ethan fry photo
Eva Bermudez Zimmerman talks during a fundraiser June 26 in Ansonia.
ANSONIA — Eva Bermudez Zimmerman brought her progressive campaign for the state’s number-two elected job to the Valley Tuesday, stumping on a platform calling for universal childcare, a phased-in $15 minimum wage, and the legalization of marijuana.
About a dozen Valley Democrats turned out at a fundraiser for Zimmerman, a 31-year-old labor organizer from Newtown who is challenging state Democratic Party-endorsed candidate Susan Bysiewicz for the lieutenant governor nomination in an Aug. 14 primary.
The fundraiser was organized by Leslie Navarrete, a member of Ansonia’s Democratic Town Committee, and Ricardo Caliz, whose Main Street business, Beyond Homecare Staffing Service, hosted the event.
Zimmerman toured the business and took questions before delivering a trilingual plea — in English, Spanish and Portuguese — asking supporters to help buck the trend of low turnouts that have traditionally hamstrung Democrats in midterm elections.
“None of these ideas will happen or be possible if we don’t get involved and go and vote,” she said, imploring attendees to get their friends and neighbors to the ballot box.
Zimmerman, who grew up in Hartford to parents who moved to the city from Puerto Rico, said she decided to run because the issues she’s campaigning on weren’t getting enough attention.
“No candidate was talking about real working class issues and real solutions,” she said. “I knew that this would give me a platform to have that kind of discussion. Why not get in?”
The popularity of Zimmerman’s candidacy was a surprise at the Democratic Party’s convention last month. Though she entered the race for lieutenant governor only a few days before, she took nearly 40 percent of the delegate vote, easily qualifying for the primary.
Ansonia’s convention delegates voted for Zimmerman’s candidacy unanimously, though it remains to be seen whether the city’s Democratic Town Committee will formally endorse her challenge to Bysiewicz, according to Tarek Raslan, the committee’s chairman.
Asked to contrast her candidacy with Bysiewicz’s, Zimmerman pointed to her background, a lifetime of political advocacy dating back to her parents naming her as a plaintiff in the landmark Sheff v. O’Neill school desegregation case.
She currently works for the Service Employees International Union as a state director organizing childcare workers.
If elected, she would be the first millennial and the first Latina to hold statewide office.
“The biggest contrast is my background and what I represent,” she said. “I don’t just talk the talk, I’ve walked the walk for many years when it comes to middle class and working class struggles and that kind of perspective you can’t come up with overnight.”
Navarrete, who works as a committee clerk at the state legislature, said one of the reasons she was attracted to Zimmerman’s candidacy was a lack of diversity in Hartford, citing a meeting she attended about recruiting minority teachers.
“It was very disappointing to me that everybody in the room was caucasian and they were talking about minority teacher recruitment,” Navarrete said. “That’s a problem.”
But could her message resonate in a place like Ansonia, where Republicans have won three consecutive landslides in local elections despite being at a two-to-one disadvantage to Democrats in voter registration?
Zimmerman pointed out her electoral success in Newtown, an affluent community where she was elected to the town’s legislative council despite the GOP holding a registration advantage over Democrats there.
“The majority’s unaffiliated. Most identify as single-issue voters, most are not politically involved,” she said. “You get them involved by having those conversations that speak to them and speak to their wallets and speak from the heart.”
Speaking of wallets — at Tuesday’s fundraiser Zimmerman outlined a plan calling for a progressive tax of big box retailers she said could raise $500 million for social subsidies on education and health care.
She said the state’s current message of funding local education through the “Education Cost Sharing” grant unfairly pits communities against each other in competition for aid.
Doesn’t that play into the Republican narrative of a tax-and-spend Democratic regime forcing businesses to flee the state?
She said a progressive taxation system could target big corporations like big box retailers while protecting smaller businesses, to which she said the state should deliver more incentives and grants.
“Democrats get the bad reputation of not paying their bills and concentrating on social issues,” she said. “If you forget about people who are disenfranchised, people who are poor, then how are you going to grow a middle class?”
