Ethan Wolin, Contributing Photographer

A crew of powerful Connecticut Democrats, including both U.S. senators and the governor, joined a Saturday morning rally in New Haven to rev up their party’s base 10 days before Election Day.

The 9 a.m. rally, outside the Dixwell Community House, or Q House, featured Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, Gov. Ned Lamont and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, among other officials and legislators. The speakers touched on the power of union organizing, evident in New Haven politics, and warned the crowd of the dangers they said former President Donald Trump would pose if elected.

Murphy, who is running this year for a third six-year term in the Senate, described the election in stark terms as a test of the American experiment, citing Trump’s comments about deploying the military to handle “the enemy from within.”

“You live at a moment where you can save the country that you love,” Murphy said. “You make sure that we send a loud and clear signal to the world that this experiment — multicultural, multiracial democracy — it’s hanging around for another 240 years.”

The event was organized by New Haven’s Democratic Town Committee to kick off a final get-out-the-vote push for the Nov. 5 election, for which early voting already began last week across Connecticut. After 45 minutes of speeches, volunteers dispersed to distribute campaign materials around the city.

In addition to Murphy and DeLauro’s bids for reelection, the election includes races for the Connecticut General Assembly. But the speakers focused on Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign against Trump, a contest that hangs “on a knife’s edge,” in DeLauro’s words.

Blumenthal stressed the stakes of beating Trump by comparing the election to the 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy, where he traveled in June for D-Day’s 80th anniversary.

“As I walked on that beach where they landed, I thought to myself, ‘This is our moment,’” Blumenthal said. “The threat to the United States right now — yes, Russia, Iran, China from abroad. But the real threat is from within, to our democracy.”

While the warnings struck a serious tone, the rally resembled a reunion. Before the speeches began, elected leaders at all levels of government, along with UNITE HERE union members and Democratic stalwarts, tricked in and mingled on the Q House’s concrete plaza.

Murphy, who beat his current Republican opponent, Matthew Corey, in 2018 with nearly 60 percent of the vote, had made few public appearances in New Haven this fall before the weekend. He had joined striking workers at the Omni New Haven Hotel and spoke to Democrats in neighboring Hamden.

Max Glass, Murphy’s campaign manager, said in a statement to the News last week that Murphy would spend the final sprint to Election Day “criss-crossing the state, and especially in the Fifth District, to knock doors, make phone calls, and help elect Democrats up and down the ballot.” Rep. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District, largely in the western part of the state, is facing a tough challenge from a Republican whom she only narrowly beat in 2022.

Murphy returned to New Haven on Friday to visit two start-up incubators and then a community center in West Hills, before returning to town the next day for the DTC rally. Like several other speakers, Murphy praised DTC Chair Vincent Mauro Jr. and the considerable group of UNITE HERE members in attendance.

Murphy said he told his teenage son, who was accompanying him on the campaign trail, “We’ve been a lot of places in Connecticut this fall, but you really haven’t seen political organizing until you’ve come to New Haven. So, you guys get it done.”

After Mauro’s introduction, Mayor Justin Elicker spoke first, calling Trump a “creepy individual,” a “ridiculous man” and a “clown.” He said he plans to canvass for Harris in the battleground state of Pennsylvania next weekend.

Rev. Scott Marks, the founder and director of the union-affiliated advocacy organization New Haven Rising, talked about the national political power of unions like UNITE HERE, led by President Gwen Mills, once a veteran New Haven organizer.

Other speakers at the rally included Lamont, Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, Treasurer Erick Russell, Comptroller Sean Scanlon, state Senate Pro Tempore Martin Looney — joined by other state legislative candidates — and Ward 27 Alder Richard Furlow, the Board of Alders’ majority leader. Fourteen other alders stood behind Furlow, representing half of the board in total.

Mauro told the News that, even if Democrats tend to easily win elections in New Haven, he wants to maintain what he called a “familial” atmosphere among the party’s leaders and loyal supporters.

The Dixwell Community House is located at 197 Dixwell Ave.