Real Primaries Strengthen the Party

We are just shy of a month from the convention. On Saturday, May 16th at 11am, just over 2,000 delegates will gather at the Bushnell in Hartford to pick the endorsed candidate in the Democratic primary for governor. Fifteen percent of delegates gets you on the August primary ballot, and fifty percent wins the endorsement outright. Because there are only two of us in this race, the whole thing gets decided on the first round.

There is a saying in politics that you have to be able to count. What that really means is that you have to know when a maybe is actually a yes or a no. You have to know how to pry respectfully without pushing people away. And you have to make the hard ask.

I have always been a soft touch as a candidate. My instinct is to gauge where someone is by the tenor of the conversation, leave it there, and keep my count conservative so I can surprise myself on the upside. A convention race is different, though. Because the vote is going to be public in a month anyway, a hard commit here is significantly more likely to be accurate than the kind you get at a door, where people will often say yes just to end the conversation and you never actually find out either way. And if anyone reading this is worried about hurting my feelings by telling me where they actually stand, you won’t. It is much better for both of us to know, so we are not wasting each other’s time.

Over the weekend I spent 17 hours on the phone working the delegate list. Between now and the convention, the goal is to get through the whole list three full times.

On top of the phone calls, I have been in front of 112 Democratic Town Committees so far, with 9 more over the next two nights. You do not beat a billionaire who is trying to protect his wealthy friends by doing anything less.

Where we stand right now: we have raised $225,000 toward our Citizens’ Election Program qualification, with just over $100,000 to go. On the delegate side, we have IDed 42 percent of the full delegate list so far. We now know nearly 20 percent of the overall delegate count will be voting for us at the convention, well past any margin of error. We still have 58 percent of the list to ID, and the number of delegates committed to us is only going to keep climbing.

We are hitting those numbers against real structural headwinds. West Haven and Waterbury are not allowing me to come speak to their DTCs. The chairs in those towns know that when I get in front of delegates, I win hearts and minds, and I have been doing exactly that, over and over, these last few months. That is a direct threat to their relationship with the governor, and the only way those chairs can guarantee their delegation’s vote goes his way is to never give me the chance to make my case at all.

Elected municipal officials across the state have told me, privately, that they feel boxed into supporting the governor because they are worried about losing state funding for their towns if they do not. That this race is as close as it is in spite of all of that tells you something about where the Democratic Party in Connecticut actually is.

And while the governor’s team chases endorsements, we are winning people inside the party. A wide contingent of delegates who will vote for him at the convention are quietly helping this race, and many more will vote for us in August. The hesitation I hear back is almost always about political fallout, not about the merits of the race.

In eight months of campaigning, I have not had a single conversation in which someone told me they are voting for the governor because they believe in his ideas and his vision for the state. Not a single time, because there is no such vision. His whole campaign is a recitation of what he has done, and nothing about what he still wants to do. And when you look closely at that list, virtually every win on it belonged to the legislature, where his job was to stay out of the way. More often than not, he did not even do that, but stood in the way and took credit once the legislature pushed the bill through anyway.

We spend a lot of time in Democratic politics talking about how Republicans produce stronger candidates because they run competitive primaries, and in the next breath, we talk about how a primary on our side weakens the party. It cannot be both. The best thing we can do for Connecticut is run a real, competitive primary. The voters in August deserve to know what their next governor actually wants to do.

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If you can help us close that last $100,000, we qualify for the public grant and head into the convention and the primary with the resources to make this case in every corner of the state.

Thanks for being in this with me.

Josh