A New ​“Machine”?

The city’s busiest polling place Tuesday was also the scene of a debate over labor’s role in the changing course of city politics.

The debate took place at Wilbur Cross High School in East Rock, where four candidates were running for Ward 9’s two co-chair seats on the Democratic Town Committee.

More than 400 people voted in what is normally a sleepy party primary. In the end, two candidates tied to organized labor — Cristina Cruz-Uribe and Lauren Miller — decisively defeated two other candidates running as a team, Jane Edelstein and Donald Harvey. Labor-backed candidates won similar races across town. Read about that here.

At 7 p.m., an hour before the polls closed at Wilbur Cross, all four candidates were set up in the parking lot, where they’d been since before dawn.

Running mates Edelstein and Harvey, along with supporters, occupied a pop-up canopy equipped with a propane heater.

Edelstein (pictured), who’s a 49-year-old branding consultant, outlined the pitch she’d been offering to convince voters headed into the polls. ​“We’ve been your neighbors for years and years. We have a proven record of achievement.”

Both she and Harvey, who’s 65 and teaches at the Yale School of Drama, are ward committee members and block watch captains, Edelstein said. She is a former president and vice-president of the Hooker PTA. They were active in the fight to save Engine 8. They worked to put together fire relief after a blaze at a pizzeria on State Street in January.

And they worked to create bylaws for the ward committee, making Ward 9’s only the third committee in the city to have them, Harvey said. That was part of an effort to make the committee process more inclusive and transparent, he said.

“We’re not backed by anybody but ourselves.”

Our agenda is Ward 9’s alone, Edelstein said.

Their opponents are part of a citywide union-affiliated political movement, Edelstein said. Cruz-Uribe and Miller are bringing in a lot of outside union help and ​“people feel like they’re being strong-armed,” Edelstein said.

The unions scored a victory against the establishment political machine in last fall’s aldermanic races, taking majority control of the city’s legislative branch. Labor is poised to take the same role with the party, Edelstein argued. Union organizers and their allies have argued that the city needs an independent grassroots alternative to the old City Hall-dominated party and government system with more, new people involved in politics; since their election they have successfully pressed for dramatic changes in community policing and efforts to connect local people to local jobs.

“We really want to avoid moving from one machine to another,” Edelstein said. ​“We’ve seen the damage a machine can do in New Haven.”

Harvey said he and Edelstein had about 25 volunteers working with them, all people ​“with day jobs,” not people who are ​“into politics for the sake of politics.”

Nearby, Cruz-Uribe and Miller were also trying to keep warm as they greeted voters. They said they’d been in the parking lot since before 6 a.m., like Harvey and Edelstein. Their boxes of Dunkin Donuts coffee had long ago transitioned from hot to iced, but the hand-warming pockets in their gloves were still going strong.

Cruz-Uribe, who’s 27, and Miller, who’s 25, said they’ve each lived in East Rock for about two and a half years.

Like Edelstein and Harvey, they spoke about make the ward committee an inclusive and transparent group. ​“We think the ward committee can and should be a diverse and representative body,” Cruz-Uribe said.

Asked how they thought they could do that better than Edelstein and Harvey, Cruz-Uribe and Miller spoke of their experience as organizers. Cruz-Uribe, a Ph.D. student at Yale’s Department of Music, is a leader in the grad student union. She’s worked on two campaigns by Ward 9 Alderwoman Jessica Holmes.

Miller came to New Haven to work for charter school organization Achievement First, where she’s a student recruiter. In college at Clark University in Massachusetts, she did a lot of campaigning for Planned Parenthood, she said.

Cruz-Uribe and Miller said they had a lot of experience knocking on doors and developing grassroots community engagement.

They said they had about 15 volunteers working on the campaign. Cruz-Uribe acknowledged that theirs is a union-connectecd campaign that’s connected with the new slate of aldermen. ​“We are very affiliated with that movement.” But their campaign volunteers are all friends and personal supporters — ​“people near and dear to us” — not labor operatives, she said.

They rejected the notion that they are part of any new machine.

“One of the things the union does well is create a grassroots agenda,” Miller said. ​“And that’s not the machine.”

“Organizing in my community is a natural extension of organizing in my department,” Cruz-Uribe said.

A very small sampling of voters found disagreement on who’s the established machine and who’s the check to its power.

“I’m trying to keep a little balance in the aldermanic chamber,” said 45-year-old William O’Shea, who teaches chemistry at New Haven Academy. After the election of a slew of labor-backed aldermen, he said he wanted co-chairs who are not union-connected.

He said he likes Edelstein and Harvey because they’re ​“more representative of me,” homeowners who’ve been around for years. They’re ​“less transient” than others, he said.

“Because New Haven is a one-party government, things get entrenched,” said Doug Kelly, a 33-year-old who does scientific research at Yale. He said he voted for Cruz-Uribe and Miller because they ​“came by and chatted and had a lot of good things to say.”

That method worked on 26-year-old Leszek Ward, who works with O’Shea teaching at New Haven Academy. He said he appreciated the effort they made to talk to him when they knocked on his door.

After the results were read aloud, the candidates shook hands with one another.

“The sun will come up tomorrow,” Harvey said, philosophically. ​“East Rock will still be here. As Rhett said, ​‘Tomorrow’s another day, Scarlett.’”

He said he hopes to remain on the ward committee. ​“I’m very proud of the race we ran.”

Cruz-Uribe echoed the sentiment: ​“I’m proud of the work we did.”

“It’s time to build a committee,” she said.

She and Miller said they haven’t given thought to who will be on the committee, but said they hope Harvey and Edelstein apply.