Westville Weighs In Early On State Races

An Iowa Caucus-type event in Westville offered a preview of next week’s Democratic Party state convention, as Erick Russell and Matt Lesser won landslide victories in a ranked-choice-vote straw poll held among nearly two dozen Westville Democrats.

That vote took place Thursday night in the Edgewood School cafeteria. It was hosted by the local Democratic Party’s Ward 25 Committee, which met in person for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

The vote offered an early peek at grassroots sentiment in two contested races in at least one politically-engaged Democratic district, as the party prepares to convene next week to nominate candidates for statewide office.

Neither Russell nor Lesser showed up in person for the event, instead sending a written letter and a campaign surrogate, respectively. Both of their candidacies left the meeting with the promised backing of the committee’s two co-chairs, Janis Underwood and Debby Evans. 

Both co-chairs will serve as delegates at next week’s state Democratic Party nominating convention in Hartford, where candidates will seek the votes of at least 15 percent of delegates in order to secure a spot on the Democratic primary ballot in August.

Thanks to Thursday’s committee vote, Russell — a local attorney and former vice-chair of the state Democratic Party who is running for state treasurer — and Lesser — a state senator from Middletown who is running for secretary of the state — will head in to the convention with the confidence that at least two New Haven delegates will be supporting them in their respective crowded, open statewide races. 

That’s because Russell won 19 votes from Westville Democratic committee members. Fellow Democratic treasurer hopefuls Karen DuBois-Walton and Dita Bhargava received two votes and one vote, respectively. 

Lesser, meanwhile, notched 18 votes of support Thursday night, with fellow Democratic secretary of the state hopefuls Maritza Bond and Hilda Santiago coming in a distant second and third, with two votes and one vote, respectively. 

As Westville Alder Adam Marchand said at the start of the meeting, what happens in Ward 25 Democratic politics has ramifications for the state at large. That’s because New Haven is consistently home to the biggest Democratic turnout in statewide contests. And Westville’s Ward 25 often delivers the highest number of Democratic votes of any district in the city.

Click here and here to read more about previous New Haven pitches made by the Democratic primary contenders for secretary of state and treasurer. 

On the Republican side, Dominic Rapini, Brock Weber and Terrie Wood have formed candidate committees to seek the office of secretary of state. Cynthia Jennings is seeking the Independent Party nomination for that post. And Harry Arora is running for the Republican nomination for state treasurer. 

Underwood and Evans promised at the start of Thursday’s meeting that they would cast their convention votes in support of whomever the committee backed during the straw poll. They stood by that commitment after Russell’s and Lesser’s landslide wins.

“I feel very good about” supporting Lesser and Russell at the convention, Evans said. ​“The ward committee thought about who might win statewide” when voting for these two candidates.

Underwood agreed. She said that both candidates have the best statewide recognition among voters of anyone in their respective fields, and therefore have the best chances of beating a Republican in November.

“Imagine a Republican having control of the secretary of the state’s office in this state,” Underwood told committee members before they cast their votes Thursday night. ​“Imagine a Republican having control of the treasurer’s office, the purse strings of the state. Who has the most name recognition statewide who can beat a Republican? That is the goal.”

Bond: "Government, Executive Experience"

Before the committee members took their vote, they heard from three of the statewide Democratic candidate hopefuls — one in person, one via a campaign surrogate, and one via a letter submitted to the committee in advance and read aloud by Underwood.

Bond, the city’s health director, who is also running for secretary of the state, was the only candidate in the room Thursday to make her pitch directly to Westville Democrats.

She charted her personal and professional trajectory: growing up in Fair Haven, attending Wilbur Cross High School, and working in public health for nearly two decades in various parts of the state, including Ansonia, Bridgeport, and now New Haven. She said that experience provides her with the necessary understanding and public-service skills to best help a diverse range of residents and businesses. (In addition to being the state’s top elections official, the secretary of the state also manages the state’s business registry.)

“I’m running for secretary of state because I want to be able to transfer my government, executive experience of implementing policies, because the role of the secretary of the state is just that,” Bond said. ​“As an implementer of policies and advocating for policies to get passed, like early voting and further expanding no-excuse absentee ballots.”

If elected, she promised to create a commission of local registrars of voters, town clerks, and other ​“stakeholders” to look into how best to expand voting access across the state; to conduct a ​“robust education campaign” with ​“peer-to-peer educators and influencers” about the importance of protecting voting rights; and to ​“revitalize” the office’s ​“small-business unit,” and in particular to support minority- and women-owned small businesses across Connecticut.

Bartlett-Josie: Lesser "Can Hit The Ground Running On Day One"

Statewide political campaign veteran Christine Bartlett Josie of New Haven showed up on behalf of Lesser’s secretary of the state campaign to help make the Middletown state senator’s pitch for Westville Democrats’ support. She said that Lesser couldn’t be there in person on Thursday because he was in Hartford, debating and working on passing legislation in these final days of the state legislature’s short session.

Bartlett-Josie said she has known Lesser since 2006, when he first ran for state representative in Middletown. 

During his time in the state House of Representatives and, since 2018, in the state Senate, he has worked on just about every single bill affecting the secretary of the state’s office, she said. That includes pandemic-era legislation expanding access to absentee voting. She said Merrill had even asked Lesser to run for that same office in 2018, before she changed her mind and decided to run for re-election herself.

“He understands this office thoroughly,” Bartlett-Josie said about Lesser. ​“He can hit the ground running on day one.”

How does Lesser feel about electronic voting? one of the meeting attendees asked.

“Matt has looked at what other states have been doing,” Barlett-Josie said. ​“We simply have to look at other states, where things have been successful. And before we introduce any of that, we have to ensure that the system is in place within the office, that we have all the resources we need to implement any of these changes.” Bond offered a similar response — open to the idea, but needing to research it and ensure the safety of it before adopting — when asked the same question.

Russell: "On The Rise"

While none of the state treasurer candidates appeared in person at Thursday’s committee meeting, Underwood read directly from Russell’s campaign announcement. She said the local attorney — and Ward 26 Westville resident — had sent in and asked her to read from it during the meeting.

Russell has ​“years of experience as an attorney representing state and local governments in the area of public finance, helping clients secure necessary resources to develop critical infrastructure projects, build new housing, and save taxpayer money by responsibly managing their financial liabilities,” she read. ​“Russell has served as Vice Chair of the Connecticut Democratic Party since 2019,” a position he has since stepped down from to run for state treasurer.

She also read quotes from former state Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman and current state Speaker of the House Matt Ritter, both of whom are supporting Russell’s campaign. ​“His commitment to community, to hard work, and to always doing the right thing are precisely what the Democratic Party needs in its nominee, and exactly what Connecticut needs in its next State Treasurer,” she quoted Wyman as saying.

She said that Russell currently works as an attorney for Pullman & Comley LLC, where he represents state and municipal governments in the issuance of tax-exempt and taxable bonds. That he previously served as chair of the Connecticut Bar Association’s LGBT section. And that he is the recipient of the American Bar Association’s 2020 ​“On The Rise — Top 40 Young Lawyers” Award.

RCV Pitch: "Majority Should Rule"

After the candidate forum, local ranked-choice-voting advocates Aaron Goode and Caleb Kleppner oversaw two straw poll votes, one for secretary of state and one for treasurer.

They hosted the first vote ​“Iowa Caucus”-style — meaning that committee members showed their support for a candidate by gathering in a particular part of the room, in this case around one of the chairs standing atop cafeteria tables. Each chair bore the name of one of the Democratic treasurer hopefuls.

They hosted the second vote by paper ballot — with each committee member filling out a ballot, and with Goode and Kleppner and other volunteers helping to count the votes by arranging the pieces of paper into different piles on a table at the front of the room.

Both votes, meanwhile, were held according to ranked-choice-voting rules, meaning that committee members listed multiple candidates in order of preference. And, in theory, if no candidate won an outright majority after the first round of voting, the candidate with the least number of votes would be eliminated from contention, and the votes that had gone to those candidates would be redistributed based on each ballot’s second-ranked choice.

That type of vote shuffling wound up not needing to take place on Thursday, because Lesser and Russell won such overwhelming majorities of support in the first round of voting in each of their straw poll contests.

Kleppner, who has been advocating for ranked-choice voting for decades, nevertheless pitched committee members on the democratic value of this approach to electing officials.

“A basic democratic principle is that majority should rule, 50 percent plus one,” he said. ​“And the vast majority of American elections don’t respect that principle. The candidate with the most votes wins, even if it’s less than 50 percent.”

“To me,” he continued, ​“the main thing is that ranked-choice voting identifies the candidate who truly has majority support, and it also means that when that candidate goes into office, she arrives with an actual mandate that she knows about.”

Oliver Road resident Debbie Elkin agreed. After participating in Thursday’s ranked choice vote, she said the method strikes her as ​“inherently democratic” because of its guaranteeing that whoever is elected to office has won a majority of votes along the way.