Opinion: Why I’m Voting For Justin Farmer

By Bekah Saxon

The following essay was submitted by Bekah Saxon, an organizer, mom, wife, daughter, dog lover and graphic tee collector. She is married to Charlene Green. They live in Edgewood with their 20-year-old son and three dogs

Justin Farmer is the candidate in the 92nd District who is fighting Trump. If you want to defeat Trump, you need to elect leaders who will defeat Trumpism. Our current president is not a cause of the problems in our country, he is a symptom of the racism, classism, imperialism and xenophobia that have ruled the United States since the beginning of the colonies. There is one candidate in the 92nd primary who has been doing the work to cultivate a future free of the hatred and domination that has plagued our nation for centuries.

I consider myself a Boomerang New Havener. I was born at Yale-New Haven
hospital and grew up in the New Haven Public Schools for my elementary school years. My family and I returned to Connecticut 3 years ago when my son graduated from high school to be closer to my father and stepmother as they age. It’s a story that plays out in countless families, as adult children navigate jobs, parenting obligations and caring for older generations. When we moved to Connecticut, we spent months trying to find a neighborhood where we felt at home as a queer, interracial, interfaith couple with a multiracial son. Ultimately, Edgewood was the place where we felt all of our overlapping identities were home: Black, Jewish, young, old, working, retired. I never expected that I would end up living a few blocks from one of my childhood homes.

The New Haven of my childhood had a degree of hope imbued in our realism. My
father was a career teacher in the public schools, and I learned lessons of solidarity from my teachers who had been on the picket line while he carried me on his back in a toddler backpack. I heard stories of the civil rights fight in the South from the black women teachers he taught alongside, and I spent hours after school being entertained by the high school students who were part of the various teams and clubs he coached. My siblings and I were privileged to be able to share him with the hundreds of students who became part of his “kids” over the years. I ran around Edgewood Park while my dad and his tennis partners played and got heckled by the men on the Liar’s Bench – an experience my son, now a student at Gateway, is still able to share when they meet to play 50 years after their first matches.

I drew on those childhood experiences when we faced a Trump-encouraged
tragedy in my second home town of Charlottesville, Virginia. Nine years ago, on Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, Nazis, Neo-Confederates, and other white supremacists descended on our small city and rioted in our streets, physically injuring many, psychologically injuring more and permanently altering our outlook and values as a community. By the end of the day, one was dead, many were permanently disabled, and our president had made his infamous statement of “fine people on both sides.”

What those of you who watched the 24-hour newsfeed from Charlottesville don’t know about is the years of work that occurred both prior to that day and every single day since that day to take steps toward what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the Beloved Community. At the time, I was both working to organize educators and was a leader in the Charlottesville Democratic Party. My wife was the director of the Office of Human Rights for the city of Charlottesville. We moved quickly to recovery mode — school was about to start and the teachers I worked with needed to process their own trauma so that they could support the children of our community as they processed theirs. My wife immediately began planning a community meeting for early that week so that people could come together to reconnect, to cry, to rage, and to plan for our community’s future.

The work to build the Beloved Community is work that occurs in quiet places, in personal conversation, in mutual aid, and in painful internal reconciliation of how a community’s past shapes both its present and its future. It was not just changing policies, it was changing hearts and minds. In the years after that fateful summer, we saw progress on school curriculum, learning our previously whitewashed history, affordable housing, support for the unhoused, and mutual aid and collective care.

Our move to New Haven, which occurred in the weeks before the 2024 election, left us feeling unmoored in the face of the new reality of a second Trump presidency. We saw our friends and neighbors in Charlottesville organizing, fighting back and doing the important community work and mutual aid and we didn’t yet have a community in our new home. As it turns out, I first encountered a person who ended up being critical to our fledgling community when I went to vote on election day 2025. When I arrived to vote, the polling place was not processing any voters so that they could do the mid-day counts. The minutes ticked by, and my brain — steeped in experiences in the South and my years of voter protection work — immediately jumped to this being voter suppression. As I got more frustrated and tried to figure out how to fix it, my agitation became more evident. Off to one side, a man I later learned was Justin Farmer, looked at me, smiled and said, “Let’s all take a deep breath and let the workers do what they need to do to get their job done.” I could feel some of the tension I was feeling dissipate, and I encouraged others to stay in line as my son and I decided to take a walk and come back a bit later to vote once the count was done. I reached out to a colleague, who suggested I report it to the secretary of state — which I was able to do in a rational and calmer way thanks to Justin’s steady presence. 

The next time I met Justin was at an education summit at the Capitol prior to the
start of the 2026 session. My colleague Abdul Osmanu made sure to properly introduce us knowing that I lived in the 92nd. Our paths continued to cross — at community meetings about how to support our neighbors facing ICE raids, at local coffee shops, while walking our dogs through the park. It seemed to me that Justin was deeply embedded in the actions that matter to our family and was an integral part of our new community.

All three candidates have talked about Trump and the type of fighter that is needed to defeat Trumpism. But it takes more than fighting — it also takes the type of love
that Cornell West is talking about when he says, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Defeating Trumpism takes work in legislatures, governor’s offices, courtrooms, and in all of our homes and neighborhoods. It will take creating a community within the 92nd where residents of Westville see their futures as linked to the futures and wellbeing of residents of the Hill, where citizens know that the lives of their children will be brightest when the lives of the children of undocumented neighbors are bright and secure.

There is only one candidate who is doing the hard work of creating the community and sense of belonging that is necessary to defeat Trumpism while also doing the work of working on policies and legislative strategies that will create a city and state where everyone succeeds. That candidate is Justin Farmer, and I invite you all to join me in supporting our future by voting for him during early voting or at your polling place on Aug. 11.