Democrat Pearson mounts aggressive campaign in GOP-held 107th

By Scott Benjamin

BROOKFIELD – The Democratic challenger, Daniel Pearson, 26, of Brookfield, and more than 20 volunteers – including the first selectman and a selectman - were canvassing neighborhoods on the first Saturday of summer.

He already has a campaign manager and a headquarters.

The Republican incumbent, Steve Harding, 30, of Brookfield, had lawn signs posted before the end of June when he started going door to door each weekend with two volunteers who travel to other neighborhoods. Campaign strategy meetings are under way.

Isn’t this the 107^th state House District, which the Republicans have held for 50 of the 52 years since it was established?

Brookfield attorney Fran Collins, now an Oxford resident, who would become the GOP House leader and then the Speaker, captured that first race in 1966.

Isn’t this the district that hasn’t elected a Democrat since Bethel attorney Jim Mannion won in 1974, when Democrat Ella Grasso annexed her first term as governor?

Isn’t this the district where Brookfield Republican M. Jodi Rell established herself for 10 years before she was elected as lieutenant governor and then governor?

Could there really be a highly competitive race in the district that kept electing Republican David Scribner? He collected more votes than anyone in Brookfield between 1995 and 2015 as he won nine elections for the state House while also serving as town treasurer before, during and after his stint at the State Capitol.

In five of those House races Scribner didn’t even have a Democratic opponent.

Wasn’t it just three years ago that the Brookfield Democrats were scrambling for relevance on the municipal boards and commissions as the Republican and A Brookfield parties dominated those panels?

Yes, longtime Brookfield Democratic Selectman and Board of Finance member Howard Lasser came within striking distance of Harding in a special election in February 2015 after Scribner vacated the seat that encompasses all of Brookfield, the Stony Hill section of Bethel and a slice of northern Danbury.

But in 2016, Harding garnered a second term without opposition.

“I tell the younger sports writers write about the game you saw and not the game you came to see,” MLB.com columnist Mike Lupica, a New Canaan resident, has said.

The early voter outreach apparently is a sign that the game you’ve seen is not the one you are about to see in a district that has elected a Democrat less often than the Mets have won a World Series.

In Brookfield, the Democratic candidate for first selectman has prevailed in four of the last five municipal elections and narrowly lost in the other. Bethel has elected a Democratic first selectman in five consecutive races. Danbury Republican Mark Boughton has been mayor since 2001, but the Hat City has supported the Democratic Fifth District congressional candidate in each of the last six elections.

Brookfield First Selectman Steve Dunn, who is now in his second term, has said the Democratic Party has become “re-energized” since his 2015 campaign with a team of volunteers manning phone banks to contact voters. The Democrats won every municipal seat that they sought in the 2015 and 2017 races.

However, Harding, who was working on former state Sen. Andrew Roraback’s congressional campaign at age 25 and was elected to the Brookfield Board of Education at age 26, has been noted for being bipartisan and ambitious.

When asked this spring about the strong economy in the district, he pointed primarily to the work of the three municipal leaders – two of whom, Dunn and Bethel First Selectman Matt Knickerbocker, are Democrats.

He also held a campaign kick-off fund-raiser in January, shortly before the start of the regular session of the General Assembly that attracted nearly 100 people to O’Connor’s Pub in Brookfield and netted considerable money toward him qualifying for the $25,000 grant from the Citizen Election program.

Pearson, who is vice chairman of the Brookfield Housing Authority, said earlier this month that he is on the verge of also securing a Citizens Election Program grant and has received endorsements from the Working Families Party, Moms Demand Action Gun Sense Campaign and the Connecticut Young Democrats. He said he expects to get endorsements from labor groups during the campaign.

Harding said he has been endorsed in previous campaigns by the Connecticut Business & Industry Association and the CT Realtors and expects to again have their backing this year.

Door to door campaigning is labor intensive, but Pearson says it yields results.

“I want to talk to the voters,” Pearson, who has worked as a community organizer, said in an interview when asked about the importance of visiting neighborhoods. “How else are you going to know what their concerns are? How else will I better know how to serve them?”

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Cheshire) has said that unless you are campaigning door to door each year you are going to get “a skewed perception” of how voters feel about issues.

Murphy has said that 20 years ago when he challenged a 14-year Republican incumbent in a state House race in the Southington area, he started going door to door and some voters said, “You’re not going to win, but you have my vote.” By his second round of visits, there were enough voters making that comment that he was going to win. He visited some of the homes as many as four times.

He has said that on Election Day while standing outside the 75-foot zone at a polling place, dozens of voters noted that he had visited them. No one said they were supporting him because of his stand on a particular issue.

On the policy areas, Pearson, who is the events and volunteer manager for Norwalk Grassroots Tennis & Education, said, “Harding is very quiet when it comes to certain issues. I don’t hear him stand up on these issues that are moral questions. What are we going to do about the education system? What are we going to do about state employees? What are we going to do about the homeless residents?”

“Bethel has invested a ton of money in its education,” said Pearson. “They now have small businesses that pay decent wages and they also have a great school system.”

“In Brookfield, we pay the least amount per pupil of all the suburbs around us,” he said. “We need the resources available to pay the teachers, to not cut the arts and other programs,” he said. “Right now we’re headed toward a race to the bottom.”

Harding, an attorney, said in a phone interview that, “I have advocated for more funding from the town and the state for the schools in Brookfield. But since I went to the Legislature more than three years ago, the governor and the Democratic majority have even considered zeroing out funding for towns like Brookfield and Bethel and giving more money to the big cities [following the 2016 ruling from a state Superior Court judge the current education funding system is “irrational”]. “I have fought to keep the funding for the schools in my district.”

The legislator said that for decades the representatives from the 107^th District have tried to get more Education Cost Sharing funds for Brookfield. Bethel gets about $8 million in funding per year under the formula and Brookfield usually receives $1.2 million to $1.5 million.

Regarding the collective bargaining units, the state Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Competitiveness reported in March that the pensions for the state employees were only 29 percent funded.

Former Greenwich hedge funds manager David Stemerman, who is seeking the Republican gubernatorial nomination, has said anything below 80 percent in the private sector is considered a crisis.

Pearson said the state should continue to make adequate annual payments as has been the case under Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Stamford) the last eight years.

State Comptroller Kevin Lembo (D-Guilford) has said that Malloy, who is not seeking a third term this year, is the first governor to do that in a generation.

Pearson said that the pension crisis should not be resolved “on the backs of teachers and state employees.”

Harding said in May that the top priority for the next governor will be to “restructure” the pension and health care benefits for the state employee collective bargaining units.

“I am an advocate for the collective bargaining units to come to the table and resolve this crisis,” the state representative said last week.

“The rank and file members understand that there is a crisis,” said Harding.

Pearson said the state needs to address its homeless crisis by providing more affordable housing. He said with a major transportation infrastructure program some of it could be built in cities where buses and trains could take lower-income workers to better-paying jobs outside their immediate area.

He also said the state should improve its job training programs.

Harding said, “Homelessness exists in the district. I think it is slightly lower than in some other parts of the state.”

He said he has worked with the governor’s office to help address homeless among military veterans.

“The people that have defended our freedom should have adequate housing,” Harding said.

U.S. Rep. Jim Himes (D-4) of Greenwich, a former executive for an affordable housing company, and Middletown Democratic Mayor Dan Drew, a New Milford High School graduate, have praised Malloy for increasing affordable housing and reducing the homeless population since taking office in 2011.

Pearson, who has a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Central Florida and a master’s degree in Social Policy and Urban Development from American University, said Connecticut’s economy has been the most-discussed topic among voters.

The state Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Competitiveness stated in the 68-page report that Connecticut’s economy had contracted by eight percent between 2007 and 2016 while the national economy expanded by 11 percent.

Metro Danbury has to some extent been an exception, as economist Donald Klepper-Smith of DataCore Partners in New Haven, noted in April that the area has recaptured 106 percent of the jobs lost in the 2008 recession. The state has only regained 82 percent of the positions that were eliminated.

“The low income are not getting the resources that they need,” Pearson said. “Their taxes are going up and nothing is coming back.”

“The wealthiest people of this state are, percentage wise, paying the least in taxes,” he said. “According to a 2015 report, the top one percent are paying an effective rate of 7 percent in taxes. The working class is paying taxes at a rate of 17 to 25 percent of their income.”

“[Nationally] the gap between rich and poor is as vast now as it ever has been,” U.S. Rep. John Delaney (D-Md.), who is seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, wrote in his recent book, “The Right Answer.”

However, the state Commission on Fiscal Stability has called for a decrease in the top income tax rate from 6.99 percent to 5.75 percent and an increase in the sales tax from 6.35 percent to 7.25 percent.

“Absolutely not,” said Pearson when asked if the General Assembly should adopt that proposal. “A higher sales tax hurts the middle class.”

“There are a lot of people suffering because they’re not being paid much more than $10 an hour,” he said. “They can’t make the next step.”