Ximena Solorzano, Head Photography Editor

Eyes around the country are trained on New York City’s three-way mayoral contest.

But in New Haven — where three-term incumbent mayor Justin Elicker is facing the Republican challenger Steve Orosco and only seven of the city’s 30 alder seats are contested — things are quieter.

“It’s pretty low-key,” Douglas Rae, a Yale political scientist and onetime city official, said.

It is the first municipal election in which New Haveners can cast their ballots early — as of Thursday afternoon, 928 already had, according to the city’s Registrar of Voters — and the last to pick for candidates who will serve two-year terms before a charter change kicks in. Three political observers interviewed by the News agreed that no major upsets seem likely.

“Elicker is a comfortable incumbent,” Rae said. “A mayor has got to really screw up to make it a worthwhile task to go after him and defeat him.”

The Elm City’s entrenched Democratic control tends to breed predictability and inevitability in its electoral politics, Rae added.

And it does little to inspire New Haveners to get out and vote, Patricia Rossi, president of the New Haven League of Women Voters, said.

“The big reason why the turnout is so low is because none of the races are considered particularly competitive,” Rossi said.

Turnout in the municipal elections — which take place in odd-numbered years, not coinciding with presidential or midterm congressional elections — has tended to match the intensity of the mayoral race.

In 2019, when Elicker unseated incumbent mayor Toni Harp, nearly 30 percent of eligible New Haveners cast ballots in the general election. That figure dropped to 23 percent in 2021, when Elicker defeated Republican challenger John Carlson, and rose slightly in 2023 to 24.5 percent when Elicker beat Tom Goldenberg, who ran on both the Republican and Independent ballot lines.

The total number of active New Haven voters has increased by more than 17 percent since 2023, the most recent municipal election cycle. At 61,764 as of mid-October, that figure is the highest it has been in a decade.

Leslie Radcliffe, a longtime civic leader and former chair of the City Plan Commission who is currently helping the Republican and Independent candidate Miguel Pittman with his campaign to unseat Ward 3 Alder Angel Hubbard, speculated that incumbents across the city may be “taking things for granted.”

The seven contested alder races represent the same amount of competition as in 2023. Three incumbents are facing challengers, and there are open contests in four other wards spread across Wooster Square, Fair Haven, Fair Haven Heights and East Shore.

But these races have also been quiet, Radcliffe said. She added that candidates are “not throwing rocks, they’re not being loud.”

In Radcliffe’s eyes, it is both this low energy level and a pervasive sense of apathy among New Haveners that drives voter turnout down.

“People don’t understand what’s at stake in municipal elections,” Rossi said. “Who the mayor is, who your alder is, affects whether there’s going to be a park, whether there’s going to be a bus that stops in front of your door, whether your streets are going to get cleaned — all sorts of things that affect you every single day.”

Rossi lamented New Haven’s low turnout and said that many residents underestimate their voting power.

“People say, ‘Oh, it’s just the way it is. All of my tax dollars are going down the drain, and it’s all for naught,’ when in fact, tax dollars are directed based on what our elected officials think are the right priorities,” she added. “And if you don’t vote, they don’t know what you think.”

To be sure, other Connecticut cities have seen lower turnout. In the 2023 municipal election, when just under a quarter of registered New Haveners turned out to vote, less than 20 percent of registered Bridgeport voters and 13.7 percent of registered Hartford voters did the same, according to data from the Connecticut Secretary of State. In suburban towns like New Canaan and Greenwich, meanwhile, turnout topped 50 percent.

Rossi, who is also the co-president of Connecticut’s League of Women Voters, said that the discrepancy tends to recur in part because “it’s easier to vote in a lot of our suburbs and small towns than it is in our big cities,” where she said the polls are generally less accessible, especially for residents without cars.

Radcliffe said New Haven’s political culture was far more robust in the 1960s and 1970s, when she was growing up. She said that the decline began in the 1980s as the activist frisson of the previous decades dissipated.

Rae traces it back even farther.

“The last time there was any real doubt about which party was going to control the mayor’s office was just after World War II,” he said.

New Haven’s last Republican mayor, William Celentano, left office in 1953. After that, Rae said, Democratic Mayor Richard C. Lee “thoroughly cleaned house and made it an Irish-slash-Italian patronage town with some meritocracy thrown in.”

And while New Haven’s demographics have shifted, Rae said that the one-party politics have not changed much. He is not confident that he will live to see the day the Elm City gets a two-party system.

Although the election may be quiet, major questions around housing, gentrification and local development lurk under the surface.

Rae said that debate over “zoning and other regulations for the downtown business district to permit higher density and some taller buildings” — including those that contain labs — is “not discussed in any dramatic way, but is very much alive.”

Radcliffe, meanwhile, said that around the Elm City, “there is grave concern that those things that we love and appreciate and want to see in New Haven, in communities in New Haven, are at risk” because of gentrification and steadily-rising property taxes.

Rossi said the issues that “resonate” for New Haveners are taxes, public safety, housing and the management of the public schools — in that order.

And looming in the background of the election is President Donald Trump. After months spent drawing a sharp contrast between New Haven’s and Trump’s values — and after joining four lawsuits against the administration, the most recent one filed on Thursday — Elicker is framing his candidacy in terms of his commitment to “standing up” to the president, in the words of a campaign flyer. 

“His presence weighs in heavily,” Radcliffe said of Trump.

Of course, he is not on the ballot.

In New Haven, Rae said, “it’s boring, actually. I mean, the electoral politics of the city are a big ho-hum.”

The most recent non-Democratic alder finished her last term in 2011.