In a campaign that’s been waged aggressively on the airwaves and through mail in recent weeks, the four Democratic candidates running for the 1st Congressional District nomination spent the final days of their primary campaigns knocking on doors and meeting voters face-to-face in blistering heat.
U.S. Rep. John Larson, who has been in office since 1999, faces three Democratic challengers who are calling for generational change. It’s the first time in 28 years that Democratic voters in the district will vote in a contested primary that features a sitting lawmaker.
Tuesday’s primary will test whether voters in the Hartford-based district want experience and seniority in Congress or a fresh face that’ll bring a new approach as incumbent lawmakers stare down challenges in primaries across the country.
In the waning days of the campaign, Larson and former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin leaned into messaging around labor, holding dueling rallies with their union supporters on Sunday. Support from unions and debate over labor records has been a recurring theme of the campaign and primarily an attack line from the congressman.
All four candidates, including West Hartford state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest and Hartford Board of Education member Ruth Fortune, fanned out across the 1st Congressional District Sunday to make their final pitches to voters on the last day of in-person early voting before Tuesday’s high-stakes primary.
Gilchrest and Fortune spent the majority of their weekends door-knocking throughout the district. The union allies of Larson and Bronin lent a hand to the campaigns in broader canvassing efforts on Sunday.
Larson, 78, started Sunday with several dozen labor allies at a union rally before supporters embarked on a large canvass of the congressman’s native East Hartford. He’s had support from dozens of unions and the Working Families Party.
He also got backup from the president of Social Security Works PAC, which has endorsed his campaign. Social Security has been Larson’s signature issue for years, and he says there’s even more urgency with estimates showing the trust fund’s insolvency in the early 2030s.
Larson proposes his legislation “Social Security 2100 Act” every session to boost benefits across the board and have high earners contribute more through payroll taxes, but it has stalled in Congress regardless of the party in control — something his opponents have noted.
If Larson wins a 15th term and Democrats take back the House in the fall, he’ll regain the gavel of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security.
Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, the president of Social Security Works PAC and the lead singer of the rock band Sha Na Na, leaned into his musical career as he propped up Larson, at one point saying the congressman will hopefully be flexing his muscles Tuesday night — a nod to his signature pose from his days in the band.
“You know I love the music in the ’50s and the ’60s. That does not mean that I actually want to return to the ’50s or the early ’60s before Medicare and Social Security, when most American seniors lived below the poverty line,” Bauman said. “And I know that labor knows how important it is to send John Larson back to Congress.”
Larson spent most of his rally speech focused on President Donald Trump.
“This isn’t only about this race. This is about the future for the country. But for the three opponents that I’m running against, I can put them to the side,” Larson said. “Because my focus is Donald Trump. It remains Donald Trump because Donald Trump is no friend of labor.”
Instead, allies like Joe Toner, the former director of the Hartford Building Trades Council and current director of the State Building Trades Council, did the bulk of criticizing Bronin and his tenure as mayor. Toner has argued that Bronin at the time prioritized developers over project-labor agreements in Hartford.
“We understand that folks in America are being attacked,” Toner said. “But there’s a couple of ways to fight back. You could fight back with a 30-second sound bite on social media, or you could actually do what you’ve been doing for the last 28 years in Congress.”
As Larson’s opponents take aim at his decades-long career in Congress, Toner sought to flip the script on questions around age and seniority that have been percolating in other Democratic congressional races. Toner argued that Bronin’s freshman status wouldn’t position him to take on Trump: “He’s going to be in the broom closet for the first two years, trying to get his name tag spelled correctly.”
Voters “know me, they respect me, they respect the job we’ve done. I’ve always run, not only on my record, in the past, going back to the time when I was a board of education member now to the United States Congress,” Larson said. “Ironically, my three opponents and Trump have the same thing in mind — they want to get rid of me.”
A few hours later, Bronin, 47, held his own rally in Manchester that included a slate of speakers from Carpenters Local 326, which has endorsed his campaign. He’s also been endorsed by the Uniformed Professional Firefighters Association of Connecticut.
The speakers commended his two terms as Hartford mayor, saying he left the city in “good hands” with the current mayor and made sure Dunkin’ ballpark was “done correctly” and that schools were built under project-labor agreements.
Referencing the flurry of mailers arriving at voters’ homes from the campaigns and super PACs supporting Larson’s and Bronin’s campaigns, Marc Okun, regional manager for Carpenters Local 326, sought to paint a different picture. He spoke about Bronin wanting to write letters to express his gratitude to workers building a school during the pandemic. Okun said Bronin had just won his second term as mayor.
“What people do when nobody is watching and they’re not running for an office, they’re not running for a position, they’re doing it because they’re a good person and they actually care,” said Okun, who said he hears from Larson every two years for a check but hasn’t met with him much in the past 15 years.
Bronin, who won the party’s endorsement at the May nominating convention, made his own reference to the ads in the race that have come from both campaigns as well as the super PACs supporting them. But he largely kept the focus on his vision for “rebuilding a party that needs to be rebuilt.”
“The carpenters are used to heat, and after about a month of b-s attacks against me, I’m used to heat too,” Bronin said with a smile, to laughter and applause, but quickly pivoted.
“I believe in my core that you don’t have to be against somebody to be for something new. We don’t need to tear a fellow Democrat down to say that we as a party can do better,” he continued. “We don’t need to tell lies about each other. We can just lay out a different kind of vision for what we are going to be as a country.”
Miguel Fuentes, council representative with the Carpenters Local 326, said he spoke with all of the candidates but said Bronin’s campaign was the one that “had the right idea about how we move forward.”
Fuentes said his union has supported Larson for decades, but he’s “fallen short.” Similar to Bronin and some of the other Democratic candidates, they’ve been critical of Larson’s laser-like focus on Social Security.
“We’re not a monolith. We’re not a single-issue constituency,” Fuentes said. “You can’t just be a single-issue representative. You’ve got to be able to command the information on all of those issues and address those concerns one at a time to get things done.”
Before the union rally, Bronin crossed paths with Gov. Ned Lamont — who faces his own primary on Tuesday from a progressive challenger — at worship services at the First Cathedral, a Black megachurch in Bloomfield that was built under the leadership of Archbishop Leroy Bailey Jr., who is 80 and has taken emeritus status.
“I respect the person I’m running against. I do,” Bronin said in an address to the congregation, his only overt reference to his primary challenge to Larson. “But to everything, there is a season.”
He paused, waiting for the applause that quickly came. He suggested that the archbishop set an example to be admired.
Gilchrest and Fortune didn’t have big or splashy events but continued to fill their days with canvassing and smaller stops throughout the 1st District.
Gilchrest, 44, made her way to Wethersfield in the late morning for a solo canvass of the neighborhood. Even with a week of early voting winding down on Sunday, a few Democratic voters who came to the door said they haven’t voted yet but plan to.
Canvassing has been a major piece of her campaign strategy, like it was when she unseated a 12-term incumbent in 2018 for her West Hartford seat. She goes door to door to make the same pitch: Get billionaires out of politics, restore the Democratic Party and send a social worker to Congress.
In the final months of the congressional campaign, she said the debates and forum have given her more visibility, and voters are more aware of the fact that four candidates are running, not just Larson and Bronin.
As she knocked on one door in Wethersfield, Gilchrest realized it had a no-solicitation sign and quickly left a campaign flyer on the door before moving on. While walking away, a woman walked to the door and recognized who she was. She wished her good luck and said through the screen, “I know people voting for you.”
Others say they recognize her from TV. A household with split political affiliations was critical of the Democratic Party. They said Larson had been in office too long and seemed lukewarm on Bronin. He appeared open to voting for Gilchrest.
Gilchrest believes Tuesday night’s results will be a true test of whether money or grassroots wins out. And regardless of the outcome, she thinks it sends a message about the current state of the Democratic Party.
“I think it says that there’s an overall frustration with how our federal government is not working right now. And voters are sick and tired of politicians saying one thing and then not taking action,” Gilchrest said while walking between homes in Wethersfield. “So I think that this primary really illustrated that voters want people who have new ideas, and who want to push for actual change, because this country is not functioning right now. People cannot afford to live their basic lives, and it shouldn’t be this hard.”
After canvassing and visiting churches on Sunday, Fortune, 38, stopped by Blue Back Square in West Hartford to watch her husband’s band play. Interrupting the music for a few minutes, Fortune took the stage to address a smattering of listeners, some who came to see her and others who were in the town’s center with their families.
She spoke about her family’s journey moving from Haiti when she was 12 and the logistical feat of getting through the state’s restrictive ballot access laws, getting her name on the primary ballot after she collected thousands of signatures via a petition to qualify. She said her work as an estate attorney also informed her views, saying she watched some people struggle to reach financial stability while others “amass insane amounts of wealth.”
“I think it shows you we are at a bit of a breaking point in our democracy where things are so broken that we feel like we need to do things differently,” Fortune said after addressing the crowd. “And even for Congressman Larson, I would hope to goodness that he sees that he could have served differently and effectively based on the way we have pushed him as the challengers to his campaign.”
“I think if nothing else, I hope he saw that, that there’s things he could have done differently,” she said, not just on votes but on a different legislative approach.
Sunday’s concert had small foot traffic, but it was one of many things she had on her docket for the day before she resumed more door knocking. Two people came up to her to compliment her campaign but weren’t Connecticut voters. But she approached a group of 1st District residents who hadn’t voted yet and others who were new to the area. She informed them how they still have time to register as Democrats by Monday.
One of the people in the crowd was Lisa Sanchez Gonzalez, a 59-year-old Democratic voter from Berlin. She met Fortune at a Democratic Town Committee meeting months ago and has stayed connected with her since.
But she’s deeply torn between voting for her or Gilchrest. As someone who voted for Larson in the past, she said both the congressman and Bronin “are just not for me,” both on policy and style. She’s tired of the “bickering” and the campaign ads and mutes them every time she’s watching TV.
She said going to make a “booth decision” on Tuesday between the two women, whom she said she resonates with for different reasons. She cited Gilchrest’s experience in the state legislature and someone she knows very well. (She noted the Gilchrest campaign sign that’s on her front lawn.)
On Fortune, Sanchez Gonzalez, whose family are Cuban immigrants, said she feels a kinship with Fortune, who came to the U.S. from Haiti as a young immigrant and was undocumented for a decade.
“[Gilchrest] represents me as a woman, as a woman of a certain age,” Sanchez Gonzalez said. “And then there’s Ruth, who represents me as a woman, as an immigrant family woman. And I know that they will both fight really hard, and I know this about the both of them.”
Sanchez Gonzalez sung Fortune’s praises as they parted ways Sunday afternoon, explaining to the candidate herself how torn she remains on her choice. Fortune said to vote her conscience.
CT Mirror reporter Mark Pazniokas contributed to this report.
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.
