For nine months, this campaign has run on mission. Connecticut families have real problems affording to live here, Lamont has been the single biggest obstacle to solving them, and someone had to make the case. Every new person who hears about this campaign is another person with us.
People keep asking three questions about where this campaign stands and where it is going. Here are our answers.
The Republican field is thin. It consists of Ryan Fazio, a two-and-a-half-term state senator; Erin Stewart, the former New Britain mayor who spent $500 of city money on her own birthday gifts; and Betsy McCaughey, a Newsmax anchor. According to the most recent UNH Nutmeg poll, 39 percent of Republican primary voters do not even know enough about Fazio to have an opinion of him, and more than half cannot identify McCaughey at all. None of these candidates is the kind of opponent a strong Democratic nominee should fear in November. When I win the Democratic primary, I will be the strongest candidate Connecticut Democrats have fielded in a generation, running on the issues a majority of voters say they care most about: cost of living, housing, and a tax code that favors the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
I have bills with my name on them to back up every one of those priorities. Lamont wants to be seen as progressive, but his record says otherwise: he vetoes housing bills, fights labor’s priorities, vehemently defends a tax system that cements generational wealth, and let an Eversource PR campaign run his top utility regulator out of her position.
We are eighty percent of the way to qualifying for the Citizens’ Election Program. New donors are joining every day, and the pace has accelerated as more voters hear what this campaign is about. Hitting the threshold unlocks a $3.7 million state grant that turns this into a $4 million campaign. We will get there, and we will get there in time to put the resources to work where they matter most.
I am running a full primary campaign, and I am not cutting a deal or trading my candidacy for some other arrangement. We are already well past the convention threshold we need to qualify for the August ballot, and every additional delegate we lock in is another data point in a larger story about a sitting governor losing ground in his own party. I plan to make sure every voter in Connecticut knows how someone who has spent seventy million dollars across four campaigns to buy this office refuses to ask the wealthiest residents of this state to pay it forward.
When we launched, we did not know how quickly voters would move away from Lamont once they had a real alternative. The problems were obvious: energy prices climbing, housing out of reach for working families, a tax code rigged for the wealthy.
Nine months in, Lamont and his surrogates are throwing everything at me. The governor himself is calling people who have never heard from him before, while running as the most progressive governor Connecticut has ever seen, which is a notable rebrand given that the platform he is now claiming is my platform, watered down.
He wants to be seen as progressive while remaining the same governor who pulled Connecticut out of a multi-state offshore wind deal with Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and who endorsed Andrew Cuomo a week before the New York primary, despite the sexual harassment scandal that ended Cuomo’s governorship.
Lamont’s endorsement of Cuomo, days before the New York primary.
On immigration, he has openly said his administration works with ICE, in his own words, on camera.
Lamont on working with ICE.
These are not the marks of a progressive governor; they are the marks of an incumbent who still cannot explain what he plans to do for the next four years if he is given them.
That weakness is the reason we have raised more money than any candidate ever has in the Citizens’ Election Program. And it does not happen on its own. It happens because people like you have decided that the Connecticut Democratic Party should not be captured by the billionaire elite.
If you can chip in today, your contribution goes directly toward making sure the next governor of Connecticut answers to working families, not country club billionaires.
In solidarity,
Josh
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