Congressman John B. Larson, a long-serving Democrat facing his first serious challenge for renomination, opened a new phase in his campaign Wednesday with an attack describing his best-financed rival, Luke Bronin, as variously hostile or indifferent to unions during his eight years as mayor of Hart ford. Accompanied by endorsements from leaders of unions representing government workers, construction trades and machinists, Larson’s campaign portrayed the congressman as a reliable ally of labor and opponent to President Donald J. Trump’s reductions in the federal workforce. “From defending collective bargaining rights to creating good-paying union jobs, I have always been in labor’s corner,” Larson said in a statement. “Now, as Trump and his allies intensify their attacks on unions and working families, we need leaders who fight for workers every single day, not just when it’s convenient.” Larson’s campaign accused Bronin of “union busting,” quoting old news coverage of the municipal union leaders who objected to the mayor’s first-year demands for cost-cutting and concessions to avert bankruptcy by the financially struggling capital city in 2016. It also capitalizes on the lingering resentment by the Hartford building trades over what one union executive says was Bronin’s unwillingness to push for union-friendly labor agreements on projects in Hartford by private developers or institutions, including Hartford Hospital. “Did he go out of his way to kill us? No. But did he go out of his way to help us? No,” Joe Toner, the former director of the Hartford Building Trades Council and current director of the State Building Trades Council, said in an interview. “When the bell rang, he never was standing next to us. John was the opposite. Toner acknowledged that a city library project begun during Bronin’s administration was done by a project-labor agreement, as were school projects originated by a predecessor and finished by Bronin. But overall the trades found the mayor to be more amenable to the desires of developers.  The building trades’ endorsements are not new. Toner first made his support clear at Larson’s campaign kickoff in September, and the Hartford council endorsed Larson in August.  But how Larson is now framing the endorsements is the strongest effort to date by his campaign to draw a distinction with Bronin, whom he evidently views as his chief rival for the party’s nomination in the solidly blue 1st Congressional District of Hartford and 26 suburbs. Bronin quickly raised nearly $1.2 million after opening his campaign in July, slightly exceeding what Larson had raised all year. Larson, 77, of East Hartford never has faced a Democratic primary since winning the open 1st Congressional District seat in 1998, leaving him without a well-oiled campaign structure as a string of Democratic challengers opened campaigns beginning on July 3 with a Hartford school board member, Ruth Fortune. She was followed by Jack Perry, a former Southington councilman who dropped out of the race Monday, then Bronin and state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest of West Hartford, a four-term lawmaker who has resisted any suggestion the contest is a two person-race. “There are a lot of people interested in making this a two-man race, but we need new kinds of leaders in Washington if we’re ever going to change anything,” Gilchrest said Monday after Perry dropped out. “I’m running to make a difference and I’m not going anywhere.” All of the challengers are between 30 and 40 years younger than Larson, who has seen several political contemporaries opt for retirement, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. None of the challengers have faulted Larson’s liberal, pro-labor voting record, instead insisting it is time for new leaders in a struggling Democratic Party. The challengers, like the four Democratic town committee leaders from Berlin, Rocky Hill, Wethersfield and Windsor who endorsed Bronin last month, generally have been respectful of Larson. “I have tremendous respect for Congressman Larson and everything he has done for our district, but this is the right time to pass the torch to a new generation, just like Speaker Pelosi and so many other Democrats are doing,” said Julie Erickson, the acting DTC chair of Berlin. Larson has been endorsed by the six other members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, all Democrats. The labor endorsements Wednesday include the International Association of Machinists, which represent workers at Pratt Whitney in East Hartford. Larson’s used the IAM hall in East Hartford for his campaign kickoff. Until Wednesday, Larson largely had ignored the challengers. Gov. Ned Lamont and then-Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, center, on a walking tour of a redevelopment site north of downtown, near the minor-league baseball park, in July 2022. Credit: Mark Pazniokas / CT Mirror Toner faulted Bronin for not pushing the Capital Regional Development Authority to insist on project-labor agreements in the housing projects it funded downtown or in the reconstruction of Dillon Stadium, now home to a professional soccer franchise. “Wherever we had the ability on publicly funded projects, from hundreds of millions of dollars of school construction to new libraries, we did that work under project labor agreements,” Bronin said Wednesday. But the margins on housing are especially tight, he said. “We are a state and city with a housing crisis, and a city that was at the time struggling to attract any investment at all,” Bronin said. “We had a basic choice, whether to make it possible to get housing built or not, and I’m proud that for the first time in many years, we got a lot of housing built.” This campaign is not the first in which the trades have opposed Bronin. In 2019, the construction unions backed Eddie A. Perez, the former mayor who was attempting a comeback after a corruption scandal forced his resignation. Bronin easily defeated Perez, winning a second term. With Larson, the support by the construction unions predates his time in Congress. The trades, which have 30,000 members and are generally seen as effective players in campaigns, backed Larson in 1998, when he won the congressional seat in a tight race with the favored Miles Rapoport, the liberal secretary of the state, and others. “I have deep respect for all of the members of the building trades, and I understand that Joe Toner and building trades leadership have relationships that go back many, many decades with John Larson,” Bronin said.  Bronin said he would fight in Congress for the “building trades, for working class and middle class families across that district, and that’s going to include a focus on trying to make sure that we actually get new infrastructure built, that we actually accelerate the pace of housing construction, and that we actually focus on key cost of living issues like health care and electricity.” Toner said he had little doubt that Bronin’s voting record in Congress would be different from Larson’s. But that was a reason to remain loyal to Larson and his nearly 28 years of contacts and seniority in Congress, Toner said. “Every vote is going be identical,” Toner said. “All you are doing is forgoing the seniority. You are going from the head of the table to the broom closet.” ...read more read less