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

Happy December! We hope you all had a restful and fulfilling Thanksgiving. 

This week, we’re breaking down a week filled with announcements of new chairs.

Let's dive in...
 

Musical chairs: Alves and Leeper come out on top in two leadership contests

For months, Democratic insiders have theorized about who Governor Lamont would endorse to be the next chair of the Connecticut Democratic State Central Committee. Last Wednesday, Lamont ended that speculation with his endorsement of Roberto Alves, the first-term mayor of Danbury.

In a statement announcing his endorsement of Alves, Lamont said Alves is “the exact type of leader we need at this moment.” Lamont emphasized that “as the mayor of a major city, [Alves] speaks with the residents of our state on a daily basis and is intimately familiar with their concerns and needs - working to keep our focus on making Connecticut more affordable.”

Alves emerged as the governor’s pick after months of jockeying by other well-known Democrats, including party vice chair Jimmy Tickey and Fairfield Democratic party chair Steve Sheinberg.

In selecting Alves, Lamont sent multiple messages at once.

The Mirror’s Mark Pazniokas noted, “The choice of an urban mayor comes after successive statewide elections in which the urban vote has been shrinking.” Choosing Alves, Paz wrote, is a sign that the governor intends to refocus on Democrats’ urban political infrastructure.

A focus on Connecticut’s cities is also an admission of another trend. In addition to falling turnout, many of the state’s cities – including Danbury – saw a sharp swing away from Democrats in the presidential election.

The across-the-board electoral drift toward the Republican Party has triggered a wave of post-election soul-searching by many Democrats, including the governor.

In a radio interview with the Tip Sheet’s author, Alves indicated that he was less inclined toward post-election punditry and more focused on empowering the state party and local party chairs “to get the word out about all the great work that Democrats are doing for the working and middle class.”

Asked if he believes, as some in his party do, that Democrats face a problem more existential than simply finding new avenues to “get the word out” to voters, Alves again declined to engage in punditry. “I gotta stay on task,” Alves said. “The fact of the matter is that Democrats in Connecticut are winning. And you know, more people – fifty percent plus one – are getting our message. It’s just how do we get it to everybody else?”

Alves pointed to his own success in Danbury as an example of how Democrats can counter the trends of the 2024 election. Alves won the mayoral race in 2023, ending two decades of Republican control. He’s also cultivated a crop of Danbury Democrats, including State Rep. Farley Santos, who are among the party’s rising figures.

He also pointed to the governor. “In the ‘22 election, 45 towns flipped from Stefanowski to Lamont,” Alves said. “That’s what Governor Lamont brings to the table.”

Of course, many of the towns Lamont flipped in 2022 were affluent, suburban communities like Greenwich, New Canaan, Darien, and Wilton.

Finding a way to increase urban turnout and retain that urban coalition could prove challenging, even in a midterm when anti-Trump backlash is expected to give Democrats an edge.

Some in the Democratic Party, most notably Sen. Chris Murphy, have argued that Democrats will need to fully embrace economic populism in order to recapture working class votes. In Murphy's telling, successfully reengaging the working class could come at the expense of those Lamont-friendly suburbanites.

“If we were actually engaging in true populist economic ideas,” Murphy said following the election, “it would hurt our coalition which these days tends to be higher income people who don’t want the status quo fundamentally upset.”

Whether or not Lamont will bring his electoral prowess to the table in 2026 is a question Alves says he does not have the answer to, but he left no doubt as to where he would stand in either case. If Lamont chooses to run again, Alves was clear that he would back the governor.

“We’ll all be excited and behind him,” Alves said. “The party, if I have the privilege of serving as party chair, will be there to support whoever our candidate is.”

Should he be elected as party chair, Alves would be in the interesting position of running a state party at the same time as he will presumably be running for re-election as mayor. In his interview on Saturday, Alves wouldn’t formally announce whether or not he was running for re-election, but he did signal his intentions.

“I really enjoy being mayor, I hope to be able to be mayor for quite some time,” Alves said. “We’ll make our announcement – but, um, I don’t plan on stepping down.”

Alves wasn’t the only pick for chair announced last week. House Speaker Matt Ritter and House Majority Leader Jason Rojas have also been rolling out their picks to lead key legislative committees for several weeks now. Last week, they named State Rep. Roland Lemar to chair the General Law Committee. State Rep. Aimee Berger-Girvalo was named to take Lemar’s gavel on the Transportation Committee.

Ritter and Rojas also announced that State Rep. Jenn Leeper will chair the Education Committee, ending months of speculation over who would replace outgoing chair Jeff Currey. The Fairfield Democrat will enter her third term in January.

The Tip Sheet understands that at least one more committee chair shakeup is due this week.

Haar mourns moderate losses

Dan Haar, the veteran scribe of Connecticut business and politics, penned a column lamenting the losses of two powerful moderates in the legislature.

As with all of Dan’s work, it’s worth a read to start your week.

The Tip Sheet Job Board

State Treasurer Erick Russell is looking for a new communications director. Veteran comms pro Tyler Van Buren is exiting state service at the end of the year. Van Buren’s run in state government took him from House Democrats to the Comptroller’s office and finally to the Treasurer’s office. Interested candidates can apply here.

The Open Communities Alliance is looking for an Advocacy Director. More info on the position can be found here.

Do you have a job listing you’d like to promote? Drop us a line and we’ll put it in front of the thousands of government and industry leaders who read the Tip Sheet every Monday.

That’s all for this week!

We’ll be back next week with more…