New Haven Shrugs For Ned, Feels Eva

Ned Lamont won the vote Tuesday — but he didn’t win New Haven’s hearts.

That could be a problem come November.

Lamont, the party-endorsed candidate, handily defeated challenger Joe Ganim in a primary for governor. Even in New Haven, supposedly one of Ganim’s best hopes of getting votes. Lamont crushed him 3 – 1 in the city, based on results from the voting machines, 6,593 (74 percent) to 2,242 (26 percent); up to 956 absentee ballots remained to be counted.

But Lamont, a Greenwich businessman and millionaire who has struggled to translate his own personal fortune and high-profile endorsements into enthusiastic support among everyday New Haveners, faces a steeper challenge than Ganim (who spent seven years in federal prison for taking kickbacks) in the general election. Many observers believe voters fed up with the state’s fiscal mess may elect a Republican.

To win, Lamont needs an enthusiastic turnout in New Haven, home to the largest contingent of Democratic voters in the state. Current Gov. Dannel P. Malloy needed an 18,000-vote plurality here to win the job; U.S. senators have relied on similar margins.

Throughout the city Tuesday, even voters who chose Lamont shrugged their way to the polls. It was striking how difficult it was to find a single enthusiastic comment from a voter, even a Lamont voter, for the candidate. At polling place after polling place, the reaction was a marked difference from the ardor expressed for a different candidate, Eva Bermudez Zimmerman, the Democratic challenge candidate for lieutenant governor. Bermudez Zimmerman, like Ganim, was counting on the urban vote; her better known opponent, party-endorsed Susan Bysiewicz, didn’t even bother campaigning much in the city or putting up signs at most polling places. Bermudez Zimmerman captured about 54 percent of the vote in New Haven, and all the visible passion.

Even Joe Ganim, despite losing by so much even in the city, elicited ardent, at times, emotional expressions of support at the polls.

“Joe’s my man,” Thomas Daniels, 46, said as he handed out flyers for the candidate outside Truman School in the Hill neighborhood. Daniels served time after confessing to a murder it turned out he didn’t commit; he said he has stayed out of prison since his release 25 years ago. ​“Joe understands what me and a lot of men of color have been going through. Joe did time like I did. My friends know he can relate to us like we can relate to him.”

As elsewhere in the state, Lamont got his vote in New Haven with the help of labor unions betting he has the best chance to beat a Republican in November. A lot of the heavy lifting was done by the most politically active union in town, Yale’s UNITE HERE locals.

Rather than seek to excite people about Lamont on the doors, canvassers stressed their efforts to pressure Yale to hire more local people — then noted that Lamont showed up at their most recent rally.

When union organizer Jess Corbett showed up at the door of Peter Blasini, a real estate lawyer who lives on Bellevue Road in Beaver Hills, Blasini admitted that he hasn’t been particularly impressed by Lamont’s candidacy to date. What cemented his support for the Greenwich businessman, he said, was Corbett’s pitch that Lamont is the candidate most in line with local unions’ efforts to get major employers to hire locally and from neighborhoods of need.

“It’s good to hear that his actions speak louder than his words,” Blasini said after Corbett told him about the UNITE HERE jobs march through Dixwell and Newhallville that Lamont participated in last week. ​“Because his words have not been tremendously inspiring.”

Blasini’s tepid response to Lamont, was typical of the nearly 20 voters that the Independent spoke with on Tuesday afternoon in Beaver Hills.

Some, like Blasini, said Lamont had won their votes because of his campaign’s endorsement by local progressive actors like UNITE HERE, which has a long track record of successful political advocacy and getting jobs for low-income New Haveners.

Some said they were voting for Lamont because they can’t stomach Bridgeport Mayor Joe Ganim, who served seven years in federal prison for municipal corruption during his first stint as the Park City’s mayor, and because they think Lamont is the best chance the Democratic Party has to retain the governor’s seat in November.

And some said they simply didn’t care about Lamont at all, and were heading to the polls on Tuesday as a civic obligation, or because of their excitement for lieutenant governor candidate Eva Bermudez Zimmerman, or because they hope to see Joe Ganim bring his second chance story all the way to Hartford.

“He needs to continue to do the work by engaging people at more local events” in New Haven, State Rep. Juan Candelaria put it delicately at Lamont’s victory party Tuesday night at College Street Music Hall.

Not one person the Independent spoke with at the polls Tuesday said they were energized to vote for Lamont. Which may be a problem for Democrats in November, at least in New Haven, as Lamont is poised to be the party’s candidate for governor.

“He’s A Safe Bet”

Voters trickled in and out of the polling place at Hillhouse High School on Sherman Parkway on Tuesday afternoon, walking by an array of lawn signs announcing the candidacies of Ned Lamont, Joe Ganim, and Democratic attorney general hopeful Chris Mattei on their way to cast their votes.

The few who had anything at all to say about Lamont leaned towards the Greenwich businessman’s inoffensiveness.

“He’s a safe bet,” said Allan Scott. ​“He’s the best chance for the Democrats to win” in November. He said he likes that Lamont is not too far to the right, not too far to the left.

Allen Brown said he voted for Lamont because, after running an unsuccessful campaign for governor in 2010, Lamont ​“has been fighting for this job for so damn long.” He said the intervening eight years have probably left Lamont with some time to come up with some good ideas on how to govern if elected.

He said he wants the next governor to make Connecticut and cities like New Haven a place where businesses gravitate towards, not away from. He said Lamont probably cares about making the state a business-friendly place as well, considering the number of times he mentions General Electric’s departure from Connecticut in his campaign ads.

But, Brown said, he’s not discounting Joe Ganim simply because of his criminal record.

“Ganim has paid his price to society,” Brown said. ​“Justice is wholly unfair to some” in this country.

James Coatsworth and Sharon Medak said they are supporting Lamont and lieutenant governor candidate and former secretary of the state Susan Bysiewicz because both identify as progressives.

“But,” Coatsworth said, ​“I’d rather see her as governor and him as lieutenant governor.”

Voting For Eva

Voters with whom the Independent spoke with outside of the Hillhouse polling place said that they came to the polls Tuesday primarily because of Eva Bermudez Zimmerman, the 31-year-old union organizer of Puerto Rican descent running for the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor. If elected, she would have been the first Latina (or Latino) to serve as one of Connecticut’s constitutional officers.

“I want Eva to win,” Rosalyn Diaz said. She said Bermudez Zimmerman would bring new blood, new ideas, a working-class background, and much-needed representation of the state’s Latino and Latina population at the highest reaches of state government.

As for Lamont, ​“He’s white and rich,” she said. Something she has seen in many state politicians before.

Frank and Paula Panzarella said they too were at the polls on Tuesday because of Bermudez Zimmerman. They said they changed their party affiliations from Green to Democrat in 2016 so that they could support Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. They said Bermudez Zimmerman’s insurgent, far-left candidacy reminds them of the Sanders campaign.

“Do we need another Fairfield County millionaire or a crooked politician from Bridgeport?” Frank asked about the Democratic Party choices for governor. Instead, he said, Bermudez Zimmerman represents a fresh face for the party and hopefully an inducement for the party to keep moving to the left.

Samantha Shapland said that was exactly why she was voting for Bermudez Zimmerman as well. She said she got a text this morning from the Working Families Party reminding her that today is the primary, and that Bermudez Zimmerman is on the ballot. She said she wants to see politicians who support $15 minimum wage, free college tuition, and universal health care.

Bermudez Zimmerman challenged Lamont’s running mate in the primary, party-endorsed Susan Bysiewicz.

Lamont bruised the hopes of New Haven political activists and elected officials when he went back on a plan to consider State Sen. Gary Winfield, who is African-American, as his running mate, choosing Bysiewicz, a white Baby Boomer, instead. Even though New Haven’s elected officials stuck with Lamont for governor, they and pretty much every activist in town swarmed to support Bermudez Zimmerman’s candidacy. Bysiewicz didn’t even bother showing up much in New Haven for the campaign; she solidified her support in the suburbs. Almost no Bysiewicz signs even appeared at New Haven voting places Tuesday. Those bruised feelings linger, and may as well pose a challenge for Lamont in generating urban excitement for his general election campaing.

“I Believe In Second Chances”

A half-dozen Ganim campaign volunteers canvassed up and down Sherman Parkway between noon and 2.

One of those volunteers, 29-year-old New Haven-native Wess Hoskie, said he supported the Bridgeport mayor because of his faith in Ganim’s ability to resolve the state’s fiscal woes and also advocate for the most vulnerable in society.

“I believe in second chances,” he said about why Ganim’s prior record doesn’t bother him.

He said Ganim has the right experience for the job, considering his early success in saving Bridgeport from bankruptcy as a young mayor in the early 1990s.

“He’s gonna turn this state around,” Hoskie said.

A young father who works the overnight shift at Wallingford’s Walmart, Hoskie said Ganim’s commitment to the welfare of Connecticut’s cities, his track record of creating jobs in Bridgeport, and his comfort relating to people of color and poor people, make his candidacy appealingly populist and relatable.

“There should be no upper class, no lower class, no middle class,” Hoskie said. ​“Just one Connecticut.” He said Ganim is best positioned to encourage that sense of unity if elected governor.

Some voters, like a woman who identified herself only as Letitia, said she didn’t know whom she was going to vote for until she entered the polling place.

“For me, it was a flip of the coin” between Ganim and Lamont, she said.

But she ultimately decided to vote for Ganim because, as a former state-employed probation officer herself, she believes in the Ganim campaign’s message around reentry.

John Alston (no relation to the city’s fire chief) also said he was initially unsure as to which Democratic candidate to pick for governor. But, he said, a friend convinced him that Ganim is ​“more for the people,” and so the Bridgeport mayor earned his vote.

Plus, he said, ​“Lamont has been here two times before” and hasn’t succeeded, referring to Lamont’s unsuccessful bids for the U.S. senate in 2006 and for governor in 2010.

New Haven Jobs … And Lamont

Outside of Hillhouse, a team of local labor organizers walked up and down Bellevue Road in Beaver Hills, knocking doors and trying to get out the vote for Lamont.

Jess Corbett, a staff organizer for Local 34, Yale’s clerical and technical workers union, joined his mother Rebecca, a longtime employee at Yale’s dermatopathology department, and Chaz Carmon of the youth anti-violence organization Ice The Beef for the afternoon doorknocking.

Their pitch hinged first on the local labor unions’ decades-long efforts to get Yale University to hire more New Haveners, and on Yale’s 2015 commitment to hire over the subsequent three years 1,000 New Haveners, 500 of whom were to come from the city’s ​“neighborhoods of need” like Dixwell, Newhallville, and the Hill.

The second part of their pitch turned to Lamont. Jess told Bellevue Road neighbor Blasini that the unions’ approach to supporting politicians like Lamont is more about seeing which candidates sign onto the unions’ efforts to boost local employment, as opposed to being about which candidates promise to be leaders in and of themselves in the fight for social and economic justice.

“We’re doing this. Will you join us?” Jess said to describe the political agenda of the unions, which involved acting first and then bringing on politicians second. ​“I like that better” that relying on politicians to act first, he said.

Blasini confirmed that he was on board with Lamont, despite being underwhelmed by a campaign stop that Lamont had made to a faith-based social and economic justice organization called CONECT that Blasini belongs too.

“He spoke in platitudes,” Blasini said about Lamont. He said the candidate needs to be more specific in his policy proposals if he is to retain the support of New Haven Democrats.

The labor organizers also made a stop at Margie Z. Sigular’s house a few blocks up Bellevue Road. Sigular, 84, told the Corbetts and Carmon about her 30-year career at Yale, where she worked first as a third cook in the university’s dining halls and then as an assistant in alumni records. She said she belonged to both Local 34 and Local 35, the university’s pink- and blue-collar unions, during her tenure at Yale.

The stable pay, benefits, and employment guaranteed by the union and the university helped her afford buying a home, raising a family, and looking after her kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids.

“He marched with us,” Jess told Sigular. He said Lamont is in support of Yale hiring more locally.

Sigular said she liked that, and that she wants to see a candidate not just support local employment, but also reinstitute highway tolls to collect revenue from interstate truckers and someone who will stand up to police brutality against unarmed people of color. (Lamont says he is sort of in favor of tolls; he’d restrict them to out-of-staters.)

“You want my vote,” Sigular said, ​“you better do something for it.”