08/19/2026
Excellent analysis by CT DSA leaders. Elections are a means to an end, not the final goal. The final goal is true working class revolution!
CT DSA ANALYSIS ON GOVERNOR PRIMARY ELECTION
(Link to full statement in comments.)
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.
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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.
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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.
