Gen Now Votes ‘Year Of Change’ Flops – How They Wasted $100K Of Big Daddy’s Money

The deeper the community group Bridgeport Generation Now Votes burrowed into the mayoral election to work against Mayor Joe Ganim, the better the mayor performed.

In total, disorganizers Callie Heilmann and Gemeem Davis spent roughly $100,000 of personal funds Gen Now Votes treasurer Niels (Big Daddy) Heilmann invested in the mayoral cycle, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Town Clerk’s Office.

Gen Now’s promised “Year Of Change” died the gooey death in its hostile independent-expenditure devotion to take out Ganim

See Gen Now Finance Report

$12,426 was spent on a mailer for losing mayoral candidate John Gomes produced by the Los Angeles based consulting firm We Are Rally; $11,425 spent on an advocacy group The Connecticut Project, another $12,000 for mailers; thousands more on wages for election workers, door knockers, poll standers, printing.

Niels Heilmann built his financial success as the founder and portfolio manager of Elion Investments, an investment firm at Millennium Partners. Husband-wife team Niels and Callie Heilmann reside in Black Rock.

In recent years Callie Heilmann and Gemeem Davis have leveraged money to influence elections. State and federal law allows organizations such as Gen Now Votes to spend unlimited amounts of money in the cause to elect or defeat a candidate but that money cannot be coordinated with the benefitting candidate.

This was an embarrassing mayoral cycle for Heilmann and Davis. They had backed State Senator Marilyn Moore for mayor, endorsing her with the candidate present in which thousands of dollars were spent, an appearance of illegal coordination, as reported by OIB, that Moore privately lamented to her contacts. Some separation was created but along the way disorganization set in and Moore failed to signature her way onto the Democratic primary ballot.

The Gen Now crew pivoted to John Gomes as their trojan horse to take out Ganim. The vast majority of their rhetoric against Ganim was an inflammatory stridency of his past. They wasted money preaching to the choir: Gomes already had those fixed voters. There was no effort to build support among voters focused on the future.

After Ganim won the second primary handily, Gomes, defeated and broke, stubbornly pressed on with the second general election, costing taxpayers about $125,000 to finance the election apparatus. Out of campaign cash, Gomes relied heavily on Davis and Heilmann’s funds.

The reliance was so high that Davis was even seen jumping into Gomes’ car for a powwow parked illegally by a fire hydrant Downtown, creating another appearance of coordination impropriety. They certainly weren’t discussing the coming solar eclipse.

For the February special general election, Ganim’s campaign and messaging clicked with majority voters while Gomes, Davis, Heilmann imploded under the weight of disorganization and hostile messaging.

Ganim crushed Gomes by 20 points impaling “The Year Of Change.”