At 22, Elizabeth Weisholtz ’04 was among the youngest candidates for Connecticut state representative in the November election. Even more unusual is the fact that she never aimed to win.
Weisholtz’s campaign in Middletown’s 33rd district was part of a larger initiative by the Working Families Party to establish influence among the electorate. The party, which ran some 50 candidates in races statewide, had a goal of getting at least one percent of the vote in each race. That would ensure that in future elections, the party would be allowed to officially endorse major-party candidates.
Weisholtz did just that by garnering three percent of the vote in her district.
According to Weisholtz, the party attempts to stay away from social issues.
“We want to bring working-class people of [all] backgrounds and cultures together to fight for greater economic equality,” Weisholtz said.
The Working Families Party was founded in 1998 by a coalition of unions and community organizations. Weisholtz said that the party’s target constituency is working-class people who feel alienated from both Democrats and Republicans.
The party’s key issues include raising the minimum wage, protecting workers’ rights to organize, providing universal health care and reforming the Connecticut tax system.
Currently, the party only exists in New York and Connecticut because these are the only states that allow for cross-endorsement of candidates. This process allows a Democrat or Republican candidate to run on both his or her own party’s ticket as well as the Working Families Party’s, provided that she or he earns the party’s endorsement.
According to Weisholtz, cross-endorsement has the potential to both benefit the candidate who has won the party’s endorsement, and to increase the influence of the Working Families Party itself.
“If the candidate we endorse wins by a margin smaller than what we brought in, this gives the Working Families a powerful voice and makes it more likely that a candidate will be good on our issues to gain support,” Weisholtz said.
She emphasized, however, that the party made choices to run candidates only in races where the competition between the two mainstream parties was not likely to result in an even split.
“We’re only running our ‘one percent’ campaigns in races that aren’t close because we don’t want to be spoilers,” Weisholtz said in an e-mail distributed on several campus listservs.
Weisholtz, who was involved in political activism and community service at Wesleyan, was inspired to run for state representative while working as a summer intern with the Working Families Party. All of the interns worked hard to get each candidate’s name on a ballot.
“That consisted of many hours outside Stop-and-Shops all over Connecticut,” Weisholtz said. “We had some pretty rough days.”
For her own race, Weisholtz used a more diverse range of campaign tactics, including door-to-door soliciting, outreach to the Wesleyan community, speaking at a candidates’ forum on adult education, and appearing in the Hartford Courant.
That last experience was a valuable one for Weisholtz.
“I learned that I don’t feel comfortable speaking to journalists of the mainstream press because I felt manipulated,” Weisholtz said.
On the whole, Weisholtz was impressed with the support of the community at large.
“A man in my apartment building who got a flier I left under his door called to tell me that he was a gay union activist and that I had his vote,” Weisholtz said. “That was pretty awesome.”
In particular, Weisholtz credits her success to the Wesleyan community.
“I ended up getting about three percent of the votes and I’m sure that is because of the support and work of Wesleyan students,” Weisholtz said.
In general, the Party’s efforts were successful; nearly every candidate received at least one percent of the vote.
“It put things in perspective and made me glad that I was part of it,” Weisholtz said.
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