Sid Silverman and Harold Levitz accepted the candidate’s flyer.
Chris Murphy got Cyvia Scharmett an absentee ballot after he visited her elderly complex. Scharmett said she will fill out the ballot — by checking off the name of Murphy’s opponent, Susan Bysiewicz, who swung by the same complex Sunday.
Scharmett declared her intentions on Sunday when Bysiewicz made an hour’s campaign stop at New Haven’s Tower One, an elderly complex that houses up to 350 potential voters.
Bysiewicz is the underdog Tuesday against Murphy in a Democratic Party primary for an open U.S. Senate seat. Murphy has lined up most of the official endorsements in New Haven and has visited so often in recent weeks that he may soon qualify for city residency. Still, Bysiewicz has made sure to stop by too, and at Tower One Sunday she showed that she’s by no means given up.
Tower One, a few blocks from downtown and the train station, is seen by politicians as an electoral treasure trove. But they have to not only convince voters there, but get them ballots or get them to the polls.
Bysiewicz and potential voter Mila Pizor.
About 75 residents, mostly women and many in wheelchairs or using canes and walkers for assistance, crowded one of the meeting rooms to hear the former secretary of state make her pitch.
On her way in, Bysiewicz, who is Polish, chatted with residents like 87-year-old Mila Pizor about the towns each hailed from in the mother country. Pizor is from Chanow; Bysiewicz said her grandfather came from the small town of Tulkowice in Galicia, in southern Poland.
In a moving exchange Pizor told Bysiewicz how she had lost both her parents and sister at Auschwitz. Biesiwicz said her parents took her to visit that camp when she was 11.
“I am very happy I survived. I talk with them [her murdered parents and sister]. I’m sure they can hear me,” Pizor said.
About the election, she added to Bysiewicz: “I watch you every day on TV.”
Bina Fenig was another resident making her way to the meeting room for the stump speech. “I’m Jewish, and Polish. How do you pronounce your name in Polish?” Fenig asked Bysiewicz?
“Bee-shevicz,” the senatorial hopeful replied.
The candidate with Bina Fenig.
In the meeting room, the seniors gathered near a table of cookies and fruit to be consumed after the address. The audience listened attentively as Bysiewicz described going up against lobbyists when she was in the state legislature and against the feds when George Bush tried to eliminate voter registration at the Veterans Administration hospital.
She received applause for preserving Medicare benefits.
She called for a transaction tax on securities transactions and for bringing troops home from Afghanistan even before the deadline the president has set.
Rose Steinman told Bysiewicz she has her vote, if she’s able to vote.
She said such steps would free up billions to help homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages, create “green” jobs (in the environmental sector), and jumpstart a Manhattan Project-caliber campaign for renewable energy to free the country from oil dependency.
Rose Steinman declared that she will vote for Bysiewicz. “She’s convinced me she’s really working for us, for little people. She told me things she really believes,” said the 97-year-old. Her husband used to operate Zemel Brothers Appliances on Court and Orange, where the federal building now looms, she said.
“That’s how we do it,” the candidate said before shaking the potential voter’s hand.
Steinman is registered, but unlike Scharmett has not yet received an absentee ballot that she requested, she said. It’s unclear if she will in time. She was unsure how she would get to the polling place.
The Bysiewicz campaign did not hold an event at Tower One to distribute absentee ballots, as the Murphy campaign did.
Herb Small is a family friend of Bysiewicz and a resident of Tower One. He said a month ago he was in touch with the campaign and tried to arrange what he called “an ice cream social” to distribute absentee ballots to Bysiewicz-inclined voters. It didn’t work out.
That lack of coordination from her campaign might prove perilous to the Bysiewicz’s prospects among the Tower One-ites. Unless, perhaps, the tower is teeming with Cyvia Scharmetts.
“I believe all the politicians see this [Tower One] as a mecca for voting, but it’s not,” argued Tower One social worker Nicole Merrit.
She said about half the residents will vote, with 30 to 40 percent using absentee ballots; only ten to 15 percent will actually go to the polls, helped by relatives, or sometimes by local representatives like Hill Alderwoman Dolores Colon, Merrit said.
Miriam Bilksi was another registered potential voter, registered who said she has not received an absentee ballot and expressed an interest in voting for Bysiewicz. Herb Small said he will contact Democratic Registrar Sharon Ferrucci on Monday to make a request for “supervised voting” (under which registrars would come on site).
Bysiewicz said her campaign will make the same request.
“Every person’s vote makes a difference,” Bysiewicz said. “Seniors are very diligent about voting. If you believed the Quinnipiac Poll, Ned Lamont should have been governor. I’m optimistic.”