Rosa Pepper-Macias looks forward to a vote if they’re elected to the State Senate — a vote taking place not in the Connecticut or U.S. legislature, but in Sikorsky Aircraft’s helicopter factory. The vote wouldn’t involve legislators sending tax dollars to build CH-53 K helicopters for the military. It would involve union members voting to shift the company’s mission to building mass transit. Pepper-Macias, a 23-year-old unionized line cook at New Haven’s Omni Hotel, is running for New Haven’s downtown-to-eastside 11th State Senate District seat in the Nov. 3 general election on the Workers’ Voice Party line. Democratic State Rep. Al Paolillo Jr. is also seeking the senate seat, from which State Sen. Martin Looney is retiring. The Republicans do not have a candidate in the race. The secretary of the state’s office Wednesday confirmed that Pepper-Macias’ campaign submitted enough valid signatures of registered voters to earn a spot on the Nov. 3 ballot. Pepper-Macias’s team reported collecting 965 voters’ signatures, around three times the required number. Pepper-Macias said they’re running to help advance an anti-war pro-worker movement rather than to try to change the two-party-dominated legislature from within. That’s why unlike, say, members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), they’re running on a third-party line. The goal is using the campaign for raising public awareness. Democrats and Republicans “work for the big businesses and for corporations and the super wealthy. The compromises are all going in favor of those people. It doesn’t work to compromise with them in that way,” Pepper-Macias said during a conversation Tuesday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Democratic and Republican candidates “are fighting for a seat, and we’re fighting for the right to just participate in these elections and to show that socialism is not some extraordinary ideology. It’s a program that benefits working people,” Pepper-Macias argued. “Most working people agree with the ideas that we put forward, that we shouldn’t be going to war, that we should be spending money on human needs and not for the profits of the billionaires, that there should be enough housing and that people shouldn’t be on the street, that we shouldn’t have racism and white supremacy. We want to fight for a labor party that comes out of the union movement that puts forward the best interests of working people.” One of the ideas the campaign is putting forward: Switching Connecticut factories like Stratford’s Sikorsky from military to purely civilian production. And granting workers control over those decisions, at all Fortune 1000 companies. In Sikorsky’s case, Pepper-Macias envisioned a pivot to making parts for buses and trains. They were asked how confident they were that Sikorsky workers, if given the option would vote to make that pivot. They were confident. “Fundamentally, those workers have more in common with Palestinian workers than they do with the bosses in their factory. Those unions should — and it’s embarrassing that they haven’t — fight for the right to stop production on that basis. We shouldn’t be killing working people across the world, because those are members of our class just like us. We should be working together with those people to make our world a better place, rather than fighting them and dropping bombs on them,” they said. “We have an enormous power in this state to affect the war machine and America’s ability to do this violence to people abroad. We need to be organizing those people to have the confidence to show that we can make what we want.” Pepper-Macias’s State Senate campaign platform calls for “abolishing ICE, taxing corporations and the rich to fund social services, outlawing Flock and ALPR spy networks, a moratorium on new data centers and workers’ control of AI, and ending the war on Iran.” Why not run for Congress to tackle federal issues? Pepper-Macias “would have loved to — I think that would be hilarious, Rosa v. Rosa ” — but the law requires federal candidates be at least 25 years old. Al Paolillo Jr. said he has heard a lot from voters in this campaign about “affordability, jobs, education, and health care,” issues he said the Democratic majority has successfully tackled in the legislature. “These are priorities which we’ve worked and delivered on. As a member of the Senate, just like as a member of the House, I will continue to focus on those issues.” Pepper-Macias said they support ending deportations of immigrants: “We think that people should have the right to travel wherever they want to travel to. I can say with certainty that as working people, we don’t have that right right now. As a trans person, my right to travel has been walked back in the last year.“ Pepper-Macias grew up aware of LGBTQ issues as the child of two men active in the movement in Ojai, California, where they began cooking as a job at 16. They moved east to attend Wesleyan University, during which time they linked up with the Workers Voice Party. The party formed in 2022 as a merger of other small parties as an anti-imperialistic pro-labor socialist organization influenced by Leon Trotsky and Nahuel Moreno. Pepper-Macias said the party hasn’t elected anyone to public office.  Yet. Click on the above video to watch the full conversation with Workers’ Voice Party State Senate candidate Rosa Pepper-Macias. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.” The post Socialist Makes State Senate Ballot appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less