Josh Elliott’s campaign for governor, and against the inevitability of the Democratic Party nominating Gov. Ned Lamont for a third term, is waged weeknights before Democratic town committees, sometimes two or three on a single evening. Words come in a rush, his time limited. His itineraries ar e dictated by the timing of DTC meetings, not the logic of geography. Connecticut is a small state that plays large to a candidate trying, on a single night, to address Democrats in Bridgeport, drive 47 miles to the Hartford suburb of Cromwell, and then 27 miles to Thomaston, just outside Waterbury. He made two out of three. “This is my 91st DTC,” Elliott said in Cromwell two weeks ago. Of Lamont’s campaign, he said, “They’re chasing their tails now, as of a few weeks ago, because they just didn’t think that I was a serious candidate, and I loved that. That was the best — the best thing they could do was underestimate me.” The alternative to Lamont is an intense, spiky-haired state representative elected 10 years ago, urged by progressives to challenge one of the most powerful people then in state government, House Speaker J. Brendan Sharkey of Hamden. It is Elliott’s origin story and a parable about possibilities in politics. Josh Elliott making his pitch in Cromwell. Credit: mark pazniokas / ct mirror Elliott, 41, is an economic populist who also happens to be a comfortable capitalist, an owner of Thyme Season, a natural food store opened a quarter-century ago by his mother. He is an admirer of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, trying to tap into a vein of progressive discontent with U.S. politics, and more locally, the fiscal moderation of Connecticut’s governor. “If you look at [Lamont’s] polling numbers, a lot of people like him, but not a lot of people love him. I can win a lot of those people,” said Elliott, who opened his campaign in July with what he recently described to one friendly Democratic audience as a plan to “slowly eat into what is this perceived notion of impossibility.” He agitates for radical changes, things he says the governor and Democratic supermajorities in the General Assembly are too timid to push, cowed by a fear of being tagged as anti-business. He favors enabling municipalities to take over their electric grids and create public electric utilities, reforms that would wring insurance profits from health care, and higher taxes on millionaires. He favors the state borrowing money to finance municipal electric takeovers, noting that Connecticut’s few municipal electric companies have cheaper rates. He says he is comfortable with a public option for health care, even if it means the loss of insurance jobs. Elliott, who says he once was a regular poker player and poker coach, said the governor is too averse to gambling on bold change, folding whenever he encounters complaints that businesses might be hurt or even leave. “You have to make sure you are calling some bluffs,” he said. His candidacy began, in part, as a vehicle to explore his ideas and allow progressives to air policy differences with Lamont. It has morphed into something else — a campaign with ambitions to complicate what had been expected to be an easy summer for a governor gliding to November on a streak of solid-to-excellent approval ratings. As the May nominating convention creeps closer, Elliott says he is confident of winning at least 15% of the delegate vote, the minimum to qualify for what would be Connecticut’s first primary involving an incumbent governor since Gov. Ella T. Grasso was challenged by Lt. Gov. Robert Killian in 1978. His assessment is shared by some Democrats tracking the current leanings of delegates, though not all. Another obstacle for Elliott is qualifying for the public financing necessary to wage a credible campaign for a Democratic primary that would be held on August 11.  Conceivably, Elliott could qualify for a primary he could not afford to pursue. Elliott told The Hartford Courant in January he would end his campaign if he didn’t qualify for public financing before the convention, saying “mid-to-late April is my own self-imposed deadline.” Now, he says simply, “I am running for governor of Connecticut. That commitment is unambiguous.” But he leaves himself an out: As his gubernatorial campaign presses for delegates and dollars, Elliott acknowledges he simultaneously is running for reelection in the 88th House District of Hamden, if without creating a campaign committee. So far, no one from either party has opened a run for the seat. On Friday, in the last fundraising report required of candidates before the convention, Elliott reported the best three-month period of his nine-month campaign: He raised $118,816, more than double what he collected in either of the two previous fiscal quarters, $45,164 and $39,918, respectively. But his $203,898 in total fundraising from individuals leaves him slightly more than $130,000 short of the $335,500 necessary to qualify for a $3.75 million primary grant under the voluntary Citizens’ Election Program. The qualifying money must come from individual donors, with a contribution limit of $340. Elliott said he is sure of eventually reaching the qualifying threshold, but not when.  The deadline is July 17, less than a month before a primary. “The question is, can I raise the money in time to spend it in a way that makes sense?” he said. Josh Elliott found a friendly audience at the DTC in Vernon, where several members are union activists who share his politics. Credit: Mark Pazniokas / CT Mirror In comments last month to the Democratic town committee in Vernon, Elliott expressed regret about contributing to an impression his campaign was more a protest of a governor’s policies than a serious challenge to his reelection. It has dogged his campaign. “I think I subconsciously put that in people’s heads,” Elliott said. “That was my fault.” Elliott told The Connecticut Mirror last July, at the start of his campaign, that he would measure success by how he shaped the party’s agenda and identity. “That to me is the win,” he said then. “The win is being in the race.” At the time, Lamont had signaled a likelihood he would run for a third term, formally announcing in November, after the municipal elections. His initial reaction to Elliott’s challenge was jocular: “Look, he’s a good guy. Welcome to the race.” Lamont no longer is so sanguine. Elliott’s critiques of Lamont have grown sharper, more personal. He portrays the independently wealthy governor as a would-be king without a cause, seeking a rare third term with no clear agenda, indifferent to the burdens of a property tax system that lands heavily on middle-class homeowners and spares the ultra-wealthy.  “And when you’re ultra-wealthy, a very small percentage of what you own is in your house. It’s in stocks and bonds, the market, securities, businesses, etc. So we are effectively asking the middle class to be on the hook for education, police, fire, transportation,” Elliott told Democrats in Cromwell. “And my perspective is that somebody who makes $55 million a year in passive generational banking income — that is our governor — is not the person who’s going to solve this problem.” More galling to Lamont are the comparisons Elliott makes to President Donald Trump — and the suggestions the governor is indifferent to the president’s immigration policies and the tactics of federal ICE agents. Several Republicans walked out on Lamont’s State of the State address on Feb. 4 after he denounced the killings of two protesters in Minneapolis. “ICE, everywhere you go uninvited, violence follows. Go home. We’re keeping Connecticut safe without you,” Lamont said then. On Friday, Lamont joined other elected officials denouncing the detention of a Cheshire High School student from Afghanistan. Elliott says Lamont was slow to find his voice on immigration, joining a parade already in progress. On his way into a meeting last week with Democrats in Torrington, Elliott recorded a video and posted it on social media. It portrayed the president and governor as too rich to understand the struggles of their constituents. “I’m just thinking today about the fact Trump, our billionaire president, is saying we are going to pay for this war with Iran, and we’re going to do it by taking money away from Medicare and Medicaid,” Elliott says. “And at the same time thinking about our billionaire governor, who is saying that our education system is great, and our municipalities don’t need support, everything’s fine, when the ultra-wealthy are paying less than half what working families are paying.” Elliott’s frown then changes to a mischievous smile. “The similarities are there, just two billionaires in these top positions that just do not understand the damage that they are doing,” Elliott says. “That’s why I’m running.” He ends the video with, “We’re in it to win it.” Lamont generally has not responded directly to Elliott, other than beginning his own outreach to DTCs after months of leaving the task to surrogates. His first in-person DTC visit was in Waterbury, where the state’s deal to save Waterbury Hospital ensured sustained applause at his introduction. “It is the heart and soul in this community, and that’s what we’re trying to do. A number of our Republicans in the state Senate said, ‘Just pull the plug on it. Let it go.’ Not on our watch,” Lamont told the Democrats. “We got your back.” Ron Napoli Sr., the city’s Democratic chair, said, “Governor, you’ve had our back so many times over the last eight years. May 16 at the state convention, we’re going to have your back. We’re also going to have it on Nov. 3.” Lamont notes he is in no position to complain about a primary challenge. He defeated U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in a Democratic primary in 2006, running to protest Lieberman’s support for the war in Iraq. Lieberman hung onto his seat by running in November as a petitioning independent candidate. But Lamont, who delivered a eulogy at Lieberman’s funeral, said he never engaged in ad hominem attacks. “It was about a big issue. We didn’t attack people’s background. We didn’t attack their character. We talked about an issue that made a big difference,” Lamont said Friday, when asked to comment on Elliott. “This is different.” One advantage of incumbency: Gov. Ned Lamont denouncing the detention by immigration agents at a well-attended press conference on April 10, 2026. Credit: mark pazniokas The casual references to him as a billionaire, however, is one gibe that Lamont laughs off. “That’s one lie I wish was a little closer to the truth,” Lamont said. Lamont’s net worth is not public record, but he released summary pages of his tax returns when running for reelection in 2022. He reported income of $54 million in 2021, a nearly seven-fold increase over the previous year, driven by $52.7 million in capital gains. His income in the three previous years averaged $8.5 million. He largely self-funded that campaign with $25.7 million. The governor shielded his wife’s income by filing a married-filing-separately return, an option used by about 5% of American taxpayers. His wife, Annie Lamont, is a successful venture capitalist. As a protection against conflicts of interest, Connecticut requires office holders to annually disclose sources of income, not amounts, and whether they have debts. On a far more modest scale, Elliott acknowledges he, too, is the beneficiary of family wealth as the only son of a successful businesswoman. His financial disclosure form shows that, like Lamont, he is debt free. Elliott bought a 3,700-square foot Colonial for $750,000 without a mortgage in 2023. The labor union issue Elliott says he campaigns nearly full time, 12 hours a day. In Cromwell, even though the former Democratic chair, Jenn Lepore, is his girlfriend, he acknowledged he was unlikely to find many votes in the room. But they were cordial. The same night, he had to wait 30 minutes while the town committee in Bridgeport argued over whether he could speak. Eventually, he was granted three minutes. Elsewhere, the reception is warmer. After addressing the DTC in Essex, he got two quick online contributions of $200 and $150. In his first campaign, when he challenged a House speaker who eventually opted against seeking reelection, Elliott had the support of the union-financed Working Families Party. It dispatched staff to canvass for him. No union, nor the Working Families Party, have offered help against Lamont, but he has fans in the labor movement. In Vernon, a woman who belongs to the International Association of Machinists expressed frustration at the DTC meeting that her union and most of organized labor are sitting on the sidelines. “I wanted you guys so bad!” Elliott replied, smiling broadly. “I was so hopeful I was going to get you, but it looks like the [executive] board’s a little too nervous.”  The chair and vice chair of the Vernon DTC are siblings, Raychel Kushner Hermanson and Olaf Kushner Hermanson, both union activists. Raychel is employed by the New England Healthcare Employees Union, District 1199. Her brother is a long-time union organizer in health care, now a director at the Massachusetts Nurses Association. Their mother is Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, a retired UAW executive and co-chair of the legislature’s Labor and Public Employees Committee. The senator declined to comment on labor’s posture in the conflict between a progressive challenger and an incumbent who is more moderate but who has been friendly to labor. Kushner, who will be a delegate to the nominating convention, is emblematic of labor’s larger dilemma. She favors measures that Lamont opposes, such as a jobless-benefits-for-strikers bill that Lamont vetoed, but he has been a partner to her and labor in passing a significant body of pro-labor laws. Those laws include one of the nation’s highest minimum wages indexed to the cost of living, a nearly universal mandate on private employers to offer paid sick time, a paid family and medical leave program, a ban on “captive audience” meetings some companies used to fight unions, and new standards intended to protect workers at Amazon fulfillment centers. Lamont’s defense of maintaining the prevailing wage for construction workers, as well as his speaking out when the Trump administration halted union work on the offshore Revolution Wind project, has won him the backing of the building trades. In Vernon, Elliott told the Democrats he understood organized labor’s reluctance to oppose the governor and side with a challenger who hadn’t yet qualified for a primary or public financing. “Labor is always very chicken and egg. I’m not resentful about this,” Elliott said. “If I were in their position, I’d probably be the same exact way. ‘If this guy’s not going to be on the ballot, if this guy’s not going to raise the money, I’m not going to put my membership of thousands of people on the line, in the crosshairs.’ So, I understand the perspective.” In an interview, Elliott went further, saying the powers of incumbency included the ability to put “a heavy hand on people around the state, and that’s what we’re seeing now.”  He says that has kept him from pressing allies for endorsements. “I didn’t want to put my colleagues at risk, and I didn’t want to put labor at risk, and I knew I had to prove myself to rank and file first — rank and file labor, rank and file members of DTCs,” Elliott said. “And now that I spent the last eight months doing that — I’m going to be at my 100th DTC this week, there is a clear and growing sense of the legitimacy of this campaign.” He’s still asking for money, for delegates. But legitimacy is one threshold he believes he has reached. ...read more read less