The Underestimated Alliance That Could Beat Back Trumpism
State and local races matter, too. Sarah Ganong, the WFP’s Connecticut state director, was part of a similarly successful effort to flip a number of state legislative seats in Connecticut from red to blue in 2024, even as the Democratic Party was losing support throughout the country and Trump was gaining ground in Connecticut. Despite these headwinds, public school teacher Nick Menapace beat Holly Cheeseman, a high-ranking, fiscally conservative Republican, labor activist Nick Gauthier defeated a four-term Republican incumbent, MJ Shannon won a Republican seat in West Haven, and Kaitlyn Shake, a registered nurse, flipped a seat in Fairfield County. Another nurse, Rebecca Martinez, flipped a seat in Plainville and Kenneth Gucker flipped one in Danbury. By running on improving local schools and reining in healthcare costs, Martinez won in a district that voted to send Trump back to Washington.
Several of these candidates had experience campaigning, having run and lost in previous cycles. It also helped that Connecticut has the most unionized public sector in the country and the WFP backed mostly working-class candidates—teachers, nurses, union organizers, and small business owners, as opposed to what Ganong called the “upper-middle-class white lawyer men” who typically run for office in the state. The candidates who flipped GOP seats in the last cycle, she said, have strong ties to the communities they ran in and/or are union members themselves, making it “easier for labor to jump on board and be supportive and for folks to recruit members to be volunteers and to vote for them.” While knocking on doors for Shake, Ganong met a Republican woman who turned out to be a colleague of the candidate’s. She knew Shake as a leader in their union and was “excited to vote for her because of that,” Ganong said.
How did pro-immigrant labor and progressive groups address immigration and crime without alienating the people they hoped to represent? WFP encourages candidates “not to shy away from their beliefs,” said Ganong. “Somebody might be incredibly anti-immigrant and also incredibly supportive of their local public schools,” she added, and “people respect politicians who actually say what they believe.”
