Generational Change Could Take Out One Of Congress’ Most Stalwart Liberals

When John Larson arrived in Congress, then-President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial was days away from beginning. Nearly 28 years later, his time in the House might be up.

Former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin has pushed Rep. John Larson into a toss-up race ahead of Tuesday’s primary in Connecticut’s 1st District, aided by significant super PAC spending and a generalized sense that the 78-year-old incumbent Democrat has simply been in office for too long.

But Bronin’s challenge to Larson is the inverse of most of the successful generational change primaries this cycle. Bronin is not a millennial with a skinny resume and an expansive left-wing agenda. He’s a well-connected, uber-credentialed 47-year-old mainstream Democrat who boasts two terms leading the state’s largest city, a stint in President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department and a deployment to Afghanistan as a member of the Naval Reserve. He was once roommates with Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) and has the endorsement of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

Bronin’s not operating on a shoestring budget, either; his campaign and allied super PACs have outspent Larson and his allies on television, $2.1 million to $943,000, according to a source tracking media buys.

“This isn’t anything bad that our current congressman has done,” said Allan Smith, the mayor of the Hartford suburb of Rocky Hill and a Bronin supporter. “It’s just 28 years is a long time. He’s been in office longer than I’ve been able to vote. And this isn’t an inexperienced candidate coming out of nowhere.”

Larson and his allies have responded by trying to play up the ideological differences between the two men, pointing to Bronin’s clashes with labor unions while he served as mayor and his backing from wealthy donors and super PACs. It’s resulted in a war over how a Democrat in a safe district can best fight back against Trumpism.

“He’s a centrist, elitist corporate Democrat,” said Joe Toner, a Larson backer and the executive director of the Connecticut Building & Construction Trades Council.

Toner pointed to a distinct class divide between Larson — who grew up in public housing, went to Central Connecticut State and worked as a high school history teacher — and Bronin, a Rhodes Scholar who grew up in Greenwich and went to Phillips Exeter.

“The 1st District is a long way from Greenwich,” Toner said, adding: “I think it’s a scary proposition how these elitists have infiltrated our party, and they’re getting their own folks elected.” (The 1st District includes Hartford and many of its suburbs, along with some smaller working-class cities.)

So far this cycle, three incumbent House Democrats have lost primaries to challengers significantly younger than them. All of the challengers have been members of the Democratic Socialists of America, and all have boasted working-class upbringings.

But as the primary season enters its final weeks, the battle between Larson and Bronin serves as vivid proof it won’t always be the party’s progressive wing that benefits from voters’ desire for a fresh approach within the party following the political failures of octogenarian President Joe Biden.

“Generational change is going to come from all angles,” said Amanda Litman, the president of Run For Something, which helps young people run for state and local office. “It gives you a sense of just how frustrated people are with the status quo.”

Larson, with the notable exception of one highly publicized freeze on the House floor, is viewed, even by his opponents, as sharp and up to the job mentally. But there have been moments where the incumbent has seemed out of touch culturally — The New York Times caught him not knowing what bubble tea was — or like a creature of Capitol Hill.

In an interview, Bronin avoided ever directly saying Larson was too old for the job, instead framing the generational switch-over as about how they would approach being a member of Congress. Ads supporting him rarely go after Larson directly — one from VoteVets, which backs Democratic veterans for office, instead highlighted the recently hospitalized Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — and often call for “new energy.”

“Like anybody who’s been doing the same thing for three decades, I think he’s gotten stuck in some routines and stuck inside an institution that needs to be fixed,” Bronin said of Larson. “At this point, he represents the part of the party that still thinks that strongly worded letters or speeches to an empty chamber for the C-SPAN cameras or press releases about legislation that’s never going to see the light of day are the way to fight this fight.”

Larson is clearly a veteran member. Within seconds of starting an interview with HuffPost, for instance, he mentioned his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee’s subcommittee on Social Security and his longtime support for legislation that would massively expand the program. He later related an anecdote about former House Speaker Tip O’Neill, who left office in 1987.

But Larson has kept up a robust campaign schedule, and tried to remind voters of how valuable experience can be on Capitol Hill, noting he helped Connecticut-based Pratt-Whitney become the sole provider of F-35s, winning a showdown with then-Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who hoped to have the planes built in Ohio.

“Take everyone out of it and say to the public, you have three people who have never served and one person who will be a full chair of a committee that’s dealing with an issue that’s going to impact all 330 million Americans,” Larson said. “Who’s going to be in the room when the decisions are being made? Who would you want representing you at this time? I think it becomes pretty clear.”

Bronin’s attacks have frustrated many of Larson’s allies, who view the incumbent as a stalwart who went head-to-head with the Trump administration to head off Elon Musk’s attacks on Social Security. The idea the state should willingly give up a senior position in Congress for a candidate who insists their voting records would be similar seems ludicrous.

“Luke Bronin’s going to be in the broom closet. I’m hoping his name tag is spelled right,” Toner said. “Down there, it’s based on tenure, right? So we’re going to go backwards to put somebody in there to say he’s going to take on Trump when every single one of our congressional delegates right now are taking on Trump every day?”

Still, operatives working on the race say it’s clear the idea Larson has stuck around too long has some currency with voters and local activists — Bronin topped Larson at the state party’s convention earlier this year. Smith, the suburban mayor who is backing Bronin, said the notion is particularly strong with Larson’s fellow senior citizens.

“It hasn’t been the young people who were the most adamant; it was seniors,” Smith said, citing his door-knocking at senior centers and 55-plus communities. “They’re like: ‘He’s older than me, and I don’t even drive at night.’”

The desire for generational change seems strong enough — and Bronin’s campaign well-funded enough — that Larson and his allies have pushed to shift the race’s axis from age to ideology in recent weeks, focusing on Bronin’s backing from wealthy donors and super PACs.

“When you look at the people who are behind this dark money, it certainly raises questions,” Larson told HuffPost. “I can’t say he’s answered those.”

Larson’s ads have made the point more explicitly. “Who’s behind Luke Bronin?” a female narrator dramatically intones in one spot. “Tech billionaires. Crypto bros. AI execs. Data centers.”

Bronin dismissed the idea that he and Larson represent distinct ideological poles, noting he turns down corporate PAC money ― Larson has taken more than $5 million worth of it in his career ― and backs tax hikes on the wealthy, Medicare for All and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He said Larson’s attacks are “whatever his Washington consultants are telling him to say” and “beneath” the congressman.

If the race does have major ideological stakes, they’re not so great as to attract the involvement of leading progressives on the national level. Larson’s highest-profile endorsers are local labor unions, the Working Families Party and fellow members of Congress from the Nutmeg State, including Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal.

“The next two years will make or break our country, so at this exact moment, we need our best fighters,” Murphy said in an ad for Larson’s reelection campaign. “John Larson grew up in public housing, so he’s spent his whole life fighting a system rigged for the powerful.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the town Allan Smith is the mayor of.