New WFP Director Focuses On ​“Clopenings” & Candidate Recruits

Sarah Ganong wants baristas and burger-flippers to know what hours they’ll work each week without having to rush in on an hour’s notice, or lock up at night only to open back up at 6 a.m.

She also wants you to consider running for elected office if you’d like to help make that and other improvements in working people’s lives become possible.

Ganong is making that pitch in her new role as state director of the Working Families Party.

Her mission is to recruit candidates for local and state office who support measures to improve working-class families’ lives, from increased wages and workplace conditions to progressive taxation, universal health care, affordable housing, and a cleaner environment; and to promote that agenda at the state Capitol.

She’s casting a wide net rather than recruiting and supporting candidates in only deep-red districts.

“We don’t think progressives can’t win in purple districts,” Ganong said in an interview Thursday on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

Ganong, 31, is a familiar face both at the Capitol and in New Haven and Hamden. She organized local volunteers for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign; then she recruited them to elect progressive challenger Josh Elliott to a Hamden state representative seat the same year. She ran for mayor in New Haven in 2017 to secure the WFP a line on the municipal ballot. She has worked on the state WFP staff on both legislative and electoral campaigns since 2017, and was recently promoted to the top post.

The WFP sometimes runs its own third-party candidates, especially for council posts in municipalities like Hartford and Hamden that reserve some seats for minority-party members. It more often cross-endorses left-leaning Democrats and helps elect them. Other times it primaries ​“corporate Democrats.”

She was asked about the national ​“Bernie-Biden” debate among Democrats about whether the party should field more centrist candidates to appeal to a wider set of voters or should field unapologetically progressive candidates who effectively communicate positions that benefit working and middle-class families.

Ganong falls in the latter camp. 

“The Democratic Party on the national level is not responding to what people need” on issues health care, housing, retirement security, and student debt, she argued.

“Who the candidate is” matters most, she said: Whether the candidate has a personal story and can connect with citizens. For instance, she looks for parents already attending PTA meetings to consider running for the school board. ​“They going to the meetings already,” she noted.

One example is Shontá Browdy, who won elected to Hartford’s school board running only on the Working Families Party line.

“We really take elections seriously” and think strategically, she said. ​“Choosing elections and choosing candidates is really important.”

To that end, she’s rising to the challenge identified in this recent Ezra Klein article in The New York Times detailing how Steve Bannon and other far-right strategists are far out-performing the left in recruiting candidates for crucial local offices. She said she is excited about four such candidates she has recruited to seek state Senate seats being vacated by Republicans. (The party isn’t yet to announced who those candidates are.)

“We’re recruiting people to run for office [who can] tell their stories” about how their lives have been affected by issues at stake, Ganong said.

Connecticut’s public financing program helps recruit grassroots candidates, Ganong said. ​“You don’t have to raise as much money as you have to do in other states to be competitive here, which is fantastic.”

This is also a quadrennial election season for governor and other statewide executive offices, a process in which WFP is active.

Asked if WFP is prepared to support the relections of Gov. Ned Lamont, who has resisted progressive Democrats’ efforts to increase marginal tax rates on the wealthy, or U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Ganong responded that the interview process hasn’t started yet. She did say she expects the party to ​“spend a lot of time” on those races, in addition to seeking to maintain a progressive Democratic majority in both state legislative houses.

“We’re not interested in seeing a Gov. [Bob] Stefanowski or Sen. [Themis] Klarides,” she added, referencing leading potential Republican challengers.

Meanwhile, the WFP is active in supporting bills in the current 12-week annual state legislative session.

In recent years it successfully helped push for laws to create a paid family and medical leave law as well as a $15 hourly minimum wage.

A top legislative priority this year is a ​“fair workweek/ fair scheduling” bill that would give low-wage retail and restaurant workers more advance notice about weekly hours and avoids ​“clopenings,” in which the same worker is expected to close up shop at the end of the night then return before dawn to reopen. New Haven/Hamden State Rep. Robyn Porter and Bethel/Danbury State Sen. Julie Kushner, co-chairs of the legislature’s Labor Committee, are leading the charge for that bill. (Click here to read about what was in the version of the bill considered by the legislature in 2021.)

“We want to to make sure the big corporations — the McDonald’s, the Targets — can make schedules work for workers so they’re not getting a call at 6 in the morning saying, ​‘You’re coming in at 8 o’clock,’ ” she said. The bill would rely on penalties to require employers to comply with rules.

Click on the video to watch the full interview with Working Families Party State Director Sarah Ganong on WNHH FM’s ​“Datleine New Haven.”