Mayor Ben Florsheim ’14 won reelection on Tuesday, Nov. 7 in a decisive victory over Republican challenger Mike Marino, a Middletown councilman and former police officer. Florsheim, a Wesleyan graduate who was elected as the town’s youngest ever mayor in 2019, will begin his second term on Jan. 1. In an interview with The Argus that occurred shortly after his reelection, he touted first-term accomplishments, discussed his time at Wesleyan, and described his vision for Middletown’s future.
The Argus: How are you feeling after your reelection on Tuesday?
Ben Florsheim: It’s still sort of settling in. The experience of running as an incumbent was very, very different from running as a first-timer, but the benefit there is that you have the experience. We have a pretty solid record that we were able to run on and got a lot of good feedback about that. The challenge was having to campaign for the job and also do the job on a day-to-day basis. So that’s part of why it’s almost not totally sunk in.
I feel very gratified by the response that we got from the voters, and I’m glad that we’ve got a lot of folks returning to the city council who have been great partners, along with a couple of new people. We’ve got a lot of new people coming onto the Board of Education, which is very exciting. We have started some really important projects that I want to try to see through. And I think people feel good about that direction. So I’m just very happy not to have to think about campaigning for three years. I feel good.
A: Do you have a first project you want to begin after your re-election?
BF: So many balls are still in the air that don’t land when Election Day happens. Since I came back on Wednesday, there was still the same pile of stuff on my desk. We have an event coming up on Monday that is going to allow us to kick off in a positive way about the mental health challenges and other challenges that young people have experienced as a result of the pandemic.
Like other municipalities, we got substantial federal funding during the pandemic, mostly through the American Rescue Plan. We put together a committee of folks, including myself and people in the city council, to decide how those federal dollars would be spent. I’m excited about all the things that we’re launching after the funding has been allocated.
We [are going to] try to get a real sense of where the need is and then try to respond in a coordinated way. With this generation that has come out of the pandemic, [we have to make sure that] we’re orienting ourselves to respond appropriately. I was [first] elected in 2019. [The pandemic] has defined the whole first four years and will define the next four years in a lot of ways. But hopefully, for better reasons than not.
A: When you were elected, you were the youngest mayor in Middletown history. And as we’re a Wesleyan paper, we can’t ignore that you went to Wesleyan. Can you tell us a bit about how Wesleyan shaped you? How your major in the College of Social Studies [CSS] shaped you?
BF: I came here to Middletown as a Wesleyan student. I moved right after high school halfway across the country and didn’t have sort of a sense of place or home. That was when I was starting to get interested in politics and government. CSS gives you a unique schedule, so sophomore year was very, very busy, and I was starting to get involved in political stuff at that time as well and wanted to continue working on campaigns. Since there’s only one semester where you can study abroad in CSS, I wound up not doing that even though I was drawn to it. I had a work opportunity and a campaign opportunity that I wanted to pursue here.
With my experience at Wesleyan, I feel like there were these parallel tracks of being on campus and being off campus—off campus being in Middletown and working on campaigns. And that was largely informed by these classroom experiences and experiences of being a young adult. I’m really excited that there’s a lot more Wesleyan students who are interested in this kind of thing.
A: As a young leader, did you feel like a part of the national movement started by other elects like [U.S. Representative from New York] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
BF: Yes and no. I made the decision to run shortly after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected. I followed that primary reasonably closely. I was also following it at a time when I was working for [U.S. Senator from Connecticut] Chris Murphy, which is what I did from when I left Wesleyan up until getting elected to this job. I was feeling very dispirited about politics, having spent a lot of time working my way up in that field, and thinking about what I might want to do next, whether that would still be in government.
Shortly after I was elected, I met with the Republican mayor of New Britain [Erin Stewart], who had been elected when she was in her 20s. I spent some time talking about that commonality and what it means to be, especially in the executive role, a young person working with people who are, in some cases, twice your age. That’s been challenging at times.
But to your question: Voters of all ages are very happy to see young people stepping forward and running for office. It’s largely because there is this sense that it’s time for a new generation of leadership. I feel like it has been happening in the state house and state legislatures. We’ve had a bunch of people younger than me who ran for office this year, including council positions and Board of Ed. positions. It hasn’t quite translated up to the federal level.
A: How do you feel about the relationship between the University and the town? How would you like to collaborate with [the University] in the future?
BF: I always say that I think it’s good and it could always be better. There’s a lot of change happening on campus with the construction and the investments that they’ve made. It’s starting to look a little bit different than it did when I was there. My hope is—and I think that this is a shared hope that the administration has as well—we can find a couple of big things to work together on in the next few years.
The really great things about the Middletown-Wesleyan relationship are the Wesleyan students who are helping out at Oddfellows [Playhouse] or who are tutoring in Middletown public schools or who are getting involved in political campaigns. There’s a lot of student interest in doing that kind of thing. And frankly, [there are] a lot of benefits that the city and the community get from having not just students, but also faculty and the other folks who are part of the Wesleyan community.
A: For small businesses specifically, what kind of mechanism do you see being effective to draw students to them? And just to Main Street in general?
BF: The big thing that we need to do is just make sure that Main Street is as accessible and pedestrian-friendly as [it can be] and [we] make it easy to park and get down here. We’ve got River Valley Transit, we have the ride service that I know Wesleyan students have been taking advantage of, which is great. I think a lot of our businesses try to market to the student population and accept [Middletown Cash]. I think that what they’re [also] finding is that, while Wesleyan students have an outsized impact on the community, it’s still a relatively small population compared to the rest of the city and its surrounding areas. I think that by catering to the Wesleyan audience, [Middletown businesses] are drawing in an even bigger audience of younger people in general, people who like the college town feel and who like being in places that are vibrant.
A: Pivoting to more policy-related questions: Earlier, you had mentioned just a little bit about bipartisanship, working with a Republican mayor. I read online that you’re also a member of the Working Families Party. Can you tell us a little about that? What does that mean to you, and what does it feel like to be in both parties?
BF: The two work together very closely, at least in Middletown. The Working Families Party played a huge role in my primary campaign earlier this year against a more conservative Democrat, who had been a Republican recently, and they recognized what that threat represented. They were instrumental in making sure that we were very successful in that race.
It’s an interesting balance, because being a mayor and being in an executive role is very different from being a state legislator, which has a more advocacy-oriented approach. I think that we have had to be creative in looking for ways to bring these policies into municipal government. With a lot of things, we were already doing them right, like with the pension system and the way that we provide for employees here. We’re not going to be coming after healthcare; we want people to be able to work here and do well. And that’s been a pretty successful approach. Part of that is informed by my values, but it’s also informed by getting to work with folks who are doing this stuff on more of an advocacy level, and on a more day-to-day basis with the labor movement and with the legislature.
It’s been a great partnership. We’re fortunate in Middletown to have them as an ally, and I think that they are happy to have legislators and other elected people from Middletown who are big champions for them. It’s a nice symbiotic relationship.
A: Your campaign was endorsed by the AFL-CIO [American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations] and other major unions. What do unions mean to you? Wesleyan just had its undergraduate student union voluntarily recognized, and you were the president of [Wesleyan Democrats]. Was there anything union-related during [your time at Wes]?
BF: There wasn’t, really. USLAC [United Student Labor Action Coalition] was there, but I remember over the past few years, when I was working for Murphy, starting to see a lot of organizing activity on college campuses in the state and being kind of surprised that there wasn’t as much happening at Wesleyan. What I learned is that there was stuff happening; it was just happening very quietly, and there were a lot of people working very hard on that organizing campaign for the undergrad workers and [Residential Life] employees. I went to a rally last year with [Connecticut State Senator Matt] Lesser, hoping to put some pressure on the administration to sit down with the students and negotiate a contract. I think that Wesleyan has had a mixed legacy and record on labor matters.
But it was at Wesleyan, in classes I took with [Associate Professor of Economics] Wendy Rayack and [former Visiting Assistant Professor of Government] Brian Glenn, that I learned about the history of the welfare state and the political economy of the United States. It became very clear to me that union employment was the way that you get from not having economic opportunity to being able to have it. I was somebody who came from a very comfortable background and did not have to take out loans for college, and I remember, very viscerally, sitting in the classroom and thinking that there was something very wrong with this picture where a lot—not all, but a lot—of very wealthy young people were on this campus learning about policies about [the increasing lack of social mobility].
The political climate at the time was very anti-union and anti-labor. And on the public sector side, there were big demonstrations in Wisconsin when they revoked collective bargaining rights for public employees. The thing that was very clear to me is that this is something that needs to be protected and fought for and expanded if we are going to correct the huge problem of income inequality and wealth inequality. And I think the best way to build solidarity between people of different races, people that have different life experiences, and even people of different class backgrounds is to have that common interest. And I think that it makes me more effective in this role. I got into politics to try to make a positive difference. So that’s part of why I’m drawn to municipal government, because that’s where many of those career paths exist, and it’s why I’ve tried to stay involved with labor stuff as I’ve been in office.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Carolyn Neugarten can be reached at cneugarten@wesleyan.edu.
Miles Pinsof-Berlowitz can be reached at mpinsofberlo@wesleyan.edu.