Frenemies For A Night: Opponents Unite For Petition Party

Political opponents did something unusual in Hamden — instead of arguing and fighting, for one night they held a joint party to help all of them qualify for spots on the Sept. 14 Democratic primary ballot.

Call it a petition party. Members of three separates slates of Democratic mayoral and Council candidates ended up attending it, and helping each other gather petition signatures.

It all started when Brad Macdowall, one of the three Democratic candidates circulating petitions to make the ballot to challenge Democratic Town Committee (DTC)-endorsed mayoral candidate Lauren Garrett in a Sept. 14 primary, announced he would be holding a campaign event at Side Street Grille Sunday night to gather signatures.

Macdowall, Peter Cyr, and incumbent Mayor Curt Leng each need to acquire 946 signatures from registered Hamden Democrats in order to make it onto the Sept. 14 primary ballot.

Macdowall said he and Jim Pascarella, a DTC member and Curt Leng supporter, were on the phone discussing alleged ​“obstruction from the Garrett campaign,” on Sunday when Macdowall told Pascarella he was ​“welcome” to come by and join him in gathering signatures for his opponent.

Leng is running for reelection as a challenger, since he did not receive the town committee’s endorsement. A slate of Council members are also petitioning in conjunction with him to wage primaries.

Members of Leng’s challenge slate of Legislative Council candidates, including Kathleen Schomaker and Melinda Saller, also came by Sunday night to collect signatures and sign petitions.

Pascarella noted that if the two of them were working together to accrue signatures for their respective campaigns, they should also invite the third petitioning candidate, Peter Cyr. So Cyr in turn sent his treasurer, Avi Schwimmer, to join.

In the end, it was a party for supporters of three competing Democratic campaigns to unite in a cause — helping everyone get on the ballot for the primary.

“No one’s going to become mayor by default,” Pascarella said. ​“We have an obligation to allow the public to decide.”

Cyr added that his treasurer attended the event ​“to get signatures,” but declined from commenting further on the event.

He and Macdowall refused to disclose how many signatures they collected at the party.

Leng, who was also not at the event, said, ​“I give credit to anyone who is willing to work to put their name on the ballot, or work to get their name on a ballot with the intention of trying to help their community… we owe the people of this town a factual debate of ideas and an opportunity to present solutions.”

Suppression?

Besides sharing a commitment to getting everyone on the ballot, the three camps at the party criticized Garrett for alleged ​“obstruction” aimed at denying them spots on the ballot.

What kind of ​“obstruction” might have taken place?

Pascarella noted that Sean Grace, the chair of the DTC who went canvassing with Garrett before the convention, had gone to the registrar’s office to verify the notary signatures that other candidates had turned in with parts of their petitions to ensure that they were valid.

“We never did anything like that” in past campaigns, Pascarella said. Pascarella and Macdowall described Grace’s auditing of petitions as unprecedented, nit-picky. They claimed that it was part of a larger mission led by Garrett’s campaign to keep candidates off the ballot.

Macdowall accused Garrett’s team of ​“essentially running a campaign against petitioning.”

“Hamden is an overwhelmingly Democratic town,” Macdowall said. ​“The general election townwide is in many ways not competitive. Look at somewhere like New York City, where that’s also the case. Primaries are critically important, especially where general elections are not competitive. They’re the only place where voters have the opportunity to choose their elections.”

Hamden does have a Republican candidate and an Independent Party candidate running for mayor this year.

“To suppress a primary is voter suppression,” Macdowall charged.

Macdowall and Pascarella recalled how Leng signed Garrett’s petition to make a Demoratic primary ballot in 2019, when he was the DTC-endorsed candidate and the two were, for the first time, running against each other for the seat.

“Considering there are a lot of people who signed her petition two years ago who were not supportive of her candidacy, you would expect her to follow that path,” Pascarella said.

Or Sexism?

Garrett said that while Leng signed her petition two years ago, he did so when she was her only competitor. She may face three competitors in this primary if all three make the ballot.

She said that one canvasser did approach her and ask her to sign Macdowall’s papers, but she declined. None of the other candidates, she said, had asked for her signature. Macdowall, in fact, is the only candidate who has actually signed all three Democrat’s petitions with his own hands.

Garrett asserted she had not been to the registrar’s office, but that she was aware that Sean Grace was going through the process of verifying others’ signatures. ​“Whenever there is a primary that is contested, and by contested I just mean challenged, you have to legally get all of your signatures. It’s the right of any campaign to look into the signatures and make sure that they are all valid,” she argued. ​“It would be pretty much a dereliction of duty not to look into those things.”

“I’m not telling people that they shouldn’t be signing petitions” when she goes door to door, she said. Other of her supporters have minds of their own, she said. ​“This isn’t something I’m instructing them to do,” she said. ​“This is just how they read the room — voters understand this process to be a direct attack on me.”

Indeed, New Haven Independent commenters and Hamden residents like Ann Altman have been vocal about the importance of not signing petitions from other candidates. They say the want to avoid splitting the vote in September and handing reelection to Leng. Altman sent the Independent an image she created and circulated to spread that message. She noted that Sean Grace then shared his family’s own interpretation of her graphic.

Garrett asserted that both Cyr and Macdowall’s campaigns, like hers, were founded on the aim of getting Leng out of office. All candidates have been vocal about that collective goal.

“We’re gonna have a primary, most likely. I don’t see that as voter suppression,” she added. ​“What you have is Brad and Peter pulling at my margins, and making this more difficult.”

“The fact that the three of them are working together so that we can have a four-way primary,” she said of Sunday’s event, ​“shows that Brad and Peter are willing to give into Leng in order to run a sexist campaign against me.”

Garrett had also claimed that Macdowall told her in an early conversation that he wasn’t going to petition if he didn’t win the endorsement. Macdowall said that ​“we had a conversation about whether or not we thought petitioning would be beneficial, but there was never an agreement made, never a statement.”

She’s the one who said she wasn’t going to petition,” he added, referring to a Facebook post Garrett made back before the convention.

He continued: ​“I told her I would consider making a pledge not to petition. But when I witnessed their behavior, when I began witnessing the gross level of collusion and voter suppression and lies coming from that campaign, I knew that was all wrong.”