A recent ad from John Larson’s campaign opens with past praise from his current rival in the Democratic primary. It features a clip of Luke Bronin at a convention in 2022, calling Larson “the best member of Congress this district could ever ask for.”
“So what changed?” the ad’s narrator asks.
That’s one of the questions both Larson and Bronin are trying to answer — on the airwaves and on the campaign trail — in the final weeks of the four-way Democratic primary for Connecticut’s 1st Congressional District.
In Larson’s estimation, as the ad goes on to argue, it’s a network of wealthy donors and billionaires getting behind Bronin because Larson will “take on the rich and powerful” if he wins a 15th term to his Hartford-based seat in Congress.
Bronin essentially offers his response in a pair of new TV ads his campaign launched this week, an argument both the candidate and voters are making that it’s time for Larson “to pass the torch.”
The latest ads are Bronin’s most pointed to date, but they still thread the needle without aggressively going after Larson. The tenor of the congressman’s ads and mailers largely center around his sharp criticism of Bronin and the origins of his fundraising from wealthy donors.
Before they were locked in a competitive primary, Larson and his challengers had been political allies, and they haven’t been shy about reminders of reciprocated praise. At the same 2022 convention where Bronin praised Larson, West Hartford Rep. Jillian Gilchrest — also on the ballot for the nomination — commended the congressman for “leading the nation, fighting for reforms.” (She now makes a similar pitch for new leadership in the district for the first time in 28 years.)
And Larson referred to Bronin in 2023 as “the best mayor in the country” following the race to replace him, saying he hoped there are “greater things in store” for him.
But in the final stretch of the campaign, the ad war between Larson and Bronin is ramping up as they seek to define the race as either a generational or ideological one.
The Aug. 11 race is happening against the backdrop of a primary season where a handful of Democratic incumbents from New York to Colorado have suffered defeats. Some of those were more on ideological grounds, where incumbents lost to progressive challengers affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America and the Israel-Gaza conflict loomed large. Others were animated by frustration with Washington, D.C., and longtime politicians.
Connecticut’s primary in the 1st District doesn’t fit the mold in many ways — it’s a larger field with different types of candidates and issues driving the campaign.
Bronin’s pitch largely revolves around generational change, the symbolic passing of the torch to the next generation of Democrats trying to break into Washington politics and take on the Trump administration.
One of his newest ads has voters helping to vocalize that sentiment.
“I’ve been voting for John Larson for decades, but it’s time for a change,” an older voter says at the start of the ad.
Bronin doesn’t go after Larson directly in his ad, with another person criticizing Larson’s tenor on his behalf: “It’s beneath John Larson to be attacking Luke Bronin.”
In the other 30-second TV ad, Bronin relies on his refrain of calling the congressman “a good man” before taking issue with Larson accepting money from corporate political action committees.
“Big corporations send PAC money to politicians. Politicians go easy on them, stay in office forever, and so nothing changes,” Bronin says direct to camera.
Larson’s campaign argues Bronin’s own fundraising is a “pattern” that goes back to his time as mayor.
“John Larson is proud to stand on his record fighting and winning against Trump, Musk, ICE and DOGE on behalf of working people in Connecticut,” Larson spokesperson Bee Ungar said in a statement.
Bronin “is using corporate billionaires’ campaign funding to run these very ads, including a prominent member of the Koch network, and voters deserve to know they’re being misled,” Ungar continued, referring to maxed-out donations from Clifford Asness, the Greenwich billionaire hedge fund manager who co-founded AQR Capital Management.
Half of Larson’s total fundraising throughout the election cycle — $2.5 million — has come from PACs. Many are affiliated with corporations, unions and other industries.
Bronin has sworn off donations from corporate PACs. Since becoming a candidate, he’s received $5,000 from Crosspartisan PAC. He also got $10,000 from VoteVets, a political action committee that seeks to elect Democratic military veterans to office.
Larson’s team points to corporate PACs that have donated money to an outside group affiliated with Crosspartisan PAC. They argue it’s an example of Bronin benefitting from money he has shunned, but the former mayor hasn’t received any money directly from corporations that have registered with the Federal Election Committee to operate such entities.
Crosspartisan PAC gets funding from With Honor PAC — which also seeks to elect veterans — and some of its funding comes from corporate PACs associated with companies like Walmart, Intel and Dell. (Bronin’s campaign criticized Larson for attacking a veterans organization.)
The tone of the campaign has grown more bitter in recent weeks. Bronin’s campaign feels like it is more one-sided.
“I assume that he’s going negative because he can feel the same shift in energy and momentum that we feel out there,” Bronin said in an interview last month in Hartford. “But I would have hoped that somebody who’s been in Congress for 30 years would focus their campaign on their vision for the future, not on attacks that are not honest.”
Larson’s team argued that Bronin’s campaign opened the door to a “negative campaign,” pointing to examples like “a bogus ethics complaint” over publicly funded ads.
Voters “deserve to know that corporate billionaires are spending big on Luke Bronin because they want to take out a progressive champion who delivers for working people and replace him with a corporate Democrat,” Ungar said when asked about the tone of their campaign.
Larson released an ad last month that challenges Bronin as backed by “tech billionaires, crypto bros, AI execs, data centers.” Some of his top donors include a range of executives and other high-ranking employees in private equity and venture capital as well as those in the tech and AI industries. (Larson has also received money from billionaires and wealthy donors, like Marc Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management.)
The two campaigns are also seeking to make greater distinctions over policy, even as all four candidates largely align on many of the issues. Quinnipiac University political science professor Scott McLean argues that has made the theme of generational change more pronounced.
“The differences on policy are very muted, and so those generational issues do come up or at least get more focus than they really should,” McLean said. “It’s going to be an interesting test to see how that plays out here in Connecticut.”
Larson and his union allies have hammered Bronin over his labor record as mayor. Larson’s campaign announced his latest union endorsement this week, from the SEIU Connecticut State Council. (Dozens of unions have backed Larson, while Bronin has a few of his own.)
At an event Thursday with teachers and the Uniformed Professional Firefighters Association of Connecticut, Bronin criticized Larson over his vote in 2024 against the Social Security Fairness Act, a bipartisan bill signed into law by President Joe Biden that raised Social Security benefits for tens of thousands of people in Connecticut.
It eliminated a pair of provisions — the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset — that reduced payments to certain beneficiaries as well as spouses and surviving family members who also collected a pension from jobs that were not covered by Social Security. They can include teachers, police officers, firefighters and government employees.
Larson was one of a few Democrats to oppose it because the law did not include an offset similar to that in his own Social Security reform bill, which would have temporarily remove those provisions. His own bill, “Social Security 2100 Act,” would have funded the repeal of WEP and GPO through raising the income cap on taxable earnings for Social Security as well as provide an across-the-board hike in Social Security benefits by 2%.
“If an item is not paid for, that impacts the [Social Security] Trust Fund directly, and that’s my concern,” Larson said in a 2024 interview with The Connecticut Mirror when the bill came before Congress. “We’re on the same page in terms of our goal and in terms of recognizing that [WEP and GPO] is bad policy that needs to be corrected.”
Backed up by Social Security advocates such as Biden’s former commissioner of the Social Security Administration Martin O’Malley, Larson’s allies credit him with being at the forefront of the issue and pushing for legislation that “requires billionaires to pay the same Social Security tax rate that all the rest of us do.”
Connecticut’s primary has received less national attention since it’s not part of Democrats’ electoral strategy of taking back the House in November’s midterm elections. But Gilchrest has argued that races like the one in the 1st District should still be a priority in reshaping the Democratic Party and a political system that benefits the candidates who can raise big money.
“There was a pushback of ‘it’s a blue seat in a blue state. We’re focused on flipping red seats blue.’ You can make the argument I stand by, like not every Democrat’s the same, and we have a real opportunity in this blue seat in a blue state to push in D.C. and be a leader that I don’t think’s been happening under John Larson,” said Gilchrest, who has called Bronin “a new version of John Larson.”
But in recent weeks, there has been more involvement from outside groups. VoteVets is currently running a $1 million ad campaign on behalf of Bronin with messaging that resembles that of his own campaign.
Another independent expenditure group, ImpactCT, is spending on digital ads and mailers in support of Bronin that touch on the same themes around corporate PAC money, as well as his support for a ban on congressional stock trading. Both outside groups do independent political spending on behalf of candidates but aren’t allowed to coordinate with them.
Conventional wisdom predicts a more crowded could fracture the anti-incumbent vote among the challengers. But McLean argued it still isn’t a sure bet for the congressman.
“That vote can get a little bit divided, and I think that’s definitely to Larson’s benefit, but that’s not to say that he’ll win,” McLean said. “It gives him a little edge, but it doesn’t mean someone like Bronin, who I would expect to be a real serious challenge to Larson,” can pull through.
After failing to qualify for the Aug. 11 primary at the nominating convention, Ruth Fortune secured the thousands of petition signatures needed to get on the ballot.
Fortune, who has never held elected office and serves as an appointed member on Hartford’s Board of Education, faces similar hurdles to Gilchrest in the crowded primary with two well-financed candidates. But she argues she’s the only one with “personal experience with the barriers that we face.”
As a kid immigrating from Haiti and living in the U.S. undocumented for a decade, she was particularly struck by the Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians.
Gilchrest and Fortune don’t have the funds to compete with Larson and Bronin on the airwaves. Gilchrest said she plans digital ads on streaming platforms. Both have focused more on canvassing and get-out-the-vote efforts.
But the four candidates will have two more opportunities to go head-to-head in debates on July 28 and 29.
Absentee ballots were issued on Tuesday, and voters have until Aug. 10 to request one. In-person early voting runs from Aug. 3 to 9.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
The Connecticut Mirror/Connecticut Public Radio federal policy reporter position is made possible, in part, by funding from the Robert and Margaret Patricelli Family Foundation.
