The Democratic Party Has Abandoned Working Families

There is a line, often attributed to Gandhi: first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. We are firmly in the fight stage.

This week, three Democratic Town Committee chairs went public with two charges: that I am not progressive enough, and that I do not show up. Their evidence for the second was a Republican amendment vote I missed, on an amendment that House Democrats uniformly defeated.

Those are remarkable charges for chairs in our own party to make about a state representative who founded the legislature’s progressive caucus, founded its tax equity caucus, helped pass landmark criminal justice reform legislation, and spent last summer at rallies and in the streets with the people standing up to ICE.

They are more remarkable when you consider whose camp they are coming from. The governor fought courthouse protections because he was afraid of Trump. The governor did not appear at a single ICE rally in Danbury, Norwalk, or Stamford. His allies walked through the rallies grumbling that the protesters were the ones making the situation worse. That is the operation now sending word, through three chairs, that I am the one who does not show up.

This is what an operation reaches for when it cannot run on the governor’s actual record. They run on something else: labor wins from eight years ago, a fictitious narrative that the governor led the fight to protect Connecticut from losing SNAP benefits, or baseless attacks on my attendance after one missed vote in a career of near-perfect attendance. On SNAP, the truth is closer to the opposite. The governor was prepared to wait six months for the next session before acting. House Democrats and House Republicans came together with veto-proof support for a deal, and only then did the governor call a special session. It is another entry in a long pattern: he does the right thing only when he is forced to.

For the last month, the Lamont operation has been calling everyone they can reach. Some people are getting five or more calls a week. What I hear from chairs and delegates is that they are not weighing the two campaigns on policy. On policy, the Democrats I talk to land in the same place. They are weighing what happens to a town that does not back the governor. I understand why a chair or a delegate hearing that pressure over and over feels it as real. I want to be clear about what that pressure says about him.

Ask yourself whether a governor whose operation makes towns afraid to vote their conscience is the kind of governor you want. Then ask the harder question. If we only ever vote strategically, if we only ever pick the safer name, how do we ever get the Connecticut working families actually need? The honest answer is that we do not. Strategic voting is how struggling families keep losing, year after year, to candidates who treat their struggle as a problem to manage rather than a problem to solve.

The other line from the Lamont camp is a variation on the same theme: good enough. We got our wins, the argument goes. Why rock the boat?

The wins Connecticut Democrats achieved are real and they matter, but they were not Lamont’s. For example, the school meals fight did not deliver free, universal meals. It delivered free school breakfast, in an election year, after years of fighting for it, and lunch was not included in the final product. Teachers I talk to across the state have stories about wanting to pay for their kids’ lunches out of their own pockets, even though the rules prohibit it. The governor held us back, and then he took the credit.

That is what good enough produces. Working families fight for years to get the bare minimum, and the governor shows up at the end to cut the ribbon.

I have been to 132 Democratic Town Committees this year. The reason this campaign keeps moving, against an incumbent governor with near-universal name recognition and unlimited self-funding, is that we built it the right way: town by town, member by member, conversation by conversation. Momentum is clearly on our side.

We have raised over $255,000 toward the $335,000 private fundraising threshold for the Citizens’ Election Program. When we hit it, we unlock a $3.7 million state grant that funds the rest of the primary. When we hit it, we will be the first gubernatorial campaign in Connecticut history to raise that much in private contributions for a primary, and we are on pace to do it in the same amount of time it took Dan Malloy to reach the threshold in 2010.

If you have not yet maxed out, now is the moment. Every dollar between here and $335,000 is a dollar that ends the question of whether this campaign can finish the race, and gives no one an excuse to flip on the theory that we cannot.

If you have already maxed out, the most valuable thing you can do is bring someone else in. Forward this email. Tell someone at work, at your kid’s school, on your town committee. The argument we are making is the argument they are already having with themselves about why nothing seems to be working for working families.

And if you are a delegate, I want to talk with you directly. I am holding two more virtual town meetings before the convention, focused on the future of our state. RSVP here.

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The whole campaign rests on a single premise: the Democratic Party has abandoned working families, and we can change that any time we decide to. Good enough is not good enough, not when people cannot afford their rent or their groceries or their heat, and not when the governor’s response is to tell them they should be grateful for what they already have.

We keep going.

Josh