Josh Elliott calls himself a “black sheep” for reasons unrelated to his insistent demand that the Connecticut Democratic Party dump Gov. Ned Lamont in next week’s rare gubernatorial primary for a younger, bolder, more liberal alternative: Namely, a state representative named Josh Elliott. Lamont’s origin story as a beneficiary of multigenerational wealth, a great-grandson of the J.P. Morgan Co. executive featured on the cover of Time after the Wall Street crash of 1929, is fodder for Elliott’s taunting ads. His own origin story is unconventional and not widely known. But if you ask, he’ll tell it. Fair is fair. Black sheep can mean many things, several relevant to politics, the ultimate game of finding a place in the flock. The phrase suggests outsider, nonconformist — things in fashion this year. Elliott says it is a mindset he established as a child, when he went by another name. With the exception of a year in kindergarten, Elliott was homeschooled until entering Hamden Hall Country Day School at 14. He articulates an adult belief in transparency as a public figure, but he grew up clutching a secret. His biological father was a sperm donor, not the man who was married at the time to his mother, Mary Ellen Stearman. “There’s nothing to hide,” Elliott said over coffee at Story and Soil Coffee, a cafe two blocks from the state Capitol. “But the reason I have adopted this headspace of being a black sheep, no matter where I am, is that for my entire childhood, I was around people who thought that I was family. And I knew that I wasn’t family.” He said his mother shared the secret during the last of her separations from her husband, Henry Fleischman, a son of a couple who ran the now-gone Fleischman’s department store in Guilford, the shoreline town where Elliott grew up. He described the story as uncomplicated: His mother wanted a child, and her husband did not — a resolve underscored by a vasectomy. A son from her first marriage died during what was supposed to be routine adenoid surgery at age 8. Elliott was an infant. The tragedy led to a major malpractice award and, perhaps, a greater degree of protectiveness about his upbringing and schooling, he said. Elliott’s first TV ad, and the stock speech he gave over the winter and spring to more than 100 Democratic town committees, introduced him as raised by a single mother who founded the natural food store in Hamden that he now co-owns, Thyme Season. It’s true, if incomplete. In an interview, he recalled Henry Fleischman for his periodic separations from his mother, stints living in Utah, Montana and Vermont. He described their marriage as turbulent, but not abusive. “They separated for real by the time I was 8,” Elliott said. “They got divorced by the time I was 11, in that range.” And somewhere around age 13, Elliott renamed himself. The boy born as Joshua Elliott Fleischman would arrive at Hamden Hall as Joshua A. Elliott, the middle initial standing for a name from Greek mythology. It’s in the Iliad, but he found it in a supermarket book of baby names. To a boy, it sounded cool. His mother signed off. So, eventually, did the dubious probate judge who made it legal. Elliott grinned as he recounted the episode, shared the name and watched his interviewer’s reaction. Without prompting, he produced his Connecticut driver’s license. Yes, his middle name really is Astyanax. Elliott matter-of-factly told the story about his name, as well the later discovery through 23andMe of his biological father’s likely identity and the confirmed existence of many half siblings, just by pushing a button. “And up pops up 23 siblings, going from zero siblings to 23 in the span of a minute,” he said. “And so the joke was when I started talking with them that it was literally 23 and me. There’s since been more.” He never reached out to the man he believes to be the biological father, a Yale-educated actor and writer he described as successful, but not famous. He said he has no real relationship with Fleischman, though his mother’s ex-husband did contribute $50 to his campaign. The disclosures came in a long conversation about vetting candidates for higher office, the exploration of who they are and what they’ve done, not just what they believe. He quickly warmed to the question: What should voters know about Josh Elliott? Elliott said the guarded, introverted child who kept a distance from peers is “not actually who I am anymore.” But he described his unconventional childhood as exerting a “gravitational pull” on him as an adult. He is 41, a decade into representing the 88th House District of Hamden. “It’s like, OK, so it’s like that’s my struggle, that’s my dynamic. That’s why I can challenge a governor and not be like, ‘Y’all hate me now.’ That’s OK,” Elliott said, then laughed and added, “I was never one of you anyway.” The last line is expressed with a theatrical flourish he would say later was meant to express an emotional freeness, not bitterness.  A tendency towards bluntness — he’d call it transparency — can cause friction, even among allies. Lamont is not the first Democrat whom Elliott had tried to push to the left or suggested he be replaced. Colleagues still talk about how he assessed the House Democratic caucus as a first-year lawmaker in 2017 on 25 progressive issues, such as a higher minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, higher taxes on the wealthy, fees on larger employers whose employees rely on the state for health and other assistance, and legalizing recreational marijuana.  “It allows me to see who should be up here — and who should not,” Elliott said then. If that was the act of a black sheep, he got past it. House Speaker Matt Ritter eventually made him a committee chair and, more recently, assigned him to oversee the panel entrusted with the screening of legislation, an important last step before bills are called for a vote or shunted to the side. Still, a predisposition to frankly-not-give-a-damn about being accepted can be a helpful trait for a candidate who has forced the first primary challenge to a Connecticut governor since 1978, when Lt. Gov. Robert Killian turned on Gov. Ella T. Grasso. Killian lost, and Grasso died without finishing her second term. “I think that that core is still there,” he said. Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont and challenger Josh Elliott at a debate on Wednesday, July 22, 2026. Credit: WTNH NEWS 8 At his only debate with the governor, Elliott was challenged about a Facebook post he made in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd about why abolishing or defunding the police, not just reforming them, was a serious public policy debate. “It’s a long, nuanced conversation where ‘abolish the police’ and ‘defund the police’ don’t really encapsulate the nuance,” he said in one of his interviews with CT Mirror last week. “And I was happy to err on the side of inflammatory to stoke the conversation, claiming the conversation was and continues to be worth having, while we continue to make sure that people who do these jobs are paid well because they’re dangerous jobs.” In other ways, Elliott is ill-suited to the demands of campaigning, of constant contact with others. The man who trudged across the state for a few minutes to speak to Democrats to tell his story — and make the case against a governor that most of them undoubtedly had voted for in two previous elections — is an introvert. “I generally tend to not prefer crowds. I generally tend to prefer not big groups of friends. I always prefer to hang out with one person, and that’s good for me,” Elliott said. “I’m an introvert in that my energy is drained being around people, and it is revived by being alone.” He lives with his girlfriend, Jenn Lepore, a lawyer for the Department of Correction and the former Democratic chair of Cromwell. They live in a 3,700-square-foot Colonial purchased by Elliott without a mortgage in 2023, helped by wealth shared by his mother. Elliott is a fan of complex Euro-style board games and digital versions that are heavy on strategy, less so on luck. The rules and conditions evolve, and the players can be represented by avatars. Elliott can have several games running at once. He said they are not unlike politics.  (One of his strategies this year is simultaneously running for reelection to the House while challenging Lamont. Should he win the primary, he will vacate the nomination for the House.) Rep. Josh Elliott shares a laugh with his girlfriend, Jenn Lepore, after he was endorsed for his House seat in May. He is running for the House and governor. Credit: mark pazniokas / ct mirror “I think a lot of this work is just through a strategic lens, where you have very limited information, and rules are always changing. The way that I conceive of myself is as somebody who is just always going to be learning, that there’s just no static version of myself,” he said. After eight years of homeschooling, he said, he studied people more than anything else at Hamden Hall and Ithaca College. “I just feel like my time at high school and college was really not so much time in the classroom than time just learning how to be a kid and be a human around others,” Elliott said. “It wasn’t like I was Harry Potter under the stairwell. I would go to summer camp. I would do soccer and karate and these things. So I was around kids, but not with the day-to-day intensity that other kids have.” He said he successfully auditioned for a place in Ithaca’s well-regarded acting program. “And then I decided that it was a thing I would prefer to keep as a hobby, and I didn’t want to do it as a profession,” he said. “So, my acting is now more when I have board game nights, and I play-act characters.” He pursued law school instead at Quinnipiac, graduating with a J.D. but never practicing. He did act in several plays at Center Stage Theatre in Shelton, including “Man of La Mancha” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”  He did not play the dreamer Don Quixote in the former, but he played more to type in the latter. He was Tevye’s eventual son-in-law, Perchik, the radical tutor who arrives in Anatevka with progressive, socialist ideas that lead to exile. State Rep. Josh Elliott, D-Hamden and candidate for governor, waves to supporters at the State Democratic Convention, Saturday, May 16, 2026, in Hartford. Credit: Jessica Hill / CT Mirror Elliott went into his mother’s business, opening a natural food store in Shelton that closed three years ago. His income now is derived from Thyme Season, his legislative salary and investments. He said he has benefitted from family wealth, albeit nothing approaching Lamont’s scale, and some of it likely derived from the malpractice case. As a lawmaker, he advocated passage of a $15 minimum wage, but he did not pay it to his employees while lobbying for it. “I am happy to argue against my economic interests for the sake of a better economy,” he said. “As long as the rules are what the rules are, I’m going to be abiding by those rules.” Running hard from the left, Elliott remains a longshot to defeat the governor in the Democratic primary on Aug. 11.  But what began as a consciousness-raising exercise to force a conversation on tax reform has morphed into a gut check for some Democrats about their priorities, their tolerance for risk and their allegiance to a governor with an approval rating that makes him close to unassailable in November. Elliott won 25% of the convention vote in May, easily crossing the 15% threshold  necessary to force a primary. He also managed to raise $335,500 in small-dollar contributions from thousands of donors, unlocking a $3.75 million public financing grant in July and the resources to attack Lamont. His ads from the left-leaning Fight Agency, the shop best known for a soaring success and a crushing failure: the victory of a little known state assemblyman, Zohran Mamdani, as mayor of New York City, and then the embarrassing flameout of Graham Platner, the Maine oysterman coaxed to run for U.S. Senate without vetting. Elliott hits Lamonts on several counts, but the main one is the governor’s resistance to follow Massachusetts and adopt a 4% surtax on annual incomes exceeding $1 million or so. The bulk of whatever is raised, and Elliott says he sees estimates ranging from $1.5 billion to more than $3 billion, would go to property tax relief, he said. Elliott trailed by 21 percentage points among likely Democratic voters in polling released last week by Impact CT, a progressive advocacy group declared to be neutral. Lamont was favored, 48% to 27%. Polling by the same group gave Lamont a 38-point lead two months ago, evidence of a tightening race.  The new survey offers no way to suss if the movement began in recent weeks, after Elliott began advertising. A poll conducted by Sacred Heart University for WFSB and CT Insider and released Monday also showed Lamont with a huge lead, but it had one useful finding for Elliott, who has been sensitive to suggestions he could win a primary and lose the  general election. Elliott’s stump speech noted that midterm elections tend to be bad for the party that holds the White House, probably more so for the party of President Donald Trump in a blue state. His argument: If ever there was a cycle to take a chance on a liberal committed to moving Connecticut to the left, it’s now. The notion was tested in a public survey for the first time Monday. Sacred Heart University offered matchups of Lamont and Elliott against the Republican nominee, state Sen. Ryan Fazio of Greenwich, who voted for Trump all three times he was the presidential nominee.  Elliott led Fazio by 14 percentage points, compared to Lamont’s 20-point advantage over the Republican. “If I felt that I was going to be an existential risk to our state, where Republicans are going to win, I’m not going to put ourselves in that position,” Elliott said last week. “I know I’d win against Ryan Fazio. I have a better team. I have a better message. I have a better track record, and it’s a blue state.” And if he somehow ends up on the ballot as the Democratic nominee for governor in November, there’d be something else: “I’ve just beaten a two-term incumbent governor.” ...read more read less