by Paul Bass The New Haven independent
Eighteen-term incumbent New Haven U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro is the latest prominent Democrat to face a prospective primary challenge from a first-time candidate promising generational change.
Thomas Breen file photo DeLauro: Seeking 19th two-year term.
Damjan DeNoble, a 40-year-old immigration, labor and civil rights attorney whose office sits across the street from DeLauro’s in downtown New Haven, filed paperwork Wednesday with the Federal Elections Commission to stage that challenge.
He’s looking to primary one of the nation’s leading Democratic lawmakers, the ranking member and former chair of the House Appropriations Committee. The election will take place next year.
DeLauro, who’s 82, won her first Congressional race in a squeaker in 1990. Since then she’s been unbeatable. Two Democrats publicly launched prospective primary campaigns against her, Michael Lawlor in 1990 and Bryan Anderson in 2017; given DeLauro’s deep support among activists and local elected officials, they didn’t make it to the ballot.
In an interview Wednesday, DeNoble did not criticize DeLauro or cite policy differences. Instead he argued that the time is right to take on long-serving incumbents because of the challenges facing a fast-changing world.
“She has done a very good job for us. She is not the candidate that we need for the next 15 – 30 years of changes and fights we have ahead,” he said. “I’m running against Rosa DeLauro because it’s time for generational change. The problems we currently we have as a country will not take a short time to solve. For that we need new leaders.”
He cited the threat to jobs posed by artificial intelligence: “How do you solve the problem of employment when you’re looking at the double barrel of having fewer jobs due to artificial intelligence and offshoring, and looking at the possibilities of having no jobs? What are the laws and policies that keep our country stable?” He spoke of supporting “human-only job” laws.
“There’s no reason that we should sit around say, ‘Let AI take all our jobs.’ As my tort teacher said, ‘It’s our job to stop the ball from snowballing.’ ”
Asked for a comment about DeNoble’s candidacy, DeLauro reelection Campaign Manager Christopher Carroll stated, “Rosa intends to run for re-election and welcomes anyone that wants to run for the seat.”
Gen Z and Millennial activists nationwide have been discussing challenges to older incumbent Democrats even before last month’s surprise New York City Democratic primary victory by 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani inspired another wave of potential candidacies. Also this week State Rep. Joshua Elliott took the first steps to challenging incumbent Gov. Ned Lamont next year in a Democratic primary.
David Hogg, the 25-year-old Parkland school massacre survivor and gun-control activist, recently resigned from his post as Democratic National Committee vice-chair to focus exclusively on supporting these generational challenges. He did, in this Slate interview, exempt DeLauro as one of the senior-citizen lawmakers whom he would not support a challenge against, due to her progressive record. DeLauro has taken a leading role in speaking out against Trump administration policies. Click here and here for recent stories about that. Denoble, who lives in Guilford, declined to put an ideological label on his politics or to position himself to the left or right of DeLauro. He spoke instead of tackling issues within new frameworks. (“I’m not a democratic socialist,” he replied when asked about the Mamdani comparison.)
Click here to read a previous interview with Denoble about his work on immigration cases in the wake of Trump I and Trump II administration threats. You can watch the interview, on WNHH FM, in the below video.