Josh Elliott Challenges Ned Lamont for Connecticut Governor

State Rep. Josh Elliott is spending his weeknights crisscrossing Connecticut, pitching himself to Democratic town committees two and three at a time, making the case that Ned Lamont shouldn’t be the party’s automatic choice for a third term as governor.

The campaign is a logistical grind. Elliott’s schedule follows the calendar of Democratic Town Committee meetings, not any sensible map. On one recent evening, he attempted stops in Bridgeport, then Cromwell in Hartford’s suburbs, then Thomaston near Waterbury. He made two of the three. Connecticut may be a small state, but stringing together 47-mile and 27-mile drives in a single night makes it feel considerably larger.

“This is my 91st DTC,” Elliott told an audience in Cromwell recently. He says Lamont’s operation dismissed him early, and he welcomed it. “They’re chasing their tails now, as of a few weeks ago, because they just didn’t think that I was a serious candidate, and I loved that. That was the best thing they could do was underestimate me.”

Elliott, 41, is a state representative whose political biography is rooted in a moment when few expected much from him. Ten years ago, progressives pushed him to challenge House Speaker J. Brendan Sharkey of Hamden, one of the most powerful figures in state government at the time. He ran. The fact that he won shaped everything that followed.

He describes himself now as an economic populist, though he is also, practically speaking, a capitalist. He co-owns Thyme and Season, a natural food store his mother opened 25 years ago. He cites Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as political touchstones and is trying to channel a broad frustration with incremental Democratic governance, both nationally and in Hartford.

His platform pulls hard to the left of where Lamont has governed. He wants municipalities to be able to take over their electric grids and run public utilities, pointing to Connecticut’s existing municipal electric companies as proof the model works. Those utilities charge lower rates, he argues, and the state should borrow money to help towns pursue that path. He favors stripping insurance profits out of health care delivery and is comfortable with a public health insurance option even if it costs jobs in the insurance sector. He wants higher taxes on millionaires.

He frames Lamont’s reluctance to push any of this as a kind of political timidity, a governor too worried about business complaints to actually test whether those complaints have any real force. Elliott, who describes a past life as a poker player and poker coach, reaches for a familiar metaphor. “You have to make sure you are calling some bluffs,” he said.

What he’s selling is the idea that Lamont is personally well-liked but not particularly galvanizing. “If you look at his polling numbers, a lot of people like him, but not a lot of people love him. I can win a lot of those people,” Elliott said. His campaign opened last July and he has described his strategy to sympathetic Democratic audiences as a plan to “slowly eat into what is this perceived notion of impossibility.”

Democratic supermajorities in the General Assembly haven’t moved the needle on these issues, in Elliott’s telling, because they share the governor’s fear of being tagged as anti-business. He’s betting there’s a constituency in the party that finds that argument exhausting.

The structural challenge is real. Lamont has the money, the institutional support, and the name recognition that comes with incumbency. Elliott has the town committee circuit and a pitch built on the idea that comfort with the status quo isn’t the same thing as satisfaction with it.

Whether that argument lands with enough Democratic voters to actually threaten Lamont’s path to renomination is the central question of this primary. Elliott, for his part, has been on the road long enough to have made his case 91 times. He’s still counting.