Just 20 miles divide Bridgeport and Greenwich, two cities on Connecticut’s commuter coastline. But Greenwich, the closer to New York, is $70,000 richer in per capita income. It’s almost twice as white and more than nine times safer than Bridgeport, where deadly drive-by shootings are routine. And now, in a tale of two Connecticuts, the mayor of Bridgeport, a convicted felon on a comeback tour, is running a longshot campaign in the Democratic gubernatorial primary against a millionaire businessman who went to Exeter and Harvard and has lived in Greenwich most of his life. Mayor Joe Ganim wants to take down Ned Lamont, the runaway favorite, who easily secured the endorsement of the state party convention last weekend.
Lamont, 64-year-old heir to an early J. P. Morgan chairman, made his personal fortune in cable television and a name for himself stealing the Democratic nomination in 2006 from hawkish Senator Joe Lieberman, who then ran as an independent and won. The establishment candidate this time around, Lamont netted nearly 87 percent of the floor vote at the Democratic convention in Hartford on Saturday, May 19, ceding the slim remainder—half of them from the state’s depressed post-industrial cities—to his one unrelenting opponent. Lamont campaign staffers told me they believed Ganim might drop out as soon as Monday. Ganim staffers said I must have garbled the quotation.
“If they think that, they definitely don’t know Joe,” said Ganim campaign coordinator Troy Jackson as he hurried from the convention center after Saturday’s vote, off to knock on more doors in New Haven.
Bridgeport knows Joe, and they elected him anyway. The 58-year-old mayor of the state’s poorest and most populous city won reelection in 2015 after serving seven years in prison for running an elaborate kickback scheme from city hall. That conspiracy, in its human scope (10 associates went away as well) and half-million dollar haul, surpassed the crimes of any of Connecticut’s other corrupt big-city mayors. Ganim first took office in 1991 and steered Bridgeport’s revival from bankruptcy until his 2003 conviction on 16 felony counts of bribery, conspiracy, racketeering, mail fraud, and tax evasion. Astonishingly, he revived his political career 12 years later.
Jay Marlin, a Washington-based political consultant who figured Ganim for a future governor a quarter-century ago, remembers him pre-prison as an uncommonly good campaigner. And a stint in the slammer didn’t rewire him much. “Politically, he says he’s more transparent. But personally he’s the same. He has the same energy and love of people,” Marlin tells me while incumbent governor Dannel Malloy bellows his valedictory at the convention. Malloy is America’s least-popular governor, according to Morning Consult’s annual state-by-state survey. His back-to-back tax hikes have led to an exodus of corporate and individual wealth from the state. But he is here to nominate Senator Chris Murphy, the uncontested object of tonight’s adoration, and he tacks on a promise that Democrats will hold Connecticut and, despite the crippling debt load his governance deepened, will raise the minimum wage “again and again. And again!”
It may be too late for Malloy, but Ganim’s here to redeem himself. “He was on the path to be governor, and it all came crashing down. It was like a Greek tragedy,” Marlin says. But then he came back. “People knock him down,” Marlin says. “Like a Whac-A-Mole, he keeps popping back up again.”
Or, as Ganim euphemized to me, “I’ve been given the honor as a second-chance candidate—after lessons learned from mistakes made, as I say—of a renewed sense of transparency and accountability.” And he skillfully spins: “It not only makes me want to be someone who will create second-chance opportunities that I’ve had in Bridgeport, but also first-chance opportunities for people.” His campaign, he says, targets Connecticut’s crumbling cities, population centers Democrats depend on but don’t really understand.
Having failed to secure the support of 15 percent of the convention delegates, Ganim needs to collect 15,500 petition signatures by June 12—he’s secured over 11,000 now—to get on the ballot for the August 14 primary. That’s the immediate task. Then, “if we’re successful in getting that message out, I think the party will be a better place, and I think we’ll win,” says Ganim. “Because there’s such affluence in some of the communities, Greenwich being one of them . . . there seems to be such a divide and insensitivity, almost lack of care, toward our cities with the greatest populations.”
Ganim didn’t expect to make it onto the ballot at the convention. But the morning of the floor vote, former state senator and longtime conservative columnist for the Hartford Courant Kevin Rennie says he’s starting to expect a solid showing from the mayor. “He’s gained a grudging admiration from a lot of people,” Rennie tells me—meaning Ganim’s opponent must have lost some.
The Lamont mystique comes with a certain smugness, an unlovable invulnerability. Some of this is just Greenwich, a town where country clubs and hedge funds buttress an enviable quality of life, despite rising taxes and plummeting real estate values, as corporate taxpayers flee for New York and Massachusetts—tax havens now, compared with Connecticut.
With his thick brown hair slicked back and wearing a dove gray blazer, Donny Landis, boyfriend of Lamont’s elder daughter Emily, tells me at Starbucks the morning of the vote that the Lamonts, like most of Connecticut, consider their patriarch’s primary win a foregone conclusion. Ganim, he says, is “not getting to 15 percent, not even close.” And the 11,000-plus signatures he’s collected? “It’s a nonissue,” he says. The Lamonts are “not concerned.” But what of the coming class war, the populist uprising after the millionaires put down the Bridgeporters? He laughs. “More power to ’em. Hey, it’s a free country.”
As an outsider clawing his way back “from great sin,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran Democratic strategist uninvolved in the race, Ganim speaks to “working people, when they’re alienated.” And in a state with climbing tax rates and dwindling opportunities, they are. “When populism is the religion of the moment, he fits that moment. But is it all an act?” he wonders.
Even if it is an act, Connecticut kind of buys it. Darlene Clouther, a Litchfield delegate, says she won’t vote for Ganim, but her smile takes on a conspiratorial glint when I ask. “He’s a nice guy who’s paid his time,” she tells me, recalling a town council meeting last year where Ganim gave her his cell number. “He said, ‘Call me if you’re ever in Bridgeport and you need anything at all.’ ” Clouther hasn’t called, but she likes that she can.
“He certainly makes an impression,” says Robert Schrage, a lawyer from Easton, “and he’s the candidate with the most direct experience”—but “under ordinary circumstances somebody with Joe’s background wouldn’t even be on the table.” That is, in a year not so weighed down by Malloy’s disastrous record that several state-level Democrats, obvious contenders on paper, declined to run. John Ryan, a delegate from East Hartford, doesn’t much like the choice that’s left. “I truthfully do not know who I’m going to go for, and it’ll come right down to the wire, I guarantee.” To win him over, a candidate would need to talk tough on the state’s mounting pension debt and unbalanced budget. “It would have to be somebody recognizing the problems, verbalizing the problems,” and so far no Democrat has. “We’ve got businesses leaving, we’ve got people leaving. My son graduates from law school on Sunday, and he’s interviewing out of state for jobs.”
Hacibey Catalbasoglu, a 20-year-old New Haven delegate and a senior at Yale, decided he’d be voting for Lamont once the field winnowed to just him and Ganim. He and I look at Bridgeport’s rowdy, relaxed delegation—seated directly in front of the Greenwich group with their legs crossed fussily and lips pursed. “How much do you want to bet there’s one of these people”—he gestures toward a Greenwich delegate in a blue blazer, frayed-cuff weekend khakis, and hundred-dollar haircut, then to the Bridgeporters—“worth more than all these people combined?”
Sitting with Bridgeport’s bloc, largely black and Hispanic, are the mayor’s mother and father. “He’s 91, and she’s 82, but they’re good on the phones,” Ganim says. Many of the Bridgeporters boo when Lamont prepares to take the stage to accept the party’s nomination. But first, they hoist all five feet, six and three-quarter inches of the mayor onto a chair in front of the platform. He pumps his fist in time to their chant, “Joe! Joe! Joe! Joe!” All the Greenwich delegates can do is silently hoist their signs: “Believe,” “Ned 2018,” and “ConNEDicut.”
“Look, I’m not going to kid you,” Ganim tells me later, as Lamont and his running mate rack up TV and radio interviews. “We’ve still got an opponent who’s going to spend $10 million. But we kind of relish in that kind of contrast.” At some point during the hubbub of the floor vote, an AP reporter snaps a photo of Lamont’s back with a round “Joe Ganim for Connecticut” sticker between his shoulders, while Ganim bounds around the floor with a pitch Jay Marlin paraphrased thus: “You don’t have to be for Ganim to vote for him tomorrow. Be for democracy.”
Lina Deleon, a New Haven proxy delegate who voted for the mayor on behalf of an absent alderman, says Ganim came up to her during the floor vote, shook her hand, and made soulful eye contact, as though they’d known each other for years and he owed her his ongoing redemption. “He couldn’t even have known how I was voting,” she says, marveling at the contrast with Lamont’s nervous smiles from within a protective posse of staffers. “He seems authentic, like he stands for ‘the forgotten people,’ ” she says, but appears unconvinced of it herself. “Does he?” I ask, and she shakes her head, “That’s the question.”
If it’s at all unclear exactly what’s driving Joe Ganim ever onward, one thing is more obvious now than before he charged through the convention in Hartford. While the Republican Governors Association pushes giddy press releases declaring the blue state in play, Democrats ignore what actually ails Connecticut: an economic downturn that their persistent progressive one-upmanship promises only to worsen. When he took to the stage to second his own nomination, Ganim echoed Malloy, saying, “I’ll work with you, if given the honor, to support an increase in the minimum wage and to fight for collective bargaining rights.”
East Hartford’s John Ryan, who said he’d lost patience with his party’s silence on the state’s financial ruin, admits after the vote that neither candidate swayed him. Of his town’s 20 delegates, 2 went for Ganim and 17 to Lamont. The 20th was Ryan. “I couldn’t vote for either,” but he got a good show. And he went home with an honest sense of one choice he’ll have in August. “He’s got some serious guts,” he says of Ganim.
