She’s Not Unbeatable

In January 2026 I launched an effort to do something that nobody in Connecticut’s Third Congressional District has done in a very long time — actually test whether voters want a competitive Democratic primary. People have assumed the answer for decades (I lost count of the number of times someone told me Rosa DeLauro was unbeatable), talked about it over drinks, and complained about it on social media, but nobody had gone out and measured it with real outreach to real voters across the entire district.

Our campaign understood from the start that the Connecticut primary system is the most restrictive in the country. Pioneering advocacy by Alex Taubes, along with a little-known but important primary challenge campaign by Muad Hrezi against John Larson in 2022, had put some disturbing facts into the public sphere — the most shocking being that there has never, in the entire history of Connecticut, been an actual primary race involving an incumbent and a challenger. People assume there has been, because they hear of people like me “declaring” a candidacy via an FEC filing. But declaring a candidacy and getting on the ballot are two very different things, and no one has ever successfully gotten on the ballot against a sitting U.S. House incumbent. Only one challenger in the state’s history — Ned Lamont in 2006 against Joe Lieberman for the Senate — has ever made the ballot in any Congressional race at all.

The reasons come down to the fact that until 2003 Connecticut was exclusively a convention nomination state, which assured no one would ever challenge a sitting Congressperson, since the Congressional reps themselves controlled the convention delegates. That system continues to this day, but a 2003 Supreme Court case opened the door to candidates getting on the ballot via petition. The state legislature “complied” with this order by implementing the most unnecessarily restrictive ballot access petition process in the entire country. Each petition page of twenty (20) signatures requires four (4) separate signatures to certify the sheet, meaning that to collect one (1) voter signature, the petition circulator must actually collect five (5) signatures, four (4) of which are from registrars and notaries. And unlike other states, where it is common to get six months to collect petition signatures, in Connecticut we only get forty-two (42) days, and can only start collecting three months before the primary. Every step of this is designed to put the challenger at a massive disadvantage. Even if you somehow clear the medieval number of hurdles and make the ballot, you’d only get two months to campaign.

It is this impossible-to-clear bar that has made people think politicians like Rosa DeLauro are “unbeatable,” when the truth is that they are actually “unreachable” — protected by a system that turns elected officials into virtual fiefdoms, surrounded by a moat that shields them from actual democracy.

I declared for the campaign in July 2025, and it took me about five months to learn most of what I just told you. Walking into captured Democratic Town Committees was like walking into a closed shop. They did not want to acknowledge me, let alone talk about a challenge to Rosa. They were her people, through and through — not, as one might assume, people interested in forwarding democracy, even at a time when democracy has been shown to be heavily under attack by autocratic forces.

By December I realized that no one actually had a good reason for why Rosa was “unbeatable” apart from inertia and collective memory. No one could — ironically, given everything I just described — remember her ever “losing” a race.

Well, you may not be surprised to learn that a politician who keeps getting elected despite never having to go through an actual election is not as popular as she assures us she is.

Why This Matters Now

But this is not just about process. The structural problem — the absence of any competitive primary — has a real policy consequence, and that consequence has never been more visible than it is right now.

Rosa DeLauro has served in Congress for thirty-six years. Her identity in Washington is built around the House Appropriations Committee, where she has spent decades negotiating line items, adjusting budgets at the margins, and working across the aisle to secure funding. That work made a kind of sense in a prior era. It does not make sense now.

We are living through a period in which the federal government has been captured by an authoritarian movement. ICE is conducting raids in Connecticut communities. Federal agencies are being dismantled or weaponized. The Republican Party is not negotiating in good faith — it is consolidating power and punishing dissent. And yet DeLauro continues to operate as though the system she built her career in still functions the way it used to. She treats her Appropriations seat as though her job is to find common ground with people who are actively undermining the republic.

Her constituents do not want the budget adjusted at the edges. They want ICE out of their neighborhoods. They want someone who recognizes that the country has fundamentally changed under this presidency and that the old playbook — committee hearings, bipartisan amendments, appropriations markups — is not a strategy. It is a form of denial.

This is not a personal attack on Rosa DeLauro. It is a recognition that she is out of step with the people she represents — not on temperament, not on party affiliation, but on the basic question of what this political moment demands. CT-03 needs a representative who understands that you do not negotiate with a house fire. You fight it.

What We Found

I needed a way to prove that voters felt the same way. Working with some very bright data engineers and election specialists, we came up with an experiment that would give us the data we needed.

In January 2026, I sent text messages to 66,000 registered Democrats across CT-03. Among everyone who engaged and expressed an opinion — yes, maybe, or no — over 80% said yes, they want a primary. Yes responses outnumbered no responses by more than fifteen to one. To put that plainly: for every one person who did not want to support a primary against Rosa DeLauro, fifteen people did.

Perhaps even more telling, twenty-two zipcode clusters across the district came back with strong majority support, including New Haven, where support topped 80%. The demand for a primary wasn’t concentrated in one neighborhood or one demographic — it was geographically distributed, diverse, and statistically meaningful.

This is not a soft signal or an ambiguous result. It is a loud, clear indication that CT-03 is a district full of people who have been waiting for someone to primary Rosa DeLauro.

What was particularly instructive during the texting campaign was how many people were confused by the fact that we’d never had a primary. Surely, they’d say, this cannot be true — they had assumed Rosa always ran in a primary. We showed them the data: Rosa had never had a primary challenger make the ballot, and every “scheduled” primary had always been cancelled. For many people this was eye-opening, and this educational dimension of our campaign is something I am genuinely proud of.

But the conversions from texters to pledges are where we really hit the ground running. Seven hundred and eighty-five people responded yes through our SMS campaign alone, and another 356 have since pledged their signatures through our online platform — bringing us to 1,141 total pledges. Over one hundred and thirty volunteers stepped forward since mid-January — graphic designers, software developers, bilingual canvassers, educators, people from New Haven to Stratford to Milford and everywhere in between, offering real skills and real time, not just moral support. Beyond that, twenty-nine people filled out a policy questionnaire, in their own words, about what they actually care about: housing, immigration, affordability, democratic accountability.

What we did, in a few short months, was demonstrate that the premise underlying thirty-six years of unchallenged incumbency — that voters don’t want a choice — is simply wrong. The absence of competition in CT-03 has never been a verdict on DeLauro. It has been a product of a system designed to make competition impossible.

What Comes Next

Now, I have to be honest about where things stand for me personally. I am a working professional and the father of three young children, including a seven-month-old. January was a hard month. Illness ran through the house, my wife and I were stretched thin, and the reality of what it takes to run a petition-driven campaign against a thirty-six-year incumbent — without institutional backing, without party support, without any of the infrastructure that incumbents take for granted — became very clear.

I also have to be honest about something else: I never wanted to be a Congressional representative. I am good at organizing people, suing government organizations, and bringing justice to individuals hurt by the intended or unintended effects of a politicized immigration system. Running for office was not the goal. Building the infrastructure to make a primary possible — that was always the goal. And that is exactly what we did.

Being the candidate in 2026 requires a sustained level of time and energy that I cannot responsibly give right now, not without shortchanging my family. But this campaign was never supposed to begin and end with me. If the lesson of CT-03 is that the system protects incumbents by making challenges structurally impossible, then the solution cannot depend on any single challenger. It has to be structural too.

Which brings me to what comes next.

Today I’m announcing  CT2028 — a two-year initiative to build a verified, organized base of district residents who are ready and willing to sign a primary petition in 2028.

Here is how it will work:

• The target is 4,500 verified pledge signatures — well above the legal threshold for ballot access — from real voters, organized by geography and ready to deploy. Not expressions of interest. Not likes on a post. Real signatures from real people.
• I will continue to lead the project personally, with support from our existing volunteer network and partner organizations. My stepping back as a candidate does not mean stepping away from this work — it means focusing on the part of this work I am best at: organizing.
• Involve partner organizations — including, hopefully, other organized groups, like local Indivisible chapters, the New Haven Voting Project, 50501, and the Yankee National Party — will help us maintain and expand the geographic and demographic reach we built during this campaign.
• Candidate recruitment begins now. Over the next two years, we will actively identify and recruit the strongest possible candidate for 2028 — someone who can commit fully to the race and who reflects the values and urgency that CT-03 voters have already told us they want.
• Quarterly progress updates will be shared publicly so that every volunteer, every pledge signer, and every partner organization can see exactly where we stand.

We are starting from a position of strength. With 1,141 pledges already collected in two months, we are roughly a quarter of the way to our goal. In two years, with sustained organizing, we will be in a position where a viable candidate can enter the race with the necessary signatures already in hand, a tested outreach model, and a community that has already said yes.

Why This Is Not a Defeat

I want to be direct about this, because I know how it looks. A candidate stepping back can feel like a concession. But consider what this campaign actually accomplished:

We proved — empirically, with data, not with anecdotes or wishful thinking — that the demand for a primary is real and that it exists across this district. We built a volunteer network of over 130 people with real, deployable skills. We collected over a thousand verified pledges. We educated thousands of voters about a ballot access system that most of them did not know existed. And we did all of it in, more or less, two months, with no institutional support, no party backing, and no precedent to follow. (Again, I declared in July 2025, but between July and the end of November all I was really doing is learning how to get a campaign off the ground. The substantive work happened during the two month period of December and January).

What this campaign also proved is that a single person, no matter how determined, cannot dismantle decades of incumbent protection in one cycle. We didn’t get into this mess overnight, and we’re not getting out of it overnight either. The honest response to that reality is not to pretend otherwise — it is to build the infrastructure that makes the next challenge succeed.

Democracy shouldn’t depend on whether one particular person decides to run. It should depend on whether voters have a choice. And in 2028, the voters of Connecticut’s Third Congressional District will have one.

To everyone who responded to a text from a stranger and chose to engage — thank you. To the volunteers who offered their time and their skills, often without being asked twice — thank you. None of it was wasted. It was the beginning. I hope that all of you will come with me to the next phase of this journer.

And to Rosa DeLauro: the country has changed, and your district knows it. In 2028, the infrastructure will already be in place to offer you your first primary challenge since 1989.