Thomas MacMillan Photo
Elicker greets his supporters at O’Toole’s pub.
(Analysis) Justin Elicker became the sole remaining challenger to Toni Harp for the mayor’s office Tuesday night by capturing five of New Haven’s highest-voting wards — while remaining practically invisible to voters in predominantly African-American neighborhoods.
Overcoming that math could prove his biggest challenge in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 5 general election.
Harp, a state senator who is African-American, captured 49.8 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s four-way Democratic mayoral primary. She hopes to become the city’s first female mayor. The city’s current mayor, John DeStefano, is retiring after 20 years in the job.
Elicker, the only white candidate in the race, came in second with 23.2 percent of the vote. He declared optimism in a speech to supporters Tuesday night, noting that New Haven has over 18,000 registered unaffiliated voters who didn’t get to vote in the primary.
A close look at the ward-by-ward breakdown revealed another hard-to-dispute fact, though: Harp didn’t just receive twice as many votes; she finished strong in neighborhoods all over the city. Elicker, by contrast, came in fourth place in some wards dominated by voters of color.
“Everyone in that room knows that we need a mayor for the whole city, not just for a part of the city,” Tim Holahan (at left in photo) remarked outside the Elicker victory party Tuesday night at O’Toole’s Irish Pub on Orange Street, where the crowd was almost entirely white. Holahan headed Elicker’s successful campaign in Westville’s Ward 25.
“Justin has to figure out how to be that mayor. If he does, he can win.”
Elicker campaigned hard in all neighborhoods of the city. He spoke Spanish regularly on the trail. He did not target his campaign to white voters. He had some visible African-American supporters. He earned respect across the political spectrum for running a smart, strategic, grassroots, issue-focused, publicly-financed primary campaign.
In the end, though, Elicker (pictured) found it hard to break through against better-known candidates of color in numerous parts of the city. He received a meager 15 votes in Newhallville’s Ward 20, for instance. Harp received 569 votes there; Kermit Carolina and Henry Fernandez, who are also black, got 141 and 81, respectively. (Carolina and Fernandez have since dropped out of the race.)
Elicker posted 93 votes in Newhallville’s other main ward, 21, compared to Harp’s 251.
Elicker got a total of 13 votes in the Hill’s Ward 3, 16 votes in the Hill’s Ward 4, 15 in the Hill’s Ward 5; and 19 in West River’s Ward 23 and 29 in West Rock’s and West Hills’ Ward 30.
He outright won Wards 9, 10, and 19, which are predominantly in the East Rock neighborhood (though they include Cedar Hill and slices of Newhallville and Fair Haven); Ward 1, comprising Yale students; Ward 7, which is downtown; Ward 25 in the Westville flats; and Morris Cove’s Ward 18. In most of those wards Harp ran competitively. The exception was white-dominated 18th Ward, which has a history of anti-black incidents (including the torching of a house bought by the housing authority). Ward 18 posed a challenge for Harp: even though the elected officials there backed her (she won the ward committee’s unanimous voice-vote endorsement), Elicker beat her 2‑to‑1 when voters anonymously made their choices at the polls. The Harp campaign must have had an inkling of that trend: that would explain its final-week press conference and robocall campaign to convince Morris Covers that Elicker had an unstated plan to close their firehouse. (Read about that here.)
Gary Holder-Winfield (pictured at Harp’s Dixwell headquarters Tuesday), a Newhallville state representative who supports Toni Harp, said the math leads to an inescapable conclusion: “The numbers look as though Justin’s support did not come from wards you would normally call black.”
“I don’t think you can win — and I’m not sure you would want to win — without them. You want to become mayor of the city with what looks like a diverse coalition of people behind you,” said Holder-Winfield, who is black. “Especially after having a mayor who has been here so long. Not just ethnicity. Differences of opinion.
“The race is going to go on another two months. Maybe he’ll find a way to do that. At this point, it doesn’t appear very diverse.”
One person contested Holahan’s and Holder-Winfield’s interpretation of the vote: Justin Elicker himself.
“I don’t think that’s there. You can’t do that analysis by any ward,” Elicker insisted in a post-election interview. “Even Ward 10; you all say it’s ‘East Rock.’ But I have strong support in Cedar Hill,” a more racially mixed enclave of six streets northeast of East Rock Park. He said he “consistently” conversed in Spanish with voters and identified Latino supporters in Fair Haven.
Elicker said he “refuse[s] to bend to this idea that people will vote for a candidate based on what that candidate looks like.” At the same time, he acknowledged, “we would be naive to believe race doesn’t impact on this election.”
Asked how he will respond to the possible racial breakdown of the vote, he responded, “We need to do the same thing we’ve been doing: knocking on doors and talking to people.”
Elicker said his campaign will “have a discussion in the next two days about how we’ll broaden” the base in the general-election campaign. But then again, he added, “independent voters live everywhere in the city. People who voted for Henry and Kermit live everywhere in the city.” And, he said, he has a good chance of getting many of those votes.