The Entrails Of The Bridgeport Haters Club Blown Wide Open – Gen Now’s ‘Year Of Change’ Foiled

A number of haters woke up Wednesday morning with a serious hangover and it wasn’t from adequate fluid ounces.

The angry acolytes had persuaded themselves that change, no matter the consequences against the electorate, fashioned their myopic narrative for a new mayor. They were foiled by a majority of Bridgeport voters who saw it differently four times capped by Mayor Joe Ganim’s convincing win across the city on Tuesday, flummoxing the post mortem of their candidate John Gomes.

They blame the larger electorate instead of examining their obvious failures that boomeranged against their mission to control City Hall.

The napalm, scorched-earth, knee-capping, preaching-to-choir harangue failed to bridge a larger voter gene pool to elevate their candidate. This entire mayoral cycle was much more about silo hatred for Joe Ganim than affinity for Gomes. He was simply an aimless vessel to dance on Ganim’s political grave. Something happened on the way to the funeral.

Often times in campaigns when you start wrong, you end wrong, no matter the multiple bites of the apple.

The longer this cycle went on the more the emergence of a flawed candidate and flawed campaign. Fact: Mayor Bill Finch fired Gomes from his city position. Fact: Gomes ran for mayor. Fact: Ganim fired Gomes. Fact: Gomes ran for mayor. A vendetta narrative came into focus.

Several other former administration officials that Ganim fired or parted ways with jumped on the Gomes train, an engine roaring with hypocrisy from conductor to the caboose with the audacity to frame themselves as reformers. They did well to harness money to make Gomes relevant against an incumbent challenged by a built-in anti vote. Collectively they all pontificated on the past while most voters think about the future.

Enormous amounts of money and time was spent fanning the flames of Ganim’s past as a way to satisfy their vitriol. They actually negotiated against themselves, as a result. They already had the immovable anti-Ganim voters who crossed the Rubicon over Ganim’s past long ago.

This misplaced strategy created some strange political bedfellows that led to serious bedwetting Tuesday night.

Case in point the privileged arrogance of the conflicted community Group Bridgeport Generation Now Votes that has spent mountain ranges of money trying to buy City Hall and has come up empty every time, lancing themselves on their own hypocrisy.

Leaders of the organization Callie Heilmann and Gemeem Davis gravitate to mayoral candidates they believe they can control. In 2019 it was State Senator Marilyn Moore. That failed because while it was there for the taking Moore’s messaging was awful. No new or original ideas.

They tried with Moore again this time around, poising $200,000 of Big Daddy’s money, that be successful entrepreneur Nils Heilmann, treasurer of the organization, mailing 20,000 absentee ballot applications to Democrats anticipating they could leverage mail-in votes for Moore while talking from the other side of their mouths about absentee shenanigans. Again, something happened on the way to the victory party. Instead of going about the priority of a strategy to help Moore make the ballot, they engaged in a dubious relationship with Moore that raised serious questions about campaign coordination against state law. When raised by OIB, Moore maintained public distance from them.

Moore’s campaign was disorganized. She failed to petition onto the mayoral primary ballot. Heilmann and Davis expected the CT Working Families Party to provide a general election lifeline. Party leaders passed. Heilmann and Davis sanctimoniously berated WFP for the transgression, irrespective of them creating their candidate problem.

Instead of pivoting to a mayoral candidate such as Lamond Daniels who better fits the profile of a “reformer” they passed because they could not control him, so eventually settled on Gomes who had money problems. Once again campaign coordination became an issue: frequenting Gomes events, donating to his campaign and Davis hopping into Gomes’ car parked illegally next to a Downtown hydrant. Oh, yes, they discussed sugar plum fairy tales, not campaign strategy. State law prohibits political entities such as Gen Now Votes from coordinating expenditure with the benefiting candidate.

Now let’s get back to Gomes and the rest of Bridgeport Haters Club led by a number of entitled, privileged Ivy League educated know-it-alls, many of them living in the Black Rock waterfront hamlet. Instead of pumping up Gomes, they carpet-bombed Ganim’s past on social media.

Gomes caught a break in last September’s Democratic primary. A supporter working in the police department monitoring designated drop boxes for absentee ballots leaked to Gomes surveillance footage showing Ganim supporters depositing ballots. Gomes supporters did it too but since he lost the tight primary he went into court, a judge ruled that the mishandling of ballots warranted another primary.

Gomes had the wind at his behind. The haters spent most of their time, however, on the drum beat of the so-called ballot scandal, isolating that one issue, rather than complementary narrative of what a Gomes administration would look like. Gomes had a pretty good story to tell, an immigrant from Cape Verde who speaks five languages, his children products of city schools. He had difficulty connecting with voters outside the built-in Ganim anti-vote. Most of what he kicked out was boorish boiler plate prattle.

Ganim was poised to be taken out in the first general election. Timing is everything in politics. Timing, timing, timing. Gomes came up short again.

The extended mayoral cycle provided Ganim with time to retool his message and community outreached. He got his stuff together with a doer-versus-divider contrast and tireless retail campaigning. The Gomes campaign turned Ganim operatives into the punching-bag poster child of the absentee ballot imbroglio when Gomes people did it too. Many Ganim supporters took to the streets on a mission to turn out a vote.

Ganim won the January primary redo handily.

The haters continued the one-dimensional campaigning including Gen Now Votes fanning every Ganim indiscretion big and small the past 25 years. Hatred clouded pragmatic strategy. They wasted money preaching to the choir. They already had those people. There was no effort to frame Gomes as a worthy change agent. Change for what?

The haters will blame the voters not their flaccid, misplaced narrative. It’s what they do.

But on Tuesday, by their own doing, their entrails were blown wide open. So much for “the year of change.”