Live from Cape Cod Bay, it’s the Tip Sheet, a weekly newsletter from Tom Dudchik’s Capitol Report written by Mike Cerulli.

This week, we’re surveying this summer’s debate landscape with the primaries right around the corner.

Let’s dive in…

1st District candidates square off on NBC stage as summer debate season ramps up

What’s better than one Mike? Two Mikes, of course!

Last week, our friends at NBC Connecticut hosted the four candidates in the 1st Congressional District. Mike Hydeck and Mike Savino ran a tight ship as debate moderators, moving efficiently from question to question and keeping everyone on topic. Colleagues from Telemundo and Connecticut’s corps of student reporters pitched in questions, too – a nice touch which highlighted parts of the state’s media landscape sometimes overlooked by the political class.

You can watch the full debate here. 

As questioners and rhetorical referees, Savino and Hydeck were all business. Their preparation was apparent each time they politely interjected when candidates tried to pivot away from the nitty-gritty of a policy question into practiced campaign talking points.

To the extent the candidates landed strikes on each other, the Hartford Courant’s Chris Keating summed it up:

When two candidates claim verbal victory in CT, a third has a different tactic. Attack them both.

The two candidates who each claimed victory were the odds-on frontrunners, John Larson and Luke Bronin. The barbs traded by the two men traced familiar outlines. Bronin deployed his usual lines about respect for longtime incumbents, while urging Democrats to choose new leadership. Larson delivered a late blow in his closing statement with a winking reference to Bronin’s political ambition.

“I got into this race not because I’m seeking another office, not because I wanted to stay in Congress and hold onto a seat,” Larson said.

The 77-year-old is seeking his fifteenth term in Washington.

But, as Keating noted, it was Jillian Gilchrest who cut a different path, going on offense against the two better-funded, more well-known men in the race.

For months now, Larson and Bronin have mainly trained their fire on each other. The CT Mirror’s Lisa Hagen recently observed this mutual focus in a profile of Gilchrest’s campaign.

Bronin has hit Larson for his heavy reliance on funding from corporate political action committees – a critique that’s backed up by the numbers. The former Hartford mayor has sworn off donations from such groups. In turn, Larson’s campaign has painted Bronin as a “corporate Democrat.” It’s true that Bronin’s list of donors includes a plethora of bona fide members of America’s business elite. Larson’s inaugural attack ad, however, stretches this truth. The ad charges Bronin with being funded by tech billionaires. Elon Musk’s face is highlighted on the screen while the claim is read by a dramatic female narrator. The trillionaire head of Tesla, SpaceX, and X is not a Bronin donor.

In Gilchrest’s telling, the tit-for-tat attacks launched by Bronin and Larson throughout the race mean little in the context of broader questions about the political influence of money in politics. On the debate stage, she dispensed with the particular details of campaign financing and said simply that Democratic candidates should not take funding from corporate interests and billionaires.

“Unfortunately, two of the men in this race do take funding from billionaires and corporations,” Gilchrest said.

Undoubtedly, Larson and Bronin have their rebuttals to this line at the ready. But the underlying dynamic of Gilchrest’s attacks is undeniable. She’s trying to break through to voters as a third option in a four-way race.

The question asked by pretty much everyone observing the 1st District battle is whether or not Gilchrest has the resources to effectively proliferate her message. In Hagen’s expertly-reported piece, Gilchrest outlined an expansive door-knocking operation powered largely by volunteers and staff – an effort that is considerably more cost effective than buying the type of airtime that Bronin and Larson have. But will it be enough to move the needle on voter awareness? All available public and private polling suggests Gilchrest still significantly lags the two men in the race.

Not to be forgotten, the fourth candidate in the race, Ruth Fortune, asserted herself in the NBC debate, too. She weaved personal narrative into her responses perhaps more than any other candidate.

“We need people in Congress who know what it’s like to live with the policies that come out of D.C.” Fortune said, highlighting her self-made success and background as a formerly undocumented immigrant.

Like Gilchrest, Fortune has lagged in polling. Despite a herculean and historic effort to secure a ballot line via petition signatures, she has not garnered the type of fundraising necessary to compete with the seven-figure campaign budgets of Larson and Bronin.

Unsurprisingly, one additional narrative that emerged from the NBC debate was about the topic of debating itself. This week, Bronin is expected to press for Larson to commit to more debates. Over in the gubernatorial race, Josh Elliott is singing a similar tune. Fresh off approval of his public campaign financing grant, Elliott asked his supporters to pressure Lamont to commit to more debates. Expect announcements from state media outlets in the coming days about what they have planned for both races.

So far, the gubernatorial race has mainly seen forum-style events with each candidate appearing separately, rather than debates in which the candidates appear together. Elliott’s eagerness for colloquies with his competitors was demonstrated by a recent sojourn into the talk radio realm – an arena typically more favorable to Republicans. The Hamden lawmaker sat for an hour-long interview on Vinnie Penn’s radio show opposite Ryan Fazio. The two fielded questions from Penn live in WELI’s studio.

Clips of Fazio and Elliott’s exchanges are available on Penn’s podcast feed.

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