A hundred-plus Mayor Toni Harp supporters have moved their advocacy for the three-term incumbent to Facebook, a digital realm largely untouched by the candidate over the course of her now-shuttered campaign.
On Sept. 25, the very same day that Harp publicly suspended her re-election campaign, five core supporters of the mayor created a Facebook public group entitled, “The People’s Campaign for Toni Harp.” As of Tuesday afternoon, the group has 122 members.
“The People’s Campaign is an independent group of New Haven citizens urging everyone to vote for Toni Harp on Tuesday, November 5, 2019!” the page’s description reads.
Harp has decided to leave her name on the Working Families Party line of the general election ballot this November, even though she said she will no longer be actively soliciting votes.
Harp lost September’s Democratic Party primary to Justin Elicker by 16 percentage points. In the subsequent weeks, many high-profile local Democrats who had backed Harp or stayed neutral during the primary have rallied around Elicker as the official Democratic nominee.
Over the course of the primary, Elicker routinely used Facebook, Twitter, and email to solicit campaign contributions, reach new supporters, and reinforce support among existing backers. Harp, meanwhile, relied on a more traditional incumbent playbook of holding multiple press conferences a day touting her administration’s various accomplishments at groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings. Even after she lost the Democratic primary, a core group of supporters urged the mayor to continue to run on the third-party line.
The new Facebook group’s administrators and moderators are Ward 30 alder candidate Honda Smith, local attorney Alex Taubes, local marketing company CEO Bud Mench, and Marcey Lynn Jones.
Some of the more recent posts include Mench and Taubes lauding the Harp administration for winning a $5.6 million in federal funding for lead hazard abatement, reposting Facebook Live videos from past ribbon cuttings for small businesses that opened over the course of Harp’s six years in office, and the occasional rant against Elicker.
But for the most part, the group’s posts eschew mentions of Elicker altogether. Instead, the most frequent commenters (Taubes and Mench) focus on the mayor’s support for affordable housing, community policing, union jobs, and immigrant rights. They reflect a core group’s insistence that, even though the mayor is not the Democratic nominee, she is still their candidate.
“Many people don’t understand that the Mayor suspended her campaign which means her team will not be campaigning, office is closed down but her name is still on the ballot with working families,” Smith wrote on Sept. 29.
“Now the media is saying that she is done which confuses the people but we the people must explain to them that We are fighting for the re-election of Mayor Toni Harp because she has work that have to be completed for our city.
“The Mayor is on the Ballot!”
As a non-Democrat, this train wreck is entertaining to watch. But Mayor Harp really needs to make clear what her plans are. Everyone's confused.