How Union Canvassers Tried To Rally The Base

As canvassers headed toward the home stretch of Tuesday’s Democratic primary, a labor door-knocking duo converted at least one skeptical Beaver Hills resident to vote for Mayor Toni Harp through a pitch that focused on jobs, public safety, and Goffe Street Park.

That pitch came just after 4 p.m. on Carmel Street, where New Haven Rising members and Harp supporters Jess Corbett and Scotticesa Marks won over neighbor Wendy Clayton to vote for the incumbent mayor.

Three-term incumbent Harp lost a challenge from Justin Elicker Tuesday in a Democratic mayoral primary. Beaver Hills’ Ward 28 emerged as one of the districts where Harp’s team needed to double efforts to pull supporters to the polls in the final hours of a close race. And the people at Wendy Clayton’s door were from the team Harp needs to pull it out.

Corbett works for Yale’s UNITE HERE Local 34, which has endorsed Harp and which spawned the New Haven Rising activist group. Marks works for Yale’s Facilities Department and is the daughter of New Haven Rising leader Scott Marks and Beaver Hills Alder Jill Marks. They were based Tuesday out of a neighborhood campaign headquarters at 316 Goffe St., right across from Goffe Street Park.

By the time the two canvassers had gotten to Clayton’s house, near the corner of Carmel Street and Percival Street, they had already left campaign literature in a few unanswered doors. They had chatted with a handful of residents who had already voted for the mayor, or were planning on voting for the mayor at the Hillhouse High School polling place in a few minutes.

“So many calls,” Carmel Street resident and Yale Facilities worker Wendell Pierre (pictured) said about the Harp campaign push Tuesday morning that encouraged him to get out the door and vote.

“Sometimes it takes knocks after knocks after knocks,” Marks said apologetically.

Neighbor Doug Taylor (pictured) assured Marks and Corbett that he was on his way right then and there to cast his ballot. He said Harp had made an appearance at his church last Sunday, and had made a campaign pitch that sounded good to him. ​“She does a good job being for the people,” he said.

Clayton (pictured), on the other hand, had not yet voted. When asked by Corbett and Marks on her way out the door, she said that, when she did vote this afternoon, she would not be casting her ballot for Harp.

“She don’t do nothing for the kids,” Clayton said about the mayor. ​“I’ve seen that she’s been out here a little more than she usually do,” but that’s just for the campaign, she added.

When there’s no election on, the mayor simply doesn’t make an effort to connect in person with members of the Beaver Hills community, she said.

Clayton said that she would happily vote to reelect Jill Marks as the neighborhood’s alder. She always sees Jill out in the community, she said, and knows how hard she works to represent Beaver Hills at City Hall. But the mayor? Not going to happen, she said.

Instead of getting in an argument, or leaving Clayton for more sympathetic potential voters, Corbett and Marks stayed put, and made the case for Harp. Not from the perspective of any kind of outside interest, but from that of fellow Beaver Hills neighbors. Marks lives on Ellsworth Avenue. Corbett grew up and lives on Norton Street, and his mom lives on Winthrop.

“It takes a team of the Board of Alders, the mayor, and the community” to get things done, Corbett said.

Those new speed bumps on Carmel Street and on Winthrop Avenue, that new roundabout at Crescent Street and Munson Street, and those $200,000 in state funds coming soon to rehab Goffe Street Park, those are all the work of a proactive alder, a supportive mayor, and an engaged community.

“Jill is putting her weight behind the mayor” for a reason, Corbett said. Because Harp has helped make those projects happen.

“She don’t need no help,” Clayton said about her alder. ​“She’s awesome just by herself.”

So Scotticesa brought up crime in the neighborhood, and in the city. Statistically, she said, crime is not just down under Harp’s leadership. It’s at a 50-year low. That wasn’t always the case for Beaver Hills, she pointed out.

“This community was jacked,” Clayton agreed. ​“It has slowed down a lot since [Harp’s] been downtown.”

What do you want to see in the neighborhood? Scotticesa asked. What would make Beaver Hills better.

“The violence has to stop,” Clayton replied. ​“The kids have to be able to be outside and be comfortable.”

Harp has supported community policing throughout her public service career, Marks said, dating back to when she was an alder representing the Dwight neighborhood in the 1980s. ​“That’s something that Toni has worked significantly on.”

“Have you heard of the jobs campaign?” Corbett asked, referencing New Haven Rising’s collaboration with UNITE HERE to pressure Yale to hire 1,000 local workers, including 500 from neighborhoods of need as well as a recently inked commitment for more job training programs.

Clayton said she had, and had felt that her own employment at Yale University, in a stable union job with good pay and great benefits, has materially changed her family’s life for the better.

Corbett said that a Yale job changed his family’s life too. His mom was on welfare, nearly homeless, he said, when she landed a Yale job two decades ago after going through a community job training program. She was able to afford to buy a house, stabilize her and her family’s life, and helped Corbett himself get a job at the university yeares later.

“I saw how one good job could change a whole family,” he said.

Harp has supported the jobs campaign, he said, and has been an ally with the unions as they’ve fought for more local hiring with the university and hospital.

“They mayor has been there every step of the way,” he said.

“That’s really made a big difference,” Clayton said about the jobs campaign.

She had never thought about the mayor that way before, she told Corbett and Marks. As someone who has presided over a drop in crime and a rise in employment.

“Nice talking with y’all,” she said. ​“I think I’ve changed my decision.” She said she would be heading to Hillhouse to vote right after she picked up her son from a friend’s place.

And at Hillhouse, she said, she’d be casting her ballot for Harp.

Preaching Unity In The Hill

Meanwhile, in the Hill, an aldermanic candidate and the labor activist group New Haven Rising have stood up for their neighborhood by delivering Yale University jobs.

They struck a chord with some voters interviewed at the polls, while others said the city is being mismanaged and that they’re ready for a change.

In a show of unity with other candidates from the UNITE HERE unions in the Hill, Carmen Rodriguez, who’s running unopposed for Ward 6 alder, spent Tuesday afternoon pulling votes in other wards.

“I’m challenging myself to keep myself visible,” Rodriguez said. ​“I’m a Hill girl, I’ll forever be that. We love our community and its diversity, and we are working together for an even better Hill.”

Rodriguez walked down Winthrop Avenue in Ward 3, where the incumbent, Ron Hurt, is facing a challenger, Maria Rodriguez. Rodriguez Tuesday gave one final rap on the doors that New Haven Rising’s volunteers have been visiting throughout the summer months. They checked about the latest neighborhood news, asking one man about his back problems, and they offered rides, driving one woman who hadn’t voted in 30 years to the polls.

In her porch-front pitches, Rodriguez didn’t talk much about the heated Democratic mayoral primary pitting incumbent Harp against challenger Justin Elicker. She dropped Harp’s name only a couple of times.

Instead, she focused on trying to get the vote out at all, holding a long back-and-forth in Spanish with one skeptic who wasn’t sure that showing up mattered. She argued to him that casting a ballot would show the Hill is a unified political force that needs to be listened to.

Rodriguez made the rounds with Carlos Hernandez, who got involved with New Haven Rising after hitting a dead end with Yale job applications. When they arrived at Marilyn Santiago’s house, she was on the front steps already, beside lawn signs. She said that she’s thinking about how to better her neighborhood, and she said she has seen Alder Hurt put in ​“hard work” to do that.

Down the block, others said they’d be heading out soon to the polls, including one was just waking up from a nap after working the late shift.

But one voter, who’d been in the Hill for 25 years, said he didn’t think he’d show up this time. He said New Haven doesn’t have enough jobs, especially not good-paying ones that would give families a break from working around the clock. He added that he doesn’t think politics are the best way to get everyone to come together.

Rodriguez said that the union-backed alders are working to change that, by goading Yale into hiring more New Haven residents, especially from poor areas like the Hill, and offering training and mentorship to get there. She added that voters like him needed to come out to vote to make sure those promises are kept.

“We have 6,000 people in the Hill, and we are asking the community we live in to be engaged. We hold the change in our hands,” Rodriguez said. ​“We all have to come to the table. As a community together, we are better, having more voices to speak.”

“This is the neighborhood of need,” added Hernandez, a 2016 Wilbur Cross graduate. ​“You’ve got to keep the youth out of the street.”

On Tuesday afternoon, though, turnout was slow at Ward 3’s polls at Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy.

Voters who showed up said they were thinking about how well the city’s being run. They diverged on whether things are improving fast enough.

J. Thompson, who recently moved into senior housing in the neighborhood, said she thinks that the city is heading in the right direction. She said that she’s looking forward to the opening of the Q House, as a place where kids and seniors can go, and she said the potholes on the streets are ​“gradually” being patched up.

“I just like what’s being done in New Haven, and I hope it continues,” she said. ​“I think we’re on the road toward a good ending.”

Others said that they haven’t seen enough get done. One said he was looking for ​“competent management” in City Hall; another said she wants the same at the Board of Education.

Suva Thapa said that he was ​“upset” by the increase in property taxes, saying it far outpaced what any raise he might get at work, without seeing an improvement in city services. ​“When we call, they don’t care,” Thapa said about his calls to weed-whack parks and disperse loiterers.

Even when voters disagreed, Rodriguez tried to make sure they stayed engaged.

“I would like to see a new government, because the person is too bad,” said Anabelle Jimenez, adding that she was referring to both New Haven and Washington. ​“I need a change.”

Rodriguez told her that could happen in 2020. ​“We need to clean the White House,” she said. ​“They are Puerto Rican, like I am, and what happened with that storm hurt us all. We need a clean house.”

“I need a change here,” Jimenez said.