With limited opportunities to engage with one another before Nov. 5, the candidates’ efforts to define their opponent in Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District are largely playing out over the airwaves in a tight race between Democratic incumbent Jahana Hayes and Republican challenger George Logan.
The candidates and the national groups backing them have leaned on advertising to tell voters more about their biographies and records. But the ads have increasingly grown more negative in the final stretch of the campaign. They have tried to draw contrasts and link them to the leadership of their party, despite making political and legislative distinctions at times.
Hayes and Logan have sparred over soundbites and how their opponent has framed their positions on key issues. The attack ads signal what the candidates and parties believe could be vulnerabilities for their opponent. For Democrats, it is abortion rights, and for Republicans, it is crime and immigration.
They will face off in a high-stakes rematch in November with control of the U.S. House on the line again. Hayes bested Logan by a little over 2,000 votes in 2022, the closest race she has faced since her first election in 2018. Even with Logan’s defeat that year, Republicans were able to take back the House with a very narrow majority.
A Republican from Connecticut has not served in Congress in 15 years, but the party sees the race as one of its best chances to flip a seat in the state as well as the New England area. The last Republican to serve in the 5th District was Nancy Johnson, who lost reelection in 2006 to Chris Murphy, who is now a U.S. senator.
Public polling released this week shows another close race. Hayes leads Logan among likely voters by 3 percentage points – which is within the margin of error – according to a poll from WTNH, Emerson College Polling, and The Hill. The survey also found Logan narrowly leading among independent voters, while Hayes has a higher favorability rating with voters more unfamiliar with the Republican challenger.
The candidates had their first and only in-person debate of the campaign last week. They will appear together virtually Friday morning for a live tele-town hall with AARP CT to discuss issues like Medicare, Social Security and caregiving, but it will not be formatted like a debate and they will not get the chance to offer rebuttals.
The uptick in fundraising throughout the year has helped both of them get on the air. Hayes continued to outpace Logan in the third fundraising quarter that runs between July through the end of September. The congresswoman brought in about $1 million, while Logan raised over $700,000. That includes transfers from authorized committees to both candidates.
They both spent over $1 million over that three month stretch. Logan, however, entered October with substantially less money to spend in the final stretch of the race. He had about $420,000 while Hayes has $1.9 million left in her campaign account.
But the campaign ads are unlikely to slow down in the final weeks before the Nov. 5 election.
Attack ads ramp up
The bitterness of last week’s congressional debate largely mirrors what voters in the 5th District see on TV.
Abortion rights have once again come up as a major issue in the 5th District race, similarly to the 2022 campaign. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling two years ago in the Dobbs decision and sent the issue of abortion back to the states.
Since the 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, 21 states have banned or restricted abortion procedures. Connecticut is not among those states, and it passed a law to protect the right to an abortion in 1990, which both candidates say they support.
Hayes and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — House Democrats’ main campaign operation — have released a couple of ads challenging Logan’s positions on a woman’s right to choose. They claim he would fall in line with other Republicans who have called for national abortion bans — something Logan has pushed back on.
In a few ads, Democrats have sought to link Logan to GOP leaders like U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has co-sponsored various bills to significantly limit abortion at the national level. Former President Donald Trump has recently said he would veto such a ban, but has celebrated the fall of Roe v. Wade and has touted the appointment of three Supreme Court justices during his presidency who voted to overturn it.
Logan has reiterated his support for Connecticut’s protections on reproductive rights and that he would not vote for a national ban. His campaign sent a cease and desist letter to TV stations airing an ad from the DCCC, saying it “contains factual inaccuracies and should be pulled from the air immediately.” The ad claims Logan would “join Donald Trump and his extreme MAGA movement” to outlaw abortions.
The ad also features a clip of Logan’s response from a 5th District debate in 2022 that he would not support federal legislation to codify the protections under Roe into federal law. At the time, he questioned whether Congress has the constitutional authority to do so.
In the current campaign, Logan says he would support such legislation, adding a similar caveat that “as long as it doesn’t undermine Connecticut’s abortion law and it’s constitutional.”
When asked about the change of position on codifying those protections federally since the last election cycle, Logan argued in a statement that his comments from the 2022 debate were misconstrued.
“The words my opponents take out of context were a response to the concerns I had in the wake of the Dobbs decision regarding the constitutionality of federal legislation and my focus has been on ensuring that federal abortion legislation never undermines Connecticut’s existing law,” Logan said in a statement. “I support codifying a woman’s right to choose into federal law as long as it does not infringe on Connecticut’s law and is constitutional. The selective editing of my previous statements is dishonest.”
Connecticut’s law enshrines the right to an abortion until fetal viability, or about 24 weeks into a pregnancy, mirroring what was once protected under Roe v. Wade.
Logan has also taken issue with a joint DCCC and Hayes campaign ad, claiming that Republicans like Logan would enable the enactment of Project 2025, a wide-ranging conservative presidential transition plan.
Trump has said he “knows nothing” about the controversial plan, though many of those involved in drafting components of the proposal from The Heritage Foundation worked in the former president’s administration.
At the debate, Logan said “he never heard of Project 2025 until she started talking about it.” Hayes called that response the “most egregious thing” said at the debate.
When asked to respond to his pushback that Democrats’ ads have mischaracterized positions like on a national ban, Hayes’ campaign pointed to his past comments on a federal bill to codify Roe and said in a statement that he “cannot be trusted on the issue of abortion.” They also noted that the group Reproductive Freedom for All, which was formerly NARAL, has put out a statement that Hayes is the only endorsed candidate for the 5th District seat.
For Republicans’ part, Logan and the National Republican Congressional Committee — House Republicans’ main campaign operation — are putting the focus on immigration, law enforcement and a specific vote in Congress regarding fentanyl.
In a joint spot from the campaign and NRCC, the ad features several members in law enforcement, claiming that Hayes is in alignment with a party that supports open borders and defunding the police — claims that she has disputed. The ad concludes with an officer touting Logan’s endorsement from the Connecticut State Fraternal Order of Police.
Republicans are also putting a spotlight on Hayes’ opposition to the HALT Fentanyl Act, a bill that passed the U.S. House with bipartisan support last year but has since stalled in the U.S. Senate. The legislation would classify fentanyl as a schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act.
In a separate one from the NRCC, the ad notes how lethal small doses of fentanyl can be and questions her opposition to that bill, questioning if it “was just partisan politics.” The ad features a photo of Hayes with progressive members like U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., which was part of a 2018 Rolling Stone cover of some of the female lawmakers who were elected to Congress that year.
“Yet Jahana Hayes was the only member of Congress from Connecticut to oppose a bipartisan bill to permanently classify fentanyl in the most dangerous category of drugs,” the ad’s narrator says. “The only one.”
Hayes was the only member of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, which is made up of five Democratic House members, to vote against the bill. But she has defended her vote, saying she has “a very different perspective” than her colleagues and tried to get amendments added to the legislation. She has also pushed back on the assertion that she would pull resources from police, noting the funding she supported in larger bills passed in Congress and her husband’s career in law enforcement.
“This is a back and forth. This idea that we can incarcerate our way out of a crime problem is so incredibly flawed,” Hayes said at the debate. “We have to build trust with communities. We have to make sure that not only are we supporting our law enforcement officers … but we are also making sure that accountability is there.”
“I voted against it because I read it. I think that anyone distributing fentanyl or highly deadly substances should be criminalized. They should have jail time,” she said in a Wednesday interview on WNPR’s The Wheelhouse. “It offered no money for prevention, for treatment, for harm reduction or even for law enforcement to enforce it.”
She said she was warned about the “optics” of voting against the bill, but said she saw how the 1994 crime bill hurt her community.
Hayes argued that “we cannot incarcerate our way out of” a public health crisis, adding that judges would have no discretion on mandatory minimum sentences depending on the type of offender. She also noted her support for separate federal legislation to deal with fentanyl at the southern border.
Biographical spots
While recent ads have gone more negative, both campaigns have used advertising to highlight their biographies, careers and political aspirations. And family members are fixtures in the spots for both the campaigns.
Hayes has more prominently featured her husband, Milford Hayes, this election cycle. He kept a lower profile during her last run for office two years ago.
Sitting in a kitchen with the congresswoman, Milford Hayes narrated an ad that goes through both of their careers: Milford who has served in law enforcement for more than two decades and the congresswoman who worked as a teacher in Waterbury and won National Teacher of the Year in 2016.
Her campaign ran another ad in the same kitchen setting as the congresswoman recalls her experiences as a high-school drop out and teenage mother and to help people “to work their way back.”
“We want the exact same things no matter where we came from,” Hayes said in the ad.
Logan, meanwhile, is emphasizing his background as the son of immigrants from Guatemala. And a few of his ads have been reprises of ones he ran during his 2022 campaign.
The first TV spot of his 2024 campaign was a reprise of an ad he ran during his last campaign for the 5th District. It features him pulling objects out of a box labeled “typical Republican,” arguing that Democrats are trying to fit him into a certain box.
His other ad that ran during the Democratic National Convention gives a nod to his family’s history. Logan is the son of Guatemalan immigrants who had roots in Jamaica. In ads from both his 2022 and 2024 campaigns, he has prominently featured his mother, Olga, and her concerns that her favorite seasoning, adobo, cost more.
In a recent ad to reach more Latino voters, Logan is featured alongside a business owner from New Britain in an auto-body shop as he speaks in Spanish about the economy and immigration.