Giri Viswanathan, Senior Photographer

As Mayor Justin Elicker seeks a fourth two-year term, no challenger has yet emerged for the municipal election coming up in under 10 months. His greatest hurdles in 2025, his sixth year in office, are likely to come not from political opponents but from challenges that have dogged the city.

Elicker formally began his reelection campaign by filing the requisite paperwork on Dec. 17, after first announcing his intention to run again in a television interview in November. The 49-year-old mayor has not hired campaign staff and thus far does not face any opponents for the Democratic primary election in September or the general election in November.

By this date two years ago, two candidates — Tom Goldenberg and Shafiq Abdussabur — had announced plans to take on Elicker. A third contender, Liam Brennan, followed with an exploratory committee in late January and a campaign launch video in February.

Late last year and early this year, however, there have been no public signals from a potential aspirant, nor hardly any murmurs among New Haven politicos about efforts to unseat Elicker, who first took office in January 2020 and handily won his third term in 2023 after fending off the challengers.

“I’m not hearing anything yet, but possibly,” Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers said when asked in a Jan. 2 “Dateline New Haven” radio interview whether she expected a competitive mayoral race. “Every election year has potential to see, you know, people running for whatever office.”

Interviews in the past several weeks with 11 community and political leaders, including Elicker and his two predecessors, suggest he may be on a glide path to reelection — if he adequately addresses New Haveners’ top concerns, especially about crime and public education. Elicker has taken steps in recent months to tackle both New Haven Public Schools underfunding and New Haven Police Department understaffing, an apparent acknowledgment of those problems’ place at the front of many residents’ minds.

He only just crossed the halfway point of his current term on Jan. 1, and ample time remains for candidates to enter a race that has not begun besides the incumbent’s unsurprising entrance. John Carlson, the Republican Town Committee chair and a 2021 mayoral contender, wrote in a text to the News on Tuesday that he expects Elicker to face “challengers from within and without his party,” declining to name names.

Vincent Mauro Jr., the Democratic Town Committee chair, said no Democratic challenger has emerged. He wrote in a text to the News, responding to Carlson: “if people are calling Mr. Carlson about running as a Democrat I think that speaks volumes on their prospects for credibility.”

One marker of Elicker’s strong standing is that none of his former major challengers are poised to make another run for the mayor’s office this year. Brennan now works for Elicker, toughening housing code enforcement as the director of the Livable City Initiative, and declined to comment on politics. Goldenberg also declined to comment.

And Abdussabur, a former police sergeant and Beaver Hills alder who left the 2023 race after failing to qualify for the Democratic primary ballot, told the News in November he would not run again because Elicker’s performance has improved. An adviser to two alder candidates in the past year, Abdussabur said he even inquired about filling the position of chief administrative officer, for which Elicker recently appointed a former assistant fire chief instead.

“At the time I ran against him, I would give him a C-minus. Right now, I give him a B-minus,” Abdussabur said, citing police officers’ morale and community engagement. “He’s doing a good job.”

“A degree of stability”

Elicker’s pitch has as much to do with his leadership style as it does with any particular policy proposals. After leading New Haven through the pandemic and negotiating a 2021 deal for more money from Yale, he has been known to promote affordable housing as part of a vision for equitable growth at the heart of his State of the City speech last February.

“Oftentimes there’s questions that come up when we start a campaign of, What are you going to do differently?” he said in an interview last month. “The reality is that I’m listening to people all the time in the city and taking that feedback and, you know, improving on it and changing what we do, and so the overall goals aren’t going to change.”

Elicker’s supporters praise him for being responsive to what he hears from constituents. Ward 15 Alder Frank Redente Jr., who dislodged an incumbent alder in his Fair Haven district in 2023 and has not shied away since then from criticizing the government, said the mayor had earned his support in the upcoming election by taking his input seriously over the past year.

Mauro said Elicker has managed the city with “a steady hand” and no frills, an approach that he anticipates will continue in the coming campaign.

“He’s not a great self-promoter — he doesn’t do that, it’s not his personality,” Mauro said. “He’s very interested in governing and doing the right things. What we’ve seen here is a degree of stability.”

In interviews with the News, familiar critics echoed their past complaints about Elicker. Carlson said the mayor has “done a horrific job across the board,” adding that “taxes are up, services are down.” The iconoclastic activist Wendy Hamilton, who mounted a quixotic challenge to Elicker in 2023, leveled unsubstantiated claims of corruption against Elicker and other city leaders but said she is too old for another run.

The criticisms have not taken hold among a substantial number of voters since Elicker defeated then-Mayor Toni Harp in a hard-fought race in 2019, his second attempt to beat her. The city since then has seen relative political calm — Elicker winning each contested primary or general election with over 70 percent of the vote.

“I honestly think that there’s a real sense of lethargy, people sort of feeling like — those who might challenge him feeling like they just don’t have the energy,” said Harp, who now chairs a political action committee, Impact CT, focused on state social policies.

It would be exceedingly difficult for a challenger to threaten Elicker unless local Democratic organizers decide they want a change in City Hall, according to both Harp and her immediate forerunner, former 20-year Mayor John DeStefano.

In low-profile Democratic elections last March, an effort to unseat a dozen Democratic Town Committee co-chairs, which was seen as a play to lay the groundwork for Goldenberg or others to challenge Elicker and other incumbent Democrats, failed to dent the party’s UNITE HERE union-backed power structure. Two special alder elections last fall also resulted in wins for Elicker’s preferred candidates.

“Right now, it just seems kind of quiet to me out there,” DeStefano, who teaches in Yale’s political science department, told the News. “That said, if you’re a parent in the New Haven Public Schools, or if you’re in a neighborhood that’s experiencing violence, or if you’re in a neighborhood that’s seeing higher taxes, you may be feeling something even if the political elites are not.”

The streets and the schools

The routine municipal duties of public safety and public education have surfaced lately as New Haveners’ most prevalent concerns with their government. Elicker’s actions on both fronts indicate he perceives their power to affect his political stature.

After spiking during the pandemic, gun violence numbers have decreased modestly but remained higher than they were in 2019 before Elicker’s tenure as mayor. Reported gunshots and homicides fell in 2024 compared to the previous year, as did auto thefts.

“When you step back and look at our overall total crime numbers, we are in a better position than we were,” Elicker said, even as he conceded “it’s understandable that people have the perception that crime may be worse.”

Juvenile crime and motor vehicle theft have become recurrent causes of public anxiety, and police have worked to crack down. A shortage of police officers has decreased the department’s presence in neighborhoods. A new bargaining agreement reached in the fall by the city and the police union, containing increased pay and benefits, raised hopes that the New Haven Police Department can better retain officers and recruit more.

When asked what he would like Elicker to do next, Alder Redente said police should expand patrols in his neighborhood to confront quality-of-life crimes such as break-ins, in keeping with his “broken window theory” that minor crimes and faltering infrastructure can give rise to worse violence.

Decayed infrastructure has been the most visible sign of what some have called a crisis in New Haven Public Schools, where delayed repairs have left some students in dire conditions, notably at the city’s largest high school, Wilbur Cross. The system began the school year in financial trouble, prompting Elicker to propose and alders to approve sending $8.5 million to shore up NHPS’ operating budget and address maintenance needs.

“I think that Mayor Elicker is committed to the schools, and he’s trying,” said Jake Halpern ’97, a journalist and Yale English lecturer who heads the Wilbur Cross Parent Teacher Student Association. “People will be evaluating his tenure as mayor at least in part on whether the school system seems like it’s stable or whether it’s falling through the floor.”

Elicker maintains that funding from the state — and the federal government, as its pandemic relief for schools dries up — will be key to solving the at times literally structural problems faced by NHPS. He and Superintendent Madeline Negrón, along with leaders from four other Connecticut cities, traveled on Monday to Hartford to make the case for greater investment in urban school districts.

Leslie Blatteau, the president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, said New Haveners “should give credit where credit is due when it comes to efforts at the city level to fund our schools.”

“Hard to know at this point”

It is only January, and much about the 2025 municipal elections, which will also include all 30 seats on the Board of Alders, remains to be seen.

Elicker has not launched a full campaign operation and said he expects to hire a campaign manager in the late winter or the spring. For now, he said he is focused on calling supporters and fundraising.

It would not be unusual for other candidates to decide to run in the coming months. In March 2021, Karen DuBois-Walton ’89, then the president of Elm City Communities, New Haven’s housing authority, launched an exploratory committee to consider seeking the Democratic nomination. She formally entered the race that May and dropped out two months later.

It is hard to predict the outcomes of the state legislative session, which carries high stakes for New Haven and potentially for Elicker’s reputation. The session lasts until June.

And a particular source of uncertainty this year lies in Washington, D.C., where Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday could bring immigration policies hostile to cities like New Haven that refrain from identifying undocumented immigrants for federal immigration authorities. If Trump executes his proposed mass deportations, the ramifications in New Haven could test Elicker’s leadership anew.

“Moments that can be perceived as a time of something being under assault, or creating a crisis, often can energize people to come out and get involved,” said DuBois-Walton, who recently took the helm of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven.

Elicker said he plans to run a robust campaign no matter how the election season develops.

“If there isn’t a hotly contested election — and it’s really hard to know at this point what’s going to happen — but if there isn’t one, it’s a real opportunity to focus on engaging people that might not regularly be engaged in the process,” he said.

The winner of this year’s mayoral election will hold the last two-year term before the city switches to four-year terms for the mayor and alders, per a set of City Charter changes approved by voters in 2023 following advocacy by Elicker and fellow incumbent Democrats. 

The practice of two-year terms dates back to the Reconstruction era.