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

This week, it’s all about State Rep. Josh Elliott. The Hamden Democrat hit his fundraising mark over the weekend, surpassing the required amount to qualify for the state’s public campaign financing program. Elliott will still need to raise a bit of a buffer to ensure his paperwork will pass muster with state elections regulators. Expect his formal application for the grant to be filed within the next week or so.

Elliott’s milestone achievement comes as some in his party’s establishment have begun to chafe at his increasingly aggressive messaging. Whether or not this is a sign of a candidate finding his stride in the months before the primary or one veering into a damaging intraparty feud depends on which side of the Elliott-Lamont divide you find yourself on.

Let’s dive in…

Aresimowicz and Elliott trade barbs

The medium is the message, as they say. Josh Elliott’s chosen medium to deliver a blistering critique of the former state House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz was his Substack account and the email distribution list his campaign has amassed. Aresimowicz launched his volleys on Facebook and a Sunday morning political talk show. The tone of their respective statements reflect a growing divide among Connecticut Democrats that seems destined to only grow wider as the days grow longer.

“I Welcome Their Hatred,” read Elliott’s Substack title.

In the emailed message, Elliott responded to harsh statements Aresimowicz made during an appearance on WTNH’s Capitol Report.

“He was not a person that was on the floor daily, working policy and working out with everybody at the table,” Aresimowicz said of his time working with Elliott. “He gets in front of a microphone.”

In Aresimowicz’s telling, Elliott’s campaign is a vanity project. 

“What can I say to be outrageous? Can I be the next Mamdani? What’s in it for me, instead of how can I make the state better?” Aresimowicz said of Elliott.

Elliott’s reply lambasted Aresimowicz as essentially a paid mouthpiece of Eversource. The former speaker is a registered lobbyist for the utility giant and, in the same segment that he discussed Elliott’s campaign, had offered a gentle defense of his client following their request for a double-digit rate hike. In Elliott’s view, Aresimowicz’s defense of Eversource and critique of his candidacy for governor are inextricably linked.

“If Eversource is paying former Speakers to come after us, the least we can do is make that a bad investment,” Elliott wrote to his supporters, adding a pitch for his “public power option” to bring down electricity costs.

Aresimowicz didn’t take long to fire back, using his perch on the Capitol Report panel to attack Elliott again and taking to Facebook to issue an even longer missive.

“What is most concerning is the style of politics he is bringing to this race,” Aresimowicz wrote. “For years, many Democrats have criticized Donald Trump not simply because of where he stood on issues, but because of how he approached public life.”

Trump, Aresimowicz wrote, is a grievance merchant who stokes outrage to serve his own political advancement.

“Josh Elliott’s campaign increasingly follows that same playbook,” the former speaker said.

A comparison to Trump is perhaps the most severe criticism one Democrat can offer of another.

“No, he is not Donald Trump ideologically,” Aresimowicz said. “But the tactics are strikingly familiar. Every disagreement becomes evidence of corruption.”

The spat between Aresimowicz and Elliott is indicative of a broader gripe many in the state’s Democratic establishment seem to have with the latter’s challenge to the incumbent governor. Whether or not Elliott actually presents an existential threat to Lamont’s incumbency depends on who you ask. What is undeniable is that Lamont’s allies seem uniformly annoyed by the way Elliott is prosecuting his campaign. That annoyance tipped into anger last week, when many of Aresimowicz's former legislative colleagues took issue with a decidedly personal attack on the former speaker.

Up until Aresimowicz’s public criticism, the gripes with Elliott have largely remained confined to the privacy of conversations between Lamont supporters. Now that Elliott seems likely to soon receive more than $3 million to take his fight to Lamont, expect those critiques to get increasingly louder – and personal.

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back next week with another edition of the Tip Sheet!