Lights. Camera. Canvass!

by Ariela Lopez

Bermúdez records a video pitch in front of a Ring camera in the Heights.

State Rep. Steve Winter, with one of Al P’s campaign potholders, a reelection-season mainstay of soon-to-retire Marty Looney.

Wildaliz Bermúdez clutched her campaign mailer in her right hand and stared straight into the camera.

“I’m running for state rep,” she shouted. “I’m here to get the word out about the upcoming election. Line A — all the Democrats,” she added, holding the mailer up and gesturing at a sample ballot printed on it.

Bermúdez, the Democratic nominee for Connecticut’s 97th General Assembly District, wasn’t making a campaign video. With two days to go until Election Day, she was spending her Sunday morning canvassing residents near Peat Meadow Park in the Annex.

When knocking several times and ringing the doorbell prompted no response, Bermúdez turned to the house’s Ring camera to make her pitch.

“In my previous elections I didn’t encounter so many Ring cams, but now they’re everywhere,” Bermúdez, who served on the Hartford City Council from 2016 to 2021, said. “Sometimes you might just be speaking to the wind, but sometimes they are recording, so you just never know.”

It was a busy day for Bermúdez, the only New Haven Democrat running for a state legislature seat against a Republican opponent this cycle. Although Democrats far outnumber Republicans in her district, which includes parts of the city’s eastern neighborhoods of Fair Haven, Fair Haven Heights, the Annex, Morris Cove and Quinnipiac Meadows, the rare general election contest brought dozens of New Haven’s political regulars to a rally for Bermúdez’s campaign in Fair Haven’s Quinnipiac River Park Sunday morning.

There, attendees snacked on donuts and coffee and listened to elected officials make the case for caring about New Haven’s not-so-competitive 2026 ballot. Mayor Justin Elicker encouraged people to “practice voting.” U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal — who Bermúdez said she met while coordinating Hurricane Maria relief efforts in Hartford — urged Democrats to make their margin of victory “too big to rig.” Retiring State Sen. and President Pro Tem Martin Looney said Democrats ought to win by “landslides” everywhere to give the impression of an “irrefutable” wave.

Bermúdez is running against Republican Anthony Acri for the seat now held by State Rep. Al Paolillo, Jr. Paolillo, whose lawn signs and branded potholders were on display at the park, chose not to seek re-election and instead to run for Looney’s overlapping state senate seat. Bermúdez, who works as the executive director of the city’s Fair Rent Commission, beat Leland Moore, the Morris Cove alder backed by much of the city’s Democratic establishment, in the August Democratic primary.

Hopkins student Gitanjali Navaratnam-Tomayko, 17, described to the crowd her experience volunteering for Bermúdez’s campaign.

“Wildaliz has taken it upon herself to teach me throughout the campaign,” she said. To voters, Bermúdez “lends a listening ear and has genuine compassion to concerns such as mold in schools, public park funding, and inequalities that local institutions create within our communities.”

When attendees dispersed around 11 a.m. — some to canvass neighborhoods in the district — Bermúdez drove over to Fair Haven Heights to knock a few doors before heading to a noon training about the election monitors the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it will send to the polls in New Haven on Tuesday.

She spoke to one voter (and three cameras) and visited three residents of the Riverview Guest Home on Lexington Avenue to offer them rides on Tuesday to their voting site.

“She’s amazing on doors,” Dondre Roberts, 34, a Fair Haven Heights resident and campaign volunteer said of Bermúdez. “I think she has a really great ability to relate to our neighbors and to be able to be a good voice, and I’ve learned a lot of things from her just being on the doors with her.”

Roberts, who is a member of New Haven’s Fair Rent Commission, said Bermúdez often relates to voters by talking about her daughter, who attends a New Haven public school.

Reached by phone Sunday morning, Acri said he had no campaign events planned for that morning, but that he planned in the evening to knock on some doors and put out a few more signs in the Annex and Morris Cove, where he lives.

“Sunday is typically a family day,” he said, explaining he planned to go to church instead of trying to rival Bermúdez’s morning door-knocking operation. “During the day, people have plans.”

Sunday was the last day New Haven residents could vote early in the election. Polls will be open on Tuesday between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m.