Momentum is on Our Side

The University of New Hampshire’s latest Nutmeg State Poll came out Thursday. The most startling numbers in it are about how Lamont is doing on the issues Connecticut voters say matter most. Cost of living is the most important problem facing the state, and 62% of voters disapprove of how Lamont is handling it. Taxes and housing come next on the list, and 55% disapprove of his handling of each.

He has had eight years to work on affordability and only recently discovered the term. In those eight years, property taxes have exploded, utility companies have extracted record profits from working families, tuition has continued to saddle the next generation with onerous debt, and housing costs have spiraled because he refuses to work on big solutions.

Before May 16, the 2,000 delegates heading to the convention need to ask whether a candidate this far underwater on cost of living, taxes, and housing is really as strong in a general election as his team would have you believe.

The reason Lamont is our governor is that in 2018, no other Democrat could raise the money to run a primary against him. That is not the case this year. We have raised $235,000 toward our $335,000 qualifying threshold under Connecticut’s Citizens’ Election Program, which means we are within $100,000 of unlocking the public funding that will carry us all the way through August.

Rogue DNC, a national progressive page, sharing our campaign on April 24.

Lamont’s latest argument for re-election is the childcare endowment, which is also the proof that he has run out of ideas. He set it up the way someone might set up a private trust, and assumed that what works for him personally would work for the state. It does not. Trust funds for the wealthy hold up because the beneficiary can afford to let the money sit and grow. Families and providers who depend on a childcare endowment cannot afford to wait, and the demand they put on the program does not pause for market cycles.

Lamont built the endowment around inconsistent revenue, with $300 million deposited and another $300 million projected. That second $300 million is already not coming. The choice he is leaving us with is to manipulate the fiscal guardrails on the margins to keep childcare funded, rather than make permanent changes to a guardrail system that locks an inequitable revenue model in place. Lamont has only ever governed during a boom cycle, and when the cycle turns, the only group he knows how to ask more of is the middle class.

When Lamont says a primary challenger needs a reason to run, what he really means is that his own primary against Joe Lieberman twenty years ago, over the Iraq War, counted as a reason but nothing happening in Connecticut today does. Exploding property taxes, cut teacher positions, unaffordable housing, and utility companies extracting record profits from working families all fail, in his view, to qualify as reasons. That is what being out of touch with this state looks like in real time.

We are three weeks from the convention. Momentum is clearly on our side, and the only thing standing between us and the strongest possible showing in May is the gap between $235,000 and $335,000. Every contribution between now and the convention closes that gap, and every dollar that closes the gap removes one more excuse for delegates who want to vote with us but are still waiting to see whether we will make it.

Donate

Thank you,

Josh