Connecticut’s Gov. Ned Lamont announced he will seek a third term as governor for the 2026 election and face off against a Republican challenger. But he also faces competition from within his own Democrat Party from Rep. Josh Elliott, D-Hamden, who announced his campaign for governor in July and believes his challenge to Lamont from the political left may be stronger than the governor thinks.

“That the majority of our state do not want him to run again says all that needs to be said,” Elliott said in an interview. “There’s appetite within the party to have a new standard-bearer. People are frustrated with the pace with which the government is helping people who work nine to five, this is an incredibly expensive state to live in.” 

Elliott cites a September 2025 poll study by the University of New Hampshire that showed voters split on whether Lamont deserved a third term.

“The governor spent the last four months poll-testing what he wanted his message to be because after eight years he apparently does not know how to lead, and he waits to be told what to do from polls,” Elliott said. 

That same poll, however, found 72 percent of Democrats definitely or probably want Lamont to run again, better than any other candidate listed, including Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, Attorney General William Tong, Comptroller Sean Scanlon, and Rep. Elliott. Both Scanlon and Elliott’s numbers appeared to suffer from lack of recognition, with roughly 70 percent saying they didn’t know enough about either potential candidate.

Elliott, having spent the last ten years as a state representative for Hamden and known as progressive in the legislature, naturally wants to change that, and believes Connecticut can become more affordable through enacting policies that have been rejected by Lamont either through veto or through signaling that a piece of legislation would be vetoed.

Although Lamont signed into law some major pieces of legislation intended to focus on the working class, like the $15 minimum wage and the Paid Family and Medical Leave Act, Elliott notes those were all accomplished early in his first term, a first term that was later dominated by the COVID pandemic. 

This past session, however, Lamont vetoed two controversial pieces of legislation: a major housing bill and a bill that would allow striking workers to collect unemployment benefits. Both pieces of legislation had been approved by the majority Democrats in the General Assembly. 

Although Lamont enjoys the support of the moderate Democrat caucus, his vetoes angered many Democrats who occupy the more progressive wing of the party, along with various organizations who supported Lamont’s campaigns in the past – unions, the Working Families Party, and advocacy groups focused on housing. It was just after these vetoes that Elliott announced his run for governor.

“What that veto meant to me was that people could finally see what elected officials in Hartford have known for the last eight years, is that this is a governor who holds us back from really helping out working families,” Elliott said. “These are just tips of the iceberg because these are bills that we got over the finish line that we knew would either be vetoed or had a chance of being vetoed. We did them as a party because we felt it was important for people to know that we in the legislature, as elected Democrats, have the backs of the people that get us elected.”

Facing pressure over the housing bill, Lamont recently called the General Assembly back into a special session to pass a revised housing bill, and to set aside $500 million to deal with potential federal funding cuts to programs like Medicaid. 

Elliott, however, says the new housing bill “changes nothing” in his eyes and says the governor has not gone far enough to “address the base issue of affordability” in Connecticut. Instead, he wants to rework the state’s tax code so that high-income earners pay a higher percentage of their income toward state and local taxes, an argument that has long been made by organizations like Voices for Children and the Working Families Party, and is based on numbers from Tax Incidence Reports. 

“That’s the system I want to change,” Elliott said. “Everything else is just nipping at the edges, and this is the system that the governor, who makes $55 million per year in passive income, is trying to protect, and I believe that’s why he’s running for a third term.”

Elliott says raising the top income tax rate, and other ideas, are shot down early by the governor because he doesn’t support them, and there’s only so much effort the legislature can put into bills that the governor will veto. Even the governor’s proposal and passage of an Early Childhood Endowment funded with $300 million in surplus revenue did not align with Democrats’ initial design to create a budget line item of $100 million per year to support child day care. 

Additionally, while Lamont has, for most of his two terms, maintained the state’s fiscal guardrails to help pay down pension debt, Elliott says he would like to see those guardrails reformed. While other legislative leaders, like Sen. Martin Looney, D-New Haven, have proposed adjusting the volatility cap, which captures surplus revenue coming largely from Wall Street earnings to fund the budget reserve and pay down pension debt, Elliott thinks it should be eliminated in favor of a stronger revenue cap.

“We’ve been artificially starving state government for decades now and that to me is another place where we need to make changes,” Elliott said. “This is something we can do, but we’re making the decision to let inertia rule the day. You can’t fix one thing without fixing everything.”

Reached for comment, Lauren Gray of Lamont’s campaign said, “There’s talking about affordability – and then there’s delivering on it.”

“Governor Lamont has cut taxes, expanded free childcare, created paid family and medical leave, boosted the earned income tax credit, and raised the minimum wage to one of the highest in the country,” Gray wrote. “That’s real action that’s putting money back in people’s pockets. And he’s not slowing down: he’s pushing for more affordable healthcare, dependable childcare, housing people can actually afford, and lower energy costs.”

While much has been made in media outlets about Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist who ran on a message of affordability that resonated with youth and won him election as mayor of New York City, Elliott doesn’t believe that wave of Democratic Socialist support resonates very far outside the city. 

While he believes there is certainly plenty of crossover between his policy proposals and those of the Democratic Socialists, he says he tries to eschew labels and remains a Democrat. Challenging a two-term sitting Democrat governor certainly puts Elliott at a disadvantage, but he says he would “absolutely not,” run a third-party campaign.

But Elliott’s campaign does send a message to the governor – that the progressive left of Connecticut’s Democratic Party is looking for more – more funding for state agencies, more funding to help the poor and working class, and altering the tax code to make it more “equitable.”

Now heading into the 2026 legislative session and following the governor’s campaign announcement, Sen. Looney says he wanted to bring back a public option healthcare proposal that would allow businesses and individuals to buy into the state employee health plan – a plan pushed for heavily by the progressive wing of legislative Democrats and was debated for three years before Lamont finally quashed it with a veto threat. 

Other attempts to limit the increasing cost of healthcare in Connecticut through legislation have died due to political infighting in the General Assembly, and regulations meant to limit healthcare cost growth have likewise failed.

“[Lamont] wants to talk about affordability while killing bills that help exactly that,” Elliott said. “It will be an interesting time over the next six months as he tries to tack left and basically make the argument that he and I are fighting for the same thing.”

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