Good morning and welcome back to the Tip Sheet, a weekly newsletter from Tom Dudchik’s Capitol Report written by Mike Cerulli.

We hope everyone had a relaxing holiday. The Tip Sheet’s author was off on vacation last week, but the newsletter is back this week with a look at all the latest happenings in the world of Connecticut politics.

This week, we’re taking a look at Josh Elliott’s forthcoming campaign kickoff. Plus, Ryan Fazio is nearing a decision on whether or not to launch his own gubernatorial campaign. Where’s his mind at after several weeks of kicking the tires? Two of Connecticut’s sitting members of Congress have also drawn challengers, who are they…and are there more contenders waiting in the wings?

Let’s dive in…

Does Josh Elliott have what it takes?

This afternoon, State Rep. Josh Elliott will officially kick off his campaign for governor with a public event in Hamden.

The five-term representative filed his formal paperwork last week.

The filing marks the official start of the contest to be the Democratic nominee for governor in next year’s election. Elliott is the race’s first official contender.

In an echo of the immortal Richard Ben Cramer, the question now facing the 40-year old progressive is: Does he have what it takes?

Or, a more refined version of that question…is he willing and able to do what it takes?

That question begets another, perhaps more fundamental one.

What will it take to deny a popular, enormously wealthy incumbent a third term?

To answer this question, it’s probably useful to begin with two basic assumptions. First, let’s assume the current governor is, as he has strongly hinted, in for re-election. Second, let’s consider a Democratic race that includes only two candidates: Lamont and Elliott.

Gov. Ned Lamont’s public proclamation that he has grown “more inclined” to run for a third term has effectively paused the shadow primary between the handful of Democrats weighing a run. The rapidly-shifting conventional wisdom now holds that, in the absence of the bigger names, Elliott will likely stand as the lone Democrat seeking to derail a Lamont bid for re-election.

Assuming it will be a heads-up showdown between Lamont and Elliott, the latter will be faced with the task of turning himself into a focal point for the various progressive grievances with the governor. That well runs deep, with ample opportunity for Elliott to pump its sustenance into his bucket of political capital. Lamont’s veto of two progressive priorities in this legislative session and his unwillingness to bend the fiscal guardrails to an extent deemed sufficient by the more left-leaning members of his party are fresh wounds that Elliott could use as springboards for his new campaign.

Seizing on specific policy differences, however, might prove to be an altogether different task from focusing them into a coherent message that resonates with delegates and voters.

In his seminal work What It Takes chronicling the 1988 presidential election, Richard Ben Cramer observed this phenomenon when describing then-Congressman Dick Gephardt’s challenge to convert campaign skills honed as a congressman to the national stage.

Gephardt, like Elliott, excelled on the doorstep, in direct conversation with the voter. Over cups of coffee and sidebars at party gatherings, Elliott is a charmer – arguably more attentive to the fine points of policy and retentive of personal details than the man he is preparing to challenge for the Democratic nomination. In Gephardt, Cramer observed a sort of translational error that can occur when attempting to scale those retail skills to a wider audience.

“This wasn’t like his other campaigns,” Cramer wrote, “It was not just more doorsteps.”

Quoting the man himself, Cramer described Gephardt’s realization that policy and retail skills alone does not make for a successful national candidate.

“‘People in this country look at politicians like doctors – solve the problem,’” Cramer recalled Gephardt saying.

“That's the way Dick talked about his discovery,” Cramer wrote. “‘They don't really know about the gall bladder. So, they want to know something about the doctor.’"

More to the point, Cramer said of voters, “They wanted one guy, at the front of the room, to tell them what they were going to do – or, at least, what he meant to do.”

In that medical analogy, Cramer and Gephardt put their fingers on exactly what makes Ned Lamont a formidable candidate and what might make the governor difficult to unseat.

Though often lacking in focused messaging, Lamont instinctively communicates what it is that he means to do. During the pandemic, he was the one standing at the front of the proverbial room described by Gephardt and Cramer. One reality of challenging Lamont is that in the eyes of many voters, even the plugged-in ones who decide nominating contests, the governor is still the “wartime” leader who managed the pandemic – not the guy who just nixed several progressive priorities in the legislative session.

In taking on the task of challenging Lamont, Elliott may look to history and the very recent past for precedent. Leaders defined and brought to popularity in crisis can be defeated. So can popular incumbents.

In the New York City mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani managed to be the guy standing in front of the room telling voters what he plans to do – and what he means to do.

Mamdani condensed his message into digestible bullet points: a rent freeze, free and fast buses, no cost childcare. Skeptics and opponents continue to challenge the feasibility of those proposals, but no one questions the platform’s potency in communicating both what Mamdani intends to do and who he places at the center of his political ideology.

Any successful campaign against Lamont will have to follow the Mamdani playbook of succinctly defining the campaign’s platform, defining the candidate in contrast to the incumbent, and then communicating all of that in a way that actually reaches the people who will decide the nominating contest.

When it comes to the task of effectively communicating, Elliott will face a test of adaptability and raw talent.

The blueprint of Mamdani’s campaign relied not only on a salient platform but also on a candidate who is native to the type of punchy, vertically-filmed social media videos that cut through in today’s media environment. Elliott is mostly untested in these waters. He comes to the task of overcoming the governor’s six years worth of earned media attention without any noticeable presence on any of the platforms that powered Mamdani’s viral rise.

That’s not to say Elliott can’t adapt to the new realities of political messaging. Last week, he was spotted outside Hamden’s town hall shooting video content in advance of his campaign launch. He’s also assembling a campaign team that includes some of the state’s more talented young Democratic operatives.

When he stands before the press corps this afternoon, Elliott will likely field questions about how closely he’ll follow the Mamdani playbook both in terms of policy and style. He’ll also be confronted with a simpler, more tactical question.

How far is he willing to take this?

It’s a question that Mark Pazniokas first floated in his piece last week on Elliott’s initial filing.

“Unclear was whether Elliott was committed to an all-or-nothing run for governor or a campaign to test Democrats’ appetite for an alternative to Lamont,” Pazniokas wrote.

Will he take his challenge to the convention floor? Will he bow out if Lamont emerges as the clear choice of the delegates or will he charge onward to a primary election?

His answers to these questions might prove to be the first indications of whether or not he truly has what it takes to mount a political insurgency in the Land of Steady Habits.

Fazio nears a decision, leaning toward a ‘26 campaign

As Josh Elliott ponders the question of what it will take to defeat Ned Lamont in the Democratic nominating contest, State Sen. Ryan Fazio has been calculating his own path to defeating the two-term incumbent as the Republican standardbearer next year.

The 35-year old Greenwichite has been working the phones with an intensity that reflects what a source familiar with his thinking told the Tip Sheet last week: He’s leaning toward entering the race.

Be on the lookout for an announcement from Fazio before summer’s end.

Rennie: Bronin ponders a return to Washington

As if the faucet of 2026 news isn’t flowing fast enough, Kevin Rennie broke news this weekend that former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin is weighing a challenge to incumbent Congressman John Larson in the state’s 1st Congressional District.

There is already one declared candidate, attorney Ruth Fortune, in the race for the 1st District. In Congresswoman Rosa Delauro’s 3rd Congressional District, attorney Damjan DeNoble has thrown his hat into the ring.

Bronin could be the first well-established Democratic politician to declare his candidacy for a seat held by an incumbent.

“Bosh!”…a rising political star you should know about

As Democrats dissect the success of Zohran Mamdani’s dominant showing in the New York City mayoral primary, another potential upstart candidate in a major city is making moves toward a campaign.

If you’ve never heard of Thomas Skinner, you’re probably not on the corner of TikTok that the Tip Sheet’s author frequently finds himself on when struggling to get a healthy amount of sleep. For those that are fellow travelers in the black hole of the infinite scroll, you might be familiar with the grinning, brash, upbeat Brit who showcases his comically large meals while offering a bit of motivational talk at the beginning or end of the work day. He signs off every video with a friendly, “Bosh!”

Skinner, a 34-year old East London native with an entrepreneurial background, appears to be making moves to launch a political career across the pond, perhaps as a candidate in London’s next mayoral election.

For the uninitiated, you can think of Skinner as an amalgamation of all the things that capture attention in the modern media ecosystem. He rose to prominence in British pop culture as a contestant on the British version of The Apprentice. He parlayed that appearance into turns on other UK reality shows like Celebrity Masterchef. More recently, he’s found TikTok virality as a sort of cross between Dave Portnoy and Tony Robbins with his bits of thoroughly English wisdom.

Last week, he headlined a conference of UK conservatives with a populist-tinged speech titled “The England I Love” that the Cambridge professor James Orr said “stole the show.”

Why is a Connecticut political newsletter interested in a potential candidate in a foreign election that’s still three years away?

As the British writer Nicholas Harris of The New Statesman recently argued, Thomas Skinner may very well represent the future of the British right. He’s wildly popular in that part of the internet that elite magazines on both sides of the Atlantic have dubbed “the manosphere.”

More specifically, Skinner is something of an icon in the manosphere subcultures dominated by younger, right-wing intellectuals, some of whom post under pseudonymous monikers, on the platform formerly known as Twitter. The Vice President of the United States is known to visit this realm. That online faction sits adjacent to a less intellectual but similarly impactful offshoot of bro culture known as the “burnerverse.” This crowd is almost exclusively American and generally more interested in the machinations of SEC football than UK politics but still wields significant influence in online discourse. Skinner exists at roughly the intersection of these two communities.

If you’re someone (perhaps a gubernatorial hopeful) who is interested in the converged worlds of politics and social media, it would be prudent to familiarize yourself with figures like Skinner and the place he occupies in the sprawling world of online subcultures.

At best, you’ll get a preview of what the next wave of influencer politicians looks like. At worst, you’ll learn how to pour gravy over British cuisine without needing to look down at your plate.

We’ll be back next week with another edition of the Tip Sheet!