Preamble
The Democratic Party base is in open rebellion. Across the country, establishment and incumbent candidates are being primaried and ousted in a wave that began with Zohran Mamdani’s victory as Mayor of New York City last year. In Connecticut, the gubernatorial primary election that pitted State Representative Josh Elliott against incumbent Governor Ned Lamont best resembles this wave we have seen.
With this context, it was inevitable that Elliott’s campaign would be compared to Mamdani’s own. What these comparisons miss, however, is that the New York City left has spent years building the organizational infrastructure that produces candidates like Mamdani. Before the mayoral campaign, democratic socialists had spent years doing the work: building tenant unions, uniting union and non-union workers alike across industries, organizing for public renewable power across the five boroughs. Before a socialist mayoral campaign was imaginable, people had been building their own collective capacity to fight.
CT does not yet have that level of movement infrastructure. In the absence of a mass, organized left-wing base, electoral resistance against a centrist governor has taken the form of a progressive legislator basing his challenge on the activist, left-liberal flank of the Democratic Party.
While Elliott campaigned on a range of proposals that are to the left of Lamont’s, the crux of the race is on fiscal policy: taxing the rich and adjusting CT’s “fiscal guardrails,” a set of budget caps in place since 2017 that drastically limit how the ability of the state to spend.
On Ned Lamont
Lamont, being of the billionaire class, exemplifies both the effectiveness and the facetiousness of Democratic Party neoliberalism: doing just enough to project the image of progress, while leaving untouched the status quo that continues to produce some of the country’s worst socioeconomic divides. Despite significant wealth, the state has serious cost-of-living issues across utility costs, housing, healthcare, and more. Lamont’s vetoes and open hostility towards key left-wing priorities, amplified by a moderate State House, are major obstacles towards improving conditions for CT’s working class.
The overarching problem is Lamont’s fiscal policy: his unwavering commitment to maintaining the rigid “fiscal guardrails,” coupled with his unwillingness to raise taxes on the billionaires that reside in CT, already locked the state into austerity before Trump’s second term. Rigid statutes prohibiting municipalities from collecting non-property tax revenue have ensured that federal cuts cannot be replaced or weathered effectively without state intervention.
The supposed key achievements of Lamont’s fiscal policy – weathering the pension debt and historic tax breaks – obscure the fact that it is by and large the wealthy who disproportionately benefit, while municipalities shoulder the cost and working class people bear the brunt of service cuts. Lamont has repeated the same argument over his term: he is being fiscally responsible by maintaining the guardrails to tackle the pension debt head on, and that the state does not have enough money to both prevent another pension debt crisis and fully fund services at the same time.
The missing piece, conveniently, is the one that attacks Lamont’s own class interests. CT’s top 4,500 income earners pay less than 8% of their income to state and local taxes; the bottom 1.2 million pay over 20%. Rather than to protect working people from fiscal instability, the guardrails have become a tool of the wealthy to inhibit the maintenance and expansion of vital social programs.
Lamont’s response to rising fascism has also lacked behind his talk of standing up to Trump: he has been unwilling to call for arresting ICE agents even as agents defy legislation passed to limit ICE terrorism, and his own Commissioner of Emergency Services has stated the duty to intervene if provisions of the CT Police Accountability Act (2020) are broken by ICE agents.
On Josh Elliott
Josh Elliott’s central campaign proposal is an income tax mirroring what Massachusetts did in 2022: a 4% surcharge on incomes over a million dollars. Massachusetts projected $2.2 billion in new revenue and collected $5.8 billion. The tax enabled free universal school meals, free community college, and expanded municipal education funding, all initiatives that Lamont has not funded sustainably. With this proposal, Elliott’s campaign was able to crystallize “tax the rich” as the central conflict in this race.
Elliott captured anti-establishment energy in a state where structural conditions are uniquely stacked against challengers, as Connecticut makes it extremely difficult to qualify for a primary against an incumbent without any party support. And so Elliott spent the first ten months of his campaign courting Democratic Town Committee delegates and building relationships inside the party apparatus, garnering enough support from delegates to trigger a primary.
Lamont’s advantages were never in question: party machinery and capital were always going to be behind him. The only viable path to unseating him ran through a unified coalition of labor and the left willing to break from the establishment together; and stitching this coalition together required a coherent and compelling narrative of “why me, why now.”
As a Deputy House Speaker with a decade inside the legislature, Elliott needed to compensate to credibly run against an establishment that he helps lead. His progressive stances, while strong, ultimately fell short of making the case that he was accountable to the working class rather than adjacent to it.
When the choice came, nearly all of organized labor went to Lamont (with the exception of the Congress of Connecticut Community Colleges and the New Haven Federation of Teachers, two progressive unions that have absorbed the worst of Lamont’s austerity and have little to lose by betting on the alternative). This development meant Elliott was left with a base of primarily disorganized progressives inside the Democratic Party with little reach beyond its activist layer, and a lack of ready-built infrastructure to turn out the disengaged voters needed to overcome the establishment’s organizational advantage.
Conclusion
The critical analysis of Elliott’s campaign does not in any way make Lamont’s austerity defensible. The guardrails Lamont treats as sacred are a political choice, not a fiscal law of nature, and a Governor who refuses to tax billionaires while vetoing pro-worker bills is siding with capital against the working class. Elliott is still the first candidate in a generation willing to say the “tax the rich” out loud in a statewide race, and his campaign has forced Lamont to make overtures to the party’s activist wing that probably would not have happened otherwise.
But still, what separates Democratic Socialism from a populist wave is the work of developing accountability to a movement through shared struggle, instead of taking the shortcut of simply backing candidates who speak to the right issues. Our most powerful tool as a mass socialist organization is our membership, which is now at 1,300 strong. Through a disciplined exercise of material support, we have been able to elect five Socialists in Office across three town councils and the State House, and are now poised to elect Connecticut’s first Democratic Socialist State Senator.
The movement infrastructure that could have made a statewide electoral challenge competitive still has to be built. That means unions doing the work of moving their members toward a broader class politics beyond bread-and-butter issues, and the left doing the work of bringing the unorganized into collective political life. It means joint campaigns and shared struggle that develop mutual trust and accountability between those two forces, and the careful work of cultivating shared leadership and a common program over time. A left statewide candidate who can actually win, instead of substituting for that infrastructure, must emerge from it.
But more than simply electing socialists to office, CT DSA sees legislative and electoral fights as tools that serve the work of building independent working-class organization, instead of replacement for that work. There was no primary result on August 11 that removed the need to keep organizing in our neighborhoods and workplaces. If you are paying attention to politics now because of this race, we invite you to fight with us for the Connecticut that we deserve.
