Tiffani McGinnis, a West Hartford town councilor and Democratic political organizer, opened a campaign this week to succeed state Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, who is running for Congress.
McGinnis is the first candidate to declare for the open seat in the safe Democratic district, and it underscores what Gilchrest has been telling Democrats: Her campaign to qualify for a primary against U.S. Rep. John B. Larson is all or nothing.
“I am running for Congress, and I will not be running for state representative,” Gilchrest said Friday.
McGinnis has made no formal announcement, but she electronically filed her registration as a candidate for General Assembly with the State Elections Enforcement Commission on Tuesday night.
The filing was expected, coming after Gilchrest assured McGinnis that she had no desire for Democrats to put a hold on anyone else seeking the 18th House District seat she won by unseating an incumbent eight years ago.
“She reached out to me,” Gilchrest said, a gesture she called “very unnecessary.”
McGinnis, 54, is a Tennessee native who had been a political activist for a dozen years before moving to West Hartford a decade ago with her husband and three children.
The last election that McGinnis observed as only a spectator was the 2000 presidential election, which Al Gore lost after the U.S. Supreme Court settled a contentious and close Florida recount in favor George W. Bush.
“I started volunteering in 2004,” McGinnis said Friday.
In 2020, she worked for the election of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris as the organizer of New England Women for Biden-Harris. Four years later, she created Gen X for Harris.
Democrats selected her as one of the electors who would cast Connecticut’s seven Electoral College votes in 2024 for Harris, who easily won the state over Donald J. Trump.
She also was active in Connecticut politics, serving as treasurer of Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz’s reelection campaign in 2022, then chairing a political action committee Bysiewicz formed in 2023, Women in Power PAC.
“Occasionally, I would think about running for office,” McGinnis said.
In March 2023, McGinnis was appointed to a vacancy on the West Hartford town council. She was elected to a two-year term in 2023 and reelected in 2025 on a slate of six Democrats that outpolled Republicans by nearly 3-1 margins.
No other Democrat has made a move for Gilchrest’s seat.
“Tiffani is the only person who has reached out to me,” Gilchrest said.
McGinnis’s registration as a candidate is of value to Gilchrest, whose candidacy has not been helped by speculation that she eventually would quit the race for Congress and seek a fifth term representing in the General Assembly.
Gilchrest was elected to the state House as an insurgent, unseating a 12-term incumbent, Andy Fleischmann, in a Democratic primary she won with 53% of the vote in 2018.
It is a template she now is trying to replicate on a larger, more crowded stage: the 27 communities of the 1st Congressional District, which is dominated by Hartford and its suburbs.
Larson, 77, of East Hartford, is facing his first serious challenge since winning the open congressional seat in 1998.
Gilchrest, former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin and Hartford school board member Ruth Fortune are seeking the Democratic nomination. Any candidate who wins 15% of the vote at a nominating convention in May will qualify for a primary in August.