One measure of the enduring political clout of Blue Hills, a Black neighborhood in the North End of Hartford, was the long line of politicians waiting to speak at the reopening of the renovated Joseph D. Lapenta Boys & Girls Club last week. For one of them, it was a second home as a kid.

“We had a great turnout, and it’s a testament to some of those personal connections, the impact of places like a Boys & Girls Club,” said Samuel S. Gray Jr., the former director of the club and now a regional executive for the organization. Those connections paid off when a gap opened in the construction budget.

Gray is 53, a Black man who has voted in every election since turning 18 as an act of personal civic engagement, as well as an example for the kids who come to the club. The ribbon cutting was Tuesday, one week after an election skipped by many city voters, confounding Gray and rattling some politicians in attendance.

“I understand my history as a man of color, what that civic responsibility means. Do I feel discouraged? It’s hard,” said Gray, a Democrat. “When you come to a Boys & Girls Club, that’s what we want to ingrain in each and every one of the young people, that their voice is heard, that their vote matters.”

The shrinking margins for Vice President Kamala Harris in Connecticut cities was a jolt to an otherwise thriving state Democratic Party that now has struggled in successive gubernatorial and presidential elections to engage and turn out urban voters, a worrying sign as the party turns to the 2026 gubernatorial cycle.

The drop off in the urban vote from the levels that contributed to Joe Biden’s victory over Donald J. Trump four years ago was a national phenomenon, but one that echoes loudly in Connecticut. 

In Bridgeport, the state’s largest city, the collapse of the Democratic vote was stunning, falling from the 35,515 votes cast for Biden to the 26,992 for Harris, a drop of 24%. The erosion also was evident in the next four largest cities: New Haven, Stamford, Hartford and Waterbury.

Trump picked up some of those votes, but the vast majority simply didn’t show up.

The falling presidential vote tracks a similar drop in the urban vote from 2018 to 2022 for Gov. Ned Lamont, a self-funding Democrat from Greenwich who won reelection in a landslide on the strength of his appeal to suburban voters. He didn’t need the huge city margins vital to his predecessor — or his own initial win, when he defeated Republican Bob Stefanowski, 49.4% to 46.2% in a five-way race.

One question now is whether, or how quickly, a poorly maintained party machine in the cities can be brought up to speed if a more traditional Democrat, namely one with limited means and a need for a larger urban turnout, is the gubernatorial nominee in 2026.

“It’s just not a light switch you can turn on and off, right?” said Marc DiBella, the chairman of the Democratic Town Committee in Hartford. “I mean, at some point the Democratic Party is going to need the urban vote to turn back out again.”

Lamont, 71, who enjoys a high approval rating and a string of budget surpluses, has neither ruled out seeking a third term nor committed to a run. He won reelection in 2022 with huge margins in Fairfield County suburbs, including one that voted for his opponent in 2018: His hometown of Greenwich.

He carried the cities by wide margins in 2022, but with far fewer votes than 2018. Bridgeport’s vote for Lamont fell by nearly 9,000 votes, from 23,388 in 2018 to 14,395 in 2022. His pluralities shrunk by nearly 8,000 votes in New Haven and more than 7,000 votes in Hartford.

Even in Stamford, a growing city in Fairfield County that overtook New Haven and Bridgeport in 2018 as the top producer of votes in Connecticut, the tally for Lamont fell from 27,447 to 23,911.

Democrats say that fall was a reflection, at least in part, on Lamont and his policies of fiscal moderation. That took away a standard wedge issue from Republicans, but fiscal moderation failed to excite the base. Additionally, city Democrats said, the emphasis of the state party moved to the suburbs.

There is no consensus for why more urban voters sat out the presidential election, or why Harris did not draw young voters in the numbers necessary for a Democrat to win.

“There is no single answer,” said Matt Ritter of Hartford, the speaker of the state House of Representatives.

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont and Lieutenant Susan Bysiewicz at the podium with Comptroller Sean Scanlon, Attorney General William Tong and Senator Richard Blumenthal to share their reactions to the results of the 2024 election at the Connecticut State Capitol on November 6th, 2024. Credit: Ryan Caron King | CT Public

Key Democratic issues like protecting abortion rights gave way to concerns about inflation, economic growth and wages. Trump did a better job of using unconventional media followed by younger voters, like Joe Rogan’s podcast. Trump emphasized border control and crime, issues Democrats avoided or downplayed. The list is long.

“First of all, it’s not unique to Connecticut in any way.” Lamont said, pointing to the failure of Philadelphia or Detroit to deliver the battleground states of Pennsylvania or Michigan to Harris, as they did for Biden. “I think it’s really about energizing people. And I don’t think in the last few cycles people have been energized. Maybe Trump energized some people in the cities more than the Democrats did in this last cycle.”

As both a percentage and the raw numbers of votes, Trump made gains in each of Connecticut’s five largest cities. 

In Hartford, a city in which non-Hispanic whites are only 15% of the population, the vote for Trump swelled from 7.5% in 2016 and 12.6% in 2020 to 17% last week. Trump’s share elsewhere this year: New Haven, 17%; Bridgeport, 26%; Stamford, 36%; and Waterbury, 44%.

Exit polling by a consortium of news organizations showed Harris winning the Black, Latino and youth vote, but by closer margins than other Democrats in previous years. In Connecticut, she won 81% of the Black vote, 55% of the Latino vote and 51% of the youth vote, 18-to-29.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the leftist who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020, was quick to blame the results on what he sees as the the party’s growing estrangement from working class voters, whether white or minority, urban or not.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well,” Sanders said. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry.”

Exit polling showed Harris winning among voters with household incomes of less than $25,000 or at $100,000 or more. Trump won every income level in between. She won the college-educated vote, while Trump was favored by those who don’t hold college degrees.

Samuel S. Gray Jr. welcomes visitors to the reopening of the Joseph D. Lapenta Boys & Girls Club. Credit: Mark Pazniokas / CT Mirror

At the Boys & Girls Club in Blue Hills, a neighborhood reaping the fruits of significant state spending on a new high school and affordable housing that replaces two aging and housing projects, the critiques were less sweeping than Sanders offered, but still critical.

“We as a party and we as government need to do a lot better at both connecting the work we are already doing to improve the lives of residents, but also listening to residents, listening to every voter, and making them feel like their concerns, their families, are top of mind for Democratic elected officials and officials generally,” said Arunan Arulampalam, who was elected mayor a year ago.

Arulampalam was one of the speakers at the Boys & Girls Club reopening. The lineup included U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Greenwich, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz of Middletown, and three Hartford lawmakers who represent pieces of Blue Hills — Ritter, state Sen. Doug McCrory and state Rep. Joshua Hall.

A budget gap in the gut-rehabilitation of the club was closed by a $1.6 million grant from the Community Investment Fund, a competitive program Ritter helped create to make state bonding more responsive to community needs. It sits next to the shiny new Willow Creek apartments and is down the street from the newly rebuilt Weaver High School, where Hall is an assistant principal.

“I know the party does a lot of good things,” said McCrory, an educator who was a regular at the club growing up. But he was quick to warm to the subject of how a Democratic ticket led by a Black woman failed to do better among Black and young voters, demographics that helped propel Barack Obama to the White House.

“I’ve been telling the leaders of the Democratic Party that your messaging is not getting through,” said McCrory, who survived a three-way primary in August after running unopposed. “I’ve been saying that for the last six, eight years.”

If that call has not been fully heeded, the reason is obvious enough, McCrory said.

“We’ve been winning,” he said. “Everybody’s happy.”

The state House Democratic majority made net gains of four seats last week and will open the 2025 session on Jan. 8 with a 102-49 advantage. Barring an adverse result in one pending recount, Democrats gained a state Senate seat and will have a 25-11 majority.

Democrats have won four straight gubernatorial races since 2010 after 20 years of losses, and Republicans have not won a U.S. Senate race since 1982 or a U.S. House race since 2006.

The Democrats’ overall successes in Connecticut have obscured what Democrats say is a neglected political infrastructure in the cities — and have led some to equate that success with having the right policies, politics and messaging.

“People need to wake up and recognize that, despite what I’ve heard in the last week from some people, we don’t have the message,” said state Sen. Gary Winfield of New Haven, a member of the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus who argues for a more populist approach to spending.

“Generally speaking, the Democratic Party was out of touch with the American public on a whole host of issues,” DiBella said. “You don’t get to lose ground with young, urban, rural, Latino, Black voters, and say that the campaign had the right message.”

The election was oddly flat, even after Biden’s dramatic withdrawal from the race and his endorsement of Harris, which quickly ended talk of a more open competition. Connecticut’s seven electoral votes never were in play, and most urban legislators either were unopposed or faced only token opponents.

“You felt it on Election Day. There was no buzz,” said Vinnie Mauro Jr., the Democratic chairman of New Haven. Of the Harris campaign, he said “The only people they had on the ground here were the people recruited to go someplace else.”

The party ran buses every weekend in October to Pennsylvania, where U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy campaigned, even though he was on the ballot for an easy reelection to a third term in Connecticut.

“I kept asking the question, why does it just not feel like anything’s happening?” Winfield said. His seat was safe, but he still campaigned door to door, finding a malaise in voters who complained of feeling a distance from their party. 

“This party, in Connecticut, at least, has for a very long time not really spoken to its voters,” he said.

Winfield is one of the progressive Democrats who say the Lamont administration’s focus on righting the fiscal ship and preserving a volatility cap that limits how surplus funds can be spent does not resonate in cities where the needs are great and social services often are delivered by non-profits scratching for greater reimbursement from the state.

Lamont defends his administration’s spending on the cities, especially on house. And he resists the notion that the drop in urban turnout was attributable to an inadequate ground game to get-out-the-vote.

“I think something else is going on,” Lamont said. “I think there’s some folks who have given up, some folks who say, ‘Maybe it doesn’t make a difference. I’ve got something else to do today.’ And maybe that’s a reflection on the candidates, but it’s true all over the country as well. Maybe there’s a certain other malaise that’s happening. You know, people are less likely to be joiners than they were a generation ago, and you see that reflected in voting as well.”

But he agrees that the cities, whose influence at Democratic nominating conventions is pegged to turnout, should be concerned.

“The cities still have a lot of clout up there in the Capitol, but the suburbs have the votes, so you may see a shift,” Lamont said. “If I was an urban legislator, I’d take special pride in getting out the vote to make sure that their voice is heard as loudly tomorrow as it is today.”