Branford Dems Want to Turn Branford Blue

Branford Dems want to turn Branford back to blue, to the days before the 2013 election when they held Town Hall and the Representative Town Meeting (RTM). Republicans, they tell voters when they reach them by phone, control 91 out of the 169 Connecticut towns. Branford is now one of them.

Yet Branford, they tell would-be voters ​“has more Democrats than any other party in town and we’re hoping with your support this year, we can turn Branford blue.” They are pressing to get out the vote on Tuesday, Nov. 7. 

As of Wednesday, there were 6,775 active Democrats in town, 3,639 Republicans and 9,506 Unaffiliated voters, according to Marion E. Burkard, the Republican Registrar of Voters.

Back in 2013, not only did Republican Jamie Cosgrove win the race for first selectman, but that election flipped the Democratic majority in the Representative Town Meeting, 19 – 11, with Republicans gaining the same majority for themselves on the town’s legislative body. They have held that majority.

Post 2016 Election Volunteers

What is unusual about these phone banks, which are taking place in Branford and throughout New Haven County, is that most of the volunteers spending their evenings calling people have never before been engaged politically.

When did you get involved in Action Together Connecticut, we asked Katerina (Katie) Politi, a cancer researcher at Yale University who lives in Branford. 

“In November,” she says, referring to when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Politi was one of 13 people attending a phone bank evening last week at the Branford home of Chris Simpson and her husband Rick Pittman, neither of whom had ever been involved in politics until the 2016 election. Pittman also decided to run for the town’s Board of Assessment Appeals, a new undertaking for him.

Simpson is now chair of the outreach committee of the Branford Democratic Town Committee (DTC). In an interview, she said she also works with the New Haven Action Together Connecticut, a group that started after the 2016 national election and now has chapters across the state and at the national level. ​“They are a grass roots organization,” she said, one with 2,800 members in the New Haven chapter.

“The majority of people are women. They are very involved in trying to support Democratic, progressive ideas in the state, at the legislative level and the political and election level.” For the phone banking event at her home in Branford, Simpson said the state Democratic party provided funding for ​“HubDialer” phone banking, a software system that speeds up phone connections to voters. Here Simpson is pictured speaking with volunteers in her living room.

We asked them what made them become involved in political life at the local level.

Getting Involved

“After the last presidential election, Rick and I felt compelled to take active roles in the democratic process. We were no longer satisfied by limiting our involvement to voting in presidential elections as this activity alone felt inadequate and insufficient. We both felt a sense of powerlessness that we ourselves contributed to by being largely bystanders. We therefore immersed ourselves in learning more about the political process, especially how citizens could affect legislative change at the national, state, and local levels.

“While we remain novices and acknowledge that we have so much more to learn, we feel empowered by having become civically involved. We are so privileged to live in a country where we have the right to be involved in our democratic process,” they told the Eagle. 

They said they are ​“encouraging others to vote and preserving the right to do so, campaigning for those who we believe can lead our town, state and nation in ways that preserve our constitution and freedoms, and running for office in order to have more direct impact. Rick and I are grateful that we no longer take this right for granted.”

On the evening of this phone banking event, the 13 volunteers fanned out into different rooms in the couple’s home. Each carried his or her own computer. 

Their purpose this night was to get out the vote for the Dems in towns throughout New Haven County, including Branford, using ​“HubDialer” in order to reach voters as quickly as possible. They were calling voters in Guilford, Branford, Madison, and Hamden. 

All the Action Together Connecticut chapters are engaged in a competition to see which one can make the most calls this municipal season for local campaigns. Last month Milford made over 9,000 calls in one night.

A day after the event at her home Simpson reported that her group had made over ​“10,000 dials,” which made it the highest call volume of any of the Action Together Connecticut chapter Hubdialer events as of that date. It put the New Haven County chapter in the lead among the various ATCT chapters as of that date, she said.

Simpson and Pittman are planning more phone banks as the election draws close. ​“Our goal is to get people to vote,” she said.

Living Room Campaigning

Meeting in homes across Branford has become a way of life for volunteers and candidates this election year. 

Earlier this month, Wanda Bubriski, (standing) who is a founding director at the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation and Willis (seated), a nationally recognized architect, invited local Democratic women candidates to their home in Short Beach. 

Their “Meet & Greet” was for women only. About 30 women showed up to meet the Democratic candidates: Lynda Mollow, who is running for first selectwoman; Maggie Bruno, who wants to be Town Clerk; Roberta Gill-Brooks, who is running for tax collector; Sarah Lockery, who is seeking a seat on the Board of Education, and Robin Comey who is running for a seat on the RTM from the third district in Short Beach.

Each candidate spoke to the group, describing her goals for the town. Bubriski, who organized the event, told the group about “She Should Run,” a non-partisan, non-profit organization, which is “dedicated to getting more women to run for political office.”

Bubriski said as more women become elected officials, they help “change the culture of women in politics, and amplify the need for gender parity in office.” 

Mollow, who is a nurse, said, “Life changed in the 2016 election. We are women who are making a difference,” she said as she outlined her plans for Branford. Click here to read about her views. 

Gill-Brooks, a recently retired executive at AT&T, is running for tax collector, a position now held by Joanne Cleary, who had been cross-endorsed by both parties in recent years. This week Cleary endorsed Gill-Brooks for tax collector. Brooks says she wants to concentrate on helping taxpayers receive individual attention when they visit Town Hall. Her father, Bob Gill was Branford’s first African American police chief.   

Comey, who has been active in public school issues, has lived in Short Beach for 25 years. “Using our collective voice does have an impact,” she said. 
Sarah Lockery, chief administrator at the Children’s Center of Hamden, is seeking a seat on the Board of Education.

And Bruno, a Branford native who served on the RTM for 10 years, spoke of her reasons for wanting to be Town Clerk, including finding ways to encourage longtime residents to stay in town.

Sharing a New Commitment

The candidates and the volunteers share a common enthusiasm and commitment to their new political work.

Politi (pictured), the Yale cancer researcher, became part of Action Together Connecticut leadership team after the November 2016 election. She also attended the phone-banking event at the Simpson-Pittman home. 

She became involved in public issues because she was worried, she said, ​“about the fate of science in the age of Trump.

“We had concerns about health care access, immigration. You name it, women’s health and even just respect for women. It’s unbelievable. 
 
​“There was something that needed to be done and there were other people who felt the same way. We couldn’t just sit around and let four years go by.”

Asked how she would describe the experience so far, she said, ​“It’s been an amazing experience, especially for someone like me who never really has thought very much about local politics. That has been eye opening.” 

She says she has worked on a number of different projects.

“Now we have a municipal election so we are focused on that. But we also work on other things; for example, we organized the March for Science in New Haven last year. We have done fund raising for IRIS, and we have been involved in refugee issues. We are also focused on criminal justice,” she added. 

Importantly, she said, ​“We discuss issues we want to explore. And then we go forward.”
###