virus.
“They will say and do anything to discredit me,” he said. “It angers me a little that the political establishment in West Haven is so narrow-minded to put someone out who’s been so good to West Haven and New Haven.”
Change?
DiMassa and Morrissey talk strategy.
DiMassa, a thin, well dressed millennial, was born a year before Esposito was first elected to the state House. He is accustomed to having voters raise their eyebrows in response to his boyish appearance: He ran his first campaign at age 18, the first of two unsuccessful bids for a seat on West Haven’s City Council.
“No one knew me,” he said at his Derby Avenue campaign headquarters Monday afternoon. “All they saw was this 18-year-old in a shirt and tie standing at their door.”
DiMassa made clear that he does not want age to be a factor in the primary. But he was careful to emphasize the hundreds of hours of physically demanding work — many of them spent outside in the summer heat — that he has dedicated to the campaign.
“You have to have the drive, and you have to be willing to be out there,” he said. “If I’m a little younger, it means it’s easier for me to be out there running around.”
DiMassa claimed that he has knocked on close to 3,500 doors as part of a comprehensive, months-long effort to grasp the issues that affect West Haven neighbors.
A lifelong Democrat, DiMassa voted for Clinton in the presidential primary. He admired the grassroots energy of the Sanders campaign, he said, but felt that Clinton would “move the party forward.”
At the same time, his candidacy is rooted in the conviction that career politicians are part of the problem. DiMassa casts Esposito as a complacent veteran out of touch with his constituents and as a cynical opportunist who specializes in attaching his name to other people’s political victories.
“He’s lost touch with the district,” DiMassa said. “They haven’t seen a huge amount of improvement over the last 20 years. You need to show some visible accomplishments.”
He claimed that Esposito does not deserve credit for the start of much-needed repair work on Forest Road that was held up for nearly a decade by the state Department of Transportation. (Esposito told the Independent that his phone calls helped get the project up and running.)
Asked if the attack ad was unfair given that Esposito had been ill, DiMassa insisted that a politician who doesn’t show up for work doesn’t deserve to have a job.
“I saw him driving on Front Avenue during the middle of the budget” when he said he was suffering from the virus, Morrissey said. “That’s when he missed all those votes.”
DiMassa believes that the state should institute term limits to prevent the complacency of a long-term incumbent. He said he does not plan to stay in the Assembly for as long as Esposito, though he was reluctant to put a precise cap on his potential tenure.
“I don’t think Hartford could deal with me after 10 years,” he said. “I won’t pass Louie. I don’t think I could do it for half that.”
For now, DiMassa said, he is focused on making it over the line to the general election. He said that, over the last three months, he spent five hours a day on weekends meeting constituents in that narrow sliver of the Hill — and that after all those hours, he now feels completely at home there.
It’s easy to see why DiMassa has made the Hill a priority for his campaign. In 2012, only 15 New Haveners turned out for the Democratic primary. But that year, Esposito won the nomination by just 12 votes. In effect, the Hill put him over the top.
Still, in 2012, many Hill neighbors said they had never heard of Esposito. Two years later, turnout slowly ticked up: Around 60 New Haven residents voted in the 2014 primary.
DiMassa, who argued that another year of low turnout would favor the incumbent, said Hill neighbors have received him warmly. They have invited him to street parties and local gatherings, he said, where he’s learned about neighborhood-specific problems, such as a shortage of summer jobs for local youth, that don’t necessarily apply to the rest of the district.
“I don’t think anyone up there said, ‘You’re from West Haven,’” DiMassa said. “They treat us like we’re from New Haven.”