Tuesday Primaries Test Strength, Not Issues

(News analysis) New Haven versus Fairfield County.

The party establishment versus issue-activist networks.

Who has the best chance to win in a general election.

Who has better qualifications — or makes voters smile more.

Those are the stakes in Tuesday’s Democratic primary elections for state treasurer and secretary of the state, battles of personalities and power bases. Voters will have to wait to weigh in on the bigger questions — like how to run elections and best preserve democracy; how best to invest billions of state dollars — until the Nov. 8 general election, which will be a battle of ideas.

New Haven has an unusually large role in the two statewide Democratic primaries occurring Tuesday: Three of the five candidates come from the city. New Haven hasn’t had a candidate on the statewide ballot since 2006 (gubernatorial hopeful John DeStefano) or a statewide elected official since 1986 (Treasurer Hank Parker). That’s despite consistently delivering the largest municipal plurality of votes to statewide Democratic candidates. The other two candidates in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries hail from Fairfield County’s Gold Coast.

New Haven’s 34,188 registered Democrats (as of mid-Monday) and 2,550 registered Republicans are eligible to vote in Tuesday’s party primaries. Polls are open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Click here to find your voting location. The city’s 15,923 unaffiliated and third-party-registered voters will have to wait until the Nov. 8 general election to cast votes.

New Haven attorney Erick Russell is the endorsed party candidate in the Democratic primary for state treasurer, a position responsible for overseeing Connecticut’s nearly $45 billion in pension and trust fund assets. New Haven housing authority Executive Director and state Board of Education Chair Karen DuBois-Walton is challenging Russell. Greenwich quantitative hedge fund manager Dita Bhargava is also on the ballot. Click here, here, and here to read stories about the three campaigns.

All three candidates agree that the treasurer should use state investments to influence corporate decisions involving issues like climate change and abortion; Russell also promises to organize a coalition of state treasurers to help pay for women seeking abortions to travel from states that are banning the practice. So the choice for voters Tuesday is not the merits of those positions, but who would best carry them out, produce the best returns on state investments, and/or have the best chance of prevailing in the November general election.

In the past, some have argued that the state treasurer should focus strictly on economic returns, not social ends. Meanwhile, Republican state treasurers nationwide have formed a national coalition to use their positions to pressure investment firms ​“to punish companies that want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” That discussion will need to wait for the general election.

Similarly, the secretary of state candidates — State Rep. Stephanie Thomas, who represents Westport and Norwalk; and New Haven city health Director Maritza Bond — agree on the top issues: They back constitutional amendments to allow early voting and universal no-excuse absentee balloting. They favor cracking down on election ​“misinformation” rather than what they call a non-existent voter fraud problem. They don’t champion ranked-choice voting. So again, the choice is about qualifications, electability, and backing. Click here and here for stories about the two candidates’ campaigns, and watch each of them answer questions about their candidacies in radio interviews shown in videos at the bottom of this article. The Republican candidates in general have opposed early and expanded absentee voting and have focused on preventing election fraud, including by requiring photo IDs at the polls. That discussion, too, will have to wait for the fall.

Republicans are also eligible to vote in two party primaries Tuesday (none involving New Haven candidates, or candidates who have visibly campaigned in New Haven).

Themis Klarides, Leora Levy, and Peter Lumaj are vying for the GOP nomination to challenge incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Dick Blumenthal in November. Click here to read an article about that primary race, which featured probably the biggest whopper of any campaign so far this year (Levy alleging with no back-up that Gov. Ned Lamont has secretly misappropriated $1.1 billion in federal Covid-relief aid to spend on teaching schoolkids ​“critical race theory”). Especially since ex-President Trump endorsed Levy, the race has become a test of how far right the historically moderate Connecticut GOP (aka ​“Weicker Likers,” in Texas parlance) has moved. Click here to read a previous article about that race.

Anti-voter fraud activist Dominic Rapini and State Rep. Terrie Wood are vying for the GOP secretary of the state nomination in a GOP primary Tuesday. (Click here and here to read about those races and those candidates.) Republicans have already picked Greenwich State Rep. Harry Arora to be their nominee for state treasurer. Arora isn’t facing a primary on Tuesday, so his name will be on the general election ballot in November.

Forget The 2s

Because no gubernatorial or U.S. Senate candidates are on the Democratic ballot, turnout is expected to be even lower than the 30 percent or so expected for an August primary. New Haven State Sen. Martin Looney, a veteran of almost five decades of campaigns, predicted turnout will fall under 20 percent of registered voters Tuesday.

That means campaigns will need not focus on turning out both ​“1” and ​“2” ranked voters — voters considered very likely or somewhat likely to support their candidate — but just the 1s, Looney said during an interview last week on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

The candidates who are best able to identify the primest of the prime voters — because those are the only ones that are going to vote in this election — and contact and persuade the most of them, are the ones who will win. ​“It’s going to be a relatively small number of votes to win,” Looney predicted. 

“When your people are going out canvassing or doing phone banking, you need to look at the voting history. Are these people regular primary voters? If so, contact them. Work them hard. Try to persuade them. Because if they’re not regular primary voters, they’re not going to vote in this election. It’s a waste of your time and effort on them. … Tapping into activist networks is going to be more important.”

The primary will test the relative strengths of those networks, different constituencies that generally unite behind the same Democratic candidate in the general election.

Russell has the backing of the state party organization; he also would become the first openly gay Black statewide official in America if elected in November. DuBois-Walton can tap networks of supporters from years of public-housing management; statewide affordable-housing and zoning reform advocacy; and politically active sorority and racial social-justice groups. She also has the backing of the labor-affiliated Working Families Party. Bhargava comes from the Gold Coast’s influential finance industry, which helped her gain over 40 percent of the vote when she ran in a two-way 2018 state treasurer primary.

In the secretary of the state race, the party organization is handling Thomas’s campaign. Bond is racking up more labor endorsements, including from UNITE HERE, the UAW, the state AFL-CIO, and the Connecticut Employees Union Independent. New Haven’s mayor and Bond’s network of hometown allies are backing her; some others in town, including the party committee responsible for producing the most votes on election day, Ward 25’s in Westville, are working for Thomas (and Russell). Ward 25’s alder, though, has formally endorsed Bond and Russell. Meanwhile, at the state party convention in May, New Haven’s delegation overwhelmingly backed Bond and DuBois-Walton. Even in New Haven, the lines aren’t clearly drawn.