Sean Grace Elected Hamden DTC Chair

A week after voters ushered in a sea change to the leading body of Hamden’s Democrats, a new face took up his party’s helm for the next two years.

Last week, Hamden Democrats went to the polls in seven Legislative Council districts to vote in the seven members who would represent their district on the Democratic Town Committee (DTC). The election handed a resounding victory to a younger crop of progressive Democrats who have clashed with longer-serving members of their party, including Mayor Curt Leng.

Read more about the primaries here and here.

The following week, on Tuesday, the newly-elected body met for the first time to choose its leadership at the Keefe Community Center. In a smooth and uncontentious set of endorsements and votes, Sean Grace won a seat as the party’s chair. He won 38 votes. His opponent, Cherlyn Poindexter, won 14.

Grace has been a prominent figure in Hamden politics for the last few years. In 2018, he ran a primary campaign for the 17th senate district, and lost to Jorge Cabrera, who is now running again. He is one of the leaders of the Hamden Progressive Action Network (HamPAN), which has become a force among progressive Democrats in town in recent years. This fall, he was the campaign manager for Lauren Garrett when she ran for mayor.

The DTC primaries featured a divide in the party that has persisted for the last two years. Last year, the town’s council frequently held heated debates over town finances that lasted long into the night — sometimes as late as 1 a.m. A crop of younger Democrats who criticized the administration’s handling of town finances clashed with longer-serving Democrats. Those dynamics persisted through the fall’s elections, which handed a comfortable victory to Leng and many of the people supporting him.

The tides turned for the DTC primaries, however, when progressive, relative newcomers to town politics crushed slates with longer-serving Democrats supported by a single PAC. Leng himself was on one of those slates, which lost in the sixth district.

On Tuesday, with the numbers tilted heavily in favor of newer, progressive Democrats, there were not contested votes or hot debates.

Grace said he wants to focus on unifying the party.

“It’s time to try and find some unity as we look for a new direction as well,” Grace told the Independent. He said he would also like to re-center values in the committee’s discourse. After talking to members, he said, he had heard people say ​“that we want to stand for something. We want to have our values front and center.”

Once he and the rest of the new leadership board had taken up their seats at the plastic folding table at the front of the room, Grace announced that he plans to create an ​“issues committee.” He said the committee will determine what issues the DTC will focus on. If the DTC decides to develop a platform, he said, that’s where the planning will begin.

The DTC is responsible for endorsing candidates for town and state elected offices. The body’s new composition means that Leng will likely not get his party’s endorsement if he decides to run again, though as past elections have shown, party endorsements do not determine the outcome of elections. It simply means that whoever does not receive the endorsement must circulate a petition to get on a primary ballot. 

The DTC’s endorsement may have a greater effect on the council’s at-large seats in the next election. While mayoral candidates tend to have a big enough campaign operation to collect the necessary signatures to get on a ballot, a candidate considering an at-large council seat does not. However, at-large council candidates must collect the same number of signatures to get on a ballot that a mayoral candidate does: five percent of the town’s registered Democrats.

Young Leaders At The Table

Once Grace had won his seat and took over the meeting, he led the election of the rest of the leadership board. Everyone else ran unopposed. After about half an hour, the DTC had elected a board of young leaders who, for the most part, have only recently become involved in Hamden politics.

The only political veteran who won a seat on the leadership board after Grace was Elaine Dove (pictured above), who is the new vice-chair. She is a member of the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals, and is a longtime member of the DTC.

The other three new leaders only recently entered Hamden politics. Sana Shah, who moved to Hamden three years ago and works at Connecticut Voices for Children, became recording secretary. She said she decided to run for the DTC after the Trump Administration killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. She said she was worried that Iranian Americans would face the same type of backlash that many Muslims faced in the U.S. after 9/11. She said she wanted to get involved because she thinks it’s important to have people representing a diversity of communities in town politics.

Though she is one of the DTC’s newest members, Shah is not the youngest member of the leadership board. The committee elected 18-year-old Abdul Razak Osmanu as its corresponding secretary. Osmanu started volunteering on local campaigns when he was 16 after Councilman Brad Macdowall came to speak in his politics class. Osmanu graduated Hamden High School in 2019, and is now a student at Southern Connecticut State University.

Finally, Karimah Mickens was elected treasurer. Mickens, like Osmanu and Shah, just began her first term on the DTC. She is also president of the New Haven Alumnae Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority.

After the meeting, former councilwoman Lauren Garrett posted on Facebook congratulating the new leadership. Commenters, like former Chair Lew Panzo, mostly posted their own congratulations. Democratic Registrar Rose Mentone wished the new leadership well, gently warning them that, as she had experienced, it is a thankless position.

Zoning Enforcement Officer Holly Masi took a different approach. She simply posted a YouTube video of Bob Dylan’s ​“The Times They Are A‑Changin’ ” with the lyrics written out above.