New Haveners Choose Sides

Veteran New Haven Alder Darryl Brackeen is catching a flight to Iowa Friday to assume a four-day role as ​“precinct captain.”

The mission: Knock on the doors of people in Cedar Rapids who have committed to back former Vice-President Joe Biden in Monday’s first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential nominating contest. Then, on Monday, go back and make sure they show up and cast their promised votes.

Brackeen, who has represented Upper Westville on the New Haven Board of Alders since 2012, is one of the politically engaged local people who have lined up behind different Democrats and begun making cases for them in the lead-up to Monday’s Iowa caucus and the following week’s New Hampshire primary.

State Rep. Josh Elliott is headed to Iowa, too, to boost Elizabeth Warren. Former State Rep. and gubernatorial aide Mike Lawlor is talking up Pete Buttigieg, while idealistic students like Ryan Dougherty are throwing down en masse for Bernie Sanders.

The four discussed their efforts, and their reasoning, in interviews this week.

Brackeen, who’s 31, has been active in local and national campaigns since his last visit to Iowa, a decade ago, for community-organizing training with the Wellstone Action Network. He built up contacts over the years through the national Young Elected Officials Network as well. Various Democratic campaigns wooed him this time. He seriously considered backing Cory Booker or Kamala Harris before they dropped out of the race. Earlier this month he received a call, and a pitch from a national Biden campaign official, followed up by a call from 2016 Sanders official-turned 2020 Biden coordinator Simone Sanders. The conversations convinced him that of all the remaining candidates, Biden’s gradualist approach to change most aligned with his own views.

For instance, Brackeen said he agrees with Biden’s emphasis on boosting urban schools and higher education — as well as the idea of beginning with two-year free community college before gradually phasing in universal four-year tuition at state colleges and universities.

Similarly, he supports the quest for universal health care. Like Biden, he argues for first building on Obamacare through an expanded public option. ​“It was so hard to get what we got” with the initial Obamacare legislation, that building on it will require sustained step-by-step legislating and negotiating, Brackeen argued.

“This was a strategic decision” based not just on Biden’s views, but on his vice-presidential experience as well as his ability to ​“expand the tent” by working across the aisle, Brackeen said of his Biden pick, during an interview Thursday on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.”

He seconds Biden’s argument that Biden has the best chance of any Democrat to defeat Donald Trump in November: ​“We need someone Donald Trump fears. [Trump] risked his presidency and was impeached because he went after Joe.”

Brackeen served as Hillary Clinton’s New Haven volunteer coordinator in the 2016 primary. That year Sanders turned out record crowds of supporters in town and generated the bulk of the public enthusiasm in that campaign — then was trounced in the city by the far better organized Clinton camp. Brackeen said he drew two conclusions form that experience: ​“Organizing matters; we knew where the voters were.” And levels of public enthusiasm don’t always correlate to percentages of actual votes.

Ryan Dougherty chose his candidate precisely because his candidate preaches dramatic, swift change over gradualism.

Dougherty, a Yale forestry school graduate student, has been hitting New Hampshire on weekends, thrilling to the communal excitement shared with the tsunami of fellow students flooding campaign offices. During the holiday break he put in eight to nine-hour days for more than a week making the Bernie Sanders case door to door in Iowa.

This is Dougherty’s first presidential campaign. Battling climate change through the Green New Deal and single-payer health care top his list of issues. Sanders has provided the fullest-throated embrace of comprehensive action on both fronts, Dougherty noted. As a result groups like the Sunrise Movement have endorsed Sanders.

“I believe in a world where things can be drastically better” than they are now, Dougherty said during a separate ​“Dateline New Haven” appearance earlier this week. ​“I saw Bernie’s campaign as a huge step forward in addressing” root causes of existential challenges.

He is also motivated by Sanders’ emphasis on movement politics over personal politics, on continuing mounting ​“street heat” protests to pass legislation long after the election. ​“We’re not done once we get Bernie in office,” Dougherty said.

To become a Sanders canvasser, Dougherty went to Bernie Boot Camp — he completed a series of hour-long webinars on the campaign’s platform last summer, then took a shorter refresher this winter.

Mike Lawlor places himself in the ​“liberal Democratic” camp, the one choosing between Sanders and Warren. He decided to raise money and online noise for one of the identified ​“moderate” candidates, ButtI gieg, instead.

“I’m a big cheerleader for Mayor Pete,” Lawlor said on ​“Dateline.” In part he based his support on Buttigieg’s positions and approach. While he would like to see single-payer health care enacted one day, Lawlor said, he doesn’t believe ​“you get there” with an ​“all or nothing strategy.” Based on his decades as a state representative, he has concluded that an ​“all or nothing strategy” too often leaves you with ​“nothing.”

“I have a career of being an incrementalist. That’s the only way to get things accomplished,” said Lawlor, who supported criminal-justice reform first as the co-chair of the state legislature’s Judiciary Committee, then as the top advisor responsible for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s ​“second-chance society” plan to keep nonviolent offenders out of prison and reintegrate them into society. (These days Lawlor teaches criminal justice at University of New Haven, and lives in New Haven’s Morris Cove neighborhood.)

More broadly, he praised Buttigieg’s youth along with his intellectual maturity and military experience. ​“I’ve never seen anybody more prepared for the job,” Lawlor argued. Part of that lies in Buttigieg’s ability to connect with diverse audiences about values. ​“Somebody is going to have to try to heal the country.”

“The frosting on the cake is he happens to be gay,” said Lawlor. He can relate to Buttigieg coming out of the closet while in office: Lawlor did the same while a state representative from East Haven. Like Buttigieg, he found that ​“most people seem to not really care about that.” In East Haven, when he came out while serving in the legislature, Lawlor took a lot more flack for harboring ​“inner-city” sympathies.

Josh Elliott plans to argue in Iowa this weekend, as he did earlier this month in New Hampshire, that Elizabeth Warren’s track record makes her the most formidable candidate. Elliott worked for Sanders in 2016, then won a state representative seat from Hamden with the help of fellow Sanderistas. He would have supported Warren in 2016 if she had run, he said.

Exhibit A for his case: Her success in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has recovered billions of dollars form predatory financial companies ripping off low and middle-income consumers.

“I cannot impress on people enough how big a deal this is,” Elliott said. ​“Her data-driven approach recognizes how the middle class is getting screwed over and over, and what solutions should be.” Click here to read a recent article following Elliott on the Warren campaign trail in New Hampshire.

All of the local volunteers interviewed agreed that their top priority is to see Donald Trump defeated in November. All said they plan to support the eventual Democratic nominee, whoever that turns out to be.

Previous New Hampshire primary season coverage:

• Dyed-In-Wool Socialist Leads Biden Trek
• Progressives’ Pitch: Movement vs. ​“Bulldog”