Matt Ritter is set to be longest-serving CT House speaker in 20 years

House Speaker Matthew D. Ritter of Hartford sat in his corner office at the state Capitol, a thick sheaf of papers in hand. They listed the wants and needs of the members of his growing Democratic majority, whose numbers and political diversity bring Ritter opportunities and challenges.

He had just come from a ceremony reopening the Hartford Public Library nearly two years after a burst pipe caused catastrophic damage. Ritter, who was instrumental in delivering an $8.3 million grant that made possible a top-to-bottom refurbishing, was introduced before the mayor.

Waiting for him at the Capitol was Steve Winter, a representative-elect from New Haven, eager to discuss his desired committee assignments. He is an environmentalist and former alderman whose summer job before his senior year at Yale in 2010 was working for Ned Lamont’s first and unsuccessful campaign for governor.

It was late November, and Ritter was working methodically to meet a self-imposed early December deadline for matching the interests of his caucus to limited slots on committees and in leadership. He finished last week, knowing that not everyone would be happy with his choices.

Whether in Hartford or Washington, D.C., being the speaker of a diverse legislative body is among the more difficult jobs in contemporary American politics. Just ask Kevin McCarthy, whose inability to satisfy his fractious GOP caucus in Congress made his time as U.S. House speaker extraordinarily brief and unhappy.

No one confuses Ritter with McCarthy. 

The General Assembly’s new term begins Jan. 8, when Ritter is set to become only the third person elected to a third two-year term as speaker of the Connecticut House. That milestone is less noteworthy than what may come next: Ritter has not ruled out becoming the first to seek a fourth term.

It is a sensitive notion he already has broached with lawmakers, especially those whose own aspirations would get moved back two years. They include House Majority Leader Jason Rojas of East Hartford and the three women already maneuvering to succeed Rojas when and if he moves up. There is a palpable disappointment in some corners but no mutiny in Ritter’s house.

Being speaker can be akin to conducting an orchestra, drawing music from disparate elements, knowing when a performer is ready for a solo, and choosing pieces that allow lesser players their moment. Others liken it to three-dimensional chess. Ritter prefers a different analogy. 

“I love sports. If you think about it, the team changes every two years, and so you have to adjust what you’re going to do going into this cycle,” Ritter said. “In my mind, I said to myself there is a group of third- and fourth-termers, 90% of them female, and it’s their time. A lot of them have won very difficult districts or turned districts very blue that were purple or red for a long time.”

He was talking about lawmakers like Aimee Berger-Girvalo of Ridgefield and Jennifer Leeper of Fairfield, both comfortably reelected last month after flipping Republican seats in 2020. Berger-Girvalo will be the new co-chair of Transportation; Leeper, co-chair of Education.

Ritter speaks like a basketball coach, a vocation he admires and, at times, envies. He talks about the importance getting the right people their minutes, their time on the floor. Democrats won a 102-49 majority on Nov. 5, a net gain of four seats that gave them their biggest advantage since winning 114 seats in 2008.

“You have to look at your playbook and your team and go, ‘There’s gonna be new starters, there’s gonna be minutes for these people, these individuals,’” Ritter said. “We’ll be very intentional about that, and the committee picks will reflect that. That was a priority.”

Ultimately, when he finished last week, there would be new co-chairs of eight committees and a ninth new committee. Seven of the nine had been elected in 2020, six of them women. Ritter had his new starters.

“In another world, I would have loved to have been a college basketball coach,” said Ritter, a gym rat whose workout routines range from pickup basketball games to Orangetheory. “I can’t think of a better job — maybe not with the pressure of UConn.”

Ritter, 41, is a lawyer, father of a son and daughter and husband of a primary-care physician, Marilyn Katz, who married into a political clan: Matt Ritter is a third-generation member of the Connecticut General Assembly, elected at 27 after unseating an incumbent in a Democratic primary by two votes in 2010.

His father is Thomas D. Ritter, who was elected from the same district at the same age in 1980, succeeding his own father, George Ritter. It took Tom Ritter a dozen years to become a leader, winning the speaker’s job at age 40. The son became the majority leader after six and speaker after 10.

Being Tommy Ritter’s kid meant good seats at UConn men’s and women’s basketball games and a degree of familiarity with Geno Auriemma. On a visit to the House in 2012, the coach irreverently took note from the dais of the fact that the kid, the son of a former speaker now a UConn trustee, was a state lawmaker.

“Mr. Ritter, it’s good to see you here today. I remember when you were a high school kid, badgering me to speak at your high school graduation, you little punk,” Auriemma said. “And I knew he was going to be a good politician because he said, ‘My dad’s the speaker of the House, and if you don’t come, you’re in big trouble.’ I thought, ‘That’s a hell of a way to get me to come speak at your high school.’ But I did.”

Ritter laughed.

It was Tom Ritter who broke what had been a two-term traditional limit for serving as speaker, the father setting a new standard the son is contemplating changing once more. By winning a third term, Tom Ritter succeeded in the ’90s, where two predecessors, James J. Kennelly of Hartford and Irving J. Stolberg of New Haven, failed in the ’70s and ’80s. 

Tom Ritter’s successor, Moira K. Lyons of Stamford, was the last to wield the gavel for three terms. That was 20 years ago.

Moira Lyons and Thomas D. Ritter attending the opening of the session as guests in January 2017. They are the only two speakers to hold the post for more than two terms in the modern era of the General Assembly. Ritter’s son, Matt, is about to become the third. Credit: mark pazniokas
Under the rules, the job of speaker is all powerful: Matt Ritter controls committee assignments and decides when to call bills for a vote.

The reality is far more complicated. To be effective, Ritter must take into account the disparate views and political needs of a caucus whose members represents the richest of the rich in Greenwich, the poorest of the poor in Hartford, and lots of folks in between.

Lawmakers of both parties say Ritter has an uncanny ability to read the caucus, gauge its moods and, most importantly, count votes.

“That’s the job. To be good, it’s having the soft skills to know when a maybe is a yes or a maybe is a no, and developing trust with your colleagues that they can tell you where they’re at, and you will not betray their confidence,” said Rep. Josh Elliott, D-Hamden, a deputy speaker.

House Democrats have gained 23 seats over four two-year election cycles that coincide with Ritter’s tenure as majority leader and speaker. Within the 102-member caucus are distinct if shifting centers of power and influence: a moderate faction, a larger progressive group, and a Black and Puerto Rican Caucus that is influential though hardly monolithic in its views.

“Potentially, we could be a very fractious caucus. We’ve got a lot of different people, different personalities and different priorities, and he’s been good at bringing people together,” said Rep. Maria Horn, D-Salisbury, whom Ritter made a committee co-chair in her second term.

Horn is one of three women playing the long game of positioning themselves for a run at majority leader in 2026 or 2028. The others are Cristin McCarthy-Vahey of Fairfield and Kate Farrar of West Hartford. They are using a playbook written by Tom Ritter and perfected by Matt Ritter.

The elder Ritter was the last speaker to win the job without first becoming majority leader. He won by quietly locking up support nearly two years before the job would be open. The son did the same thing in 2016, lining up votes for an expected run at majority leader in 2018.

J. Brendan Sharkey, the House speaker, surprised the caucus by not seeking reelection in 2016, making way for the majority leader, Joe Aresimowicz, to become speaker. Others opened a campaign for majority leader, only to learn that Matt Ritter already had the votes.

As speaker, Ritter’s own political philosophy is not easy to discern.

“Matt rarely shows his cards with regard to what is important to him personally,” Elliott said. 

A notable exception was the successful advocacy by Ritter, a former co-chair of the Public Health Committee, for the repeal of religious exemptions for childhood vaccinations.

Ritter agrees with the label others often apply to his politics: He is a pragmatist.

“I think pragmatist a good word, right?” Ritter said. “I think I’ve been accused of being very liberal and being too moderate. And I guess it depends on the issue.”

On social issues, Ritter said he stands to the left of many colleagues. On fiscal ones, he sees himself as closer to the center, though he is pressing Lamont to loosen the state’s strict spending caps.

More typically, the speaker’s job is one of facilitation, not dictation. A great irony of legislative politics is that speakers and majority leaders, after reaching the top of the leadership ladder, more often than not have to sublimate their own desires and instead reflect the collective needs or desires of the majority. 

“He does an exceptional job of it,” said Elliott, a liberal who initially chafed at the pace and often incremental nature of bills passed in the House. “I think that virtually all my colleagues agree, even if we, and at times certainly myself as well, are frustrated by the progress of certain pieces of legislation.”

In 2023, Ritter refused to call a Senate bill that would have expanded Connecticut’s limited mandate on private employers to provide sick days to virtually all employees. It was too much of an expansion for a significant number of House Democrats, and Ritter refused to pressure them by calling a vote.

Instead, Ritter directed advocates, as well as the leadership of the Labor and Public Employees Committee, to spend another year doing outreach. A revised version phasing in the expansion passed in 2024.

His incremental, bring-them-along approach to lawmaking was evident last year when some lawmakers, including moderate Democrats and some members of the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, joined with Republicans in hitting the brakes on a push to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.

Ritter publicly defended those who had raised concerns about the cost of EVs, the availability of a charging network and the capacity of the electric grid.

“Our party sometimes has a wag-our-finger approach to individuals who may not always see it the same way,” Ritter said then. “These are real concerns that can’t be just shooed away, they can’t be wished away. They have to be worked on.”

Ritter has a constructive working relationship with the House Republican minority, whose members appreciate his adherence to the General Assembly’s tradition of unlimited debate, which gives the GOP a measure of influence even if they only hold one-third of the seats.

Under legislative rules, any debate can be ended by a motion to call the question, but House and Senate leaders are loathe to use it. In the last session, that meant a sweeping climate bill that passed the House never came to a vote in the Senate, where the GOP had vowed a filibuster as the session wound down.

That infuriated the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Christine Palm, D-Chester, generally an ally and admirer of Ritter. She had followed Ritter’s recipe of negotiating a bill that relied more on carrots than sticks to broaden support, only to see every House Republican vote against the measure and the Senate refuse to call a vote.

The cautious approach was a failure, Palm said.

“Certainly with the climate, which is my main concern, with women’s rights, there is no room for caution,” Palm said. “And I know that’s probably a hot take and not a politically astute thing to say, because there is kind of a universally accepted tenet that moderation and meeting in the middle and bipartisanship and all of that consensus building stuff is, by definition, the best place to be. I don’t believe that. I believe that dire times call for dire measures.”

Ritter already has identified passage of a climate bill as a priority in 2025, but Palm will not play a role. She did not seek reelection.

There is a degree of cooperation between the parties in Hartford that is long gone in Washington, and Ritter’s respect of the GOP minority and its leader, Rep. Vincent J. Candelora of North Branford, generally are seen as a positive.

“His strength is his ability to listen to people,” Candelora said. “And I think a lot of times in listening, he does have an ability to cut deals and negotiate.”

“He’s good at taking the emotional temperature down on things,” said Horn, the co-chair of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee.

The leaders enjoy a mutual trust. Ritter’s relationship with Candelora was a factor in breaking a 20-year deadlock on raising legislative pay. Near the end of the 2022 session, Ritter cut a deal to de-politicize the issue: Most Republicans opposed the raise, but Candelora supported it and no Republican spoke in opposition.

Not only did the measure increase legislative base pay from $28,000 to $40,000, it placed future increases on autopilot by pegging salaries to the Employment Cost Index, a measure of wage growth calculated by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. As a result, salaries will increase 4.5% in each year of the term that begins next month.

Another Ritter success was the creation of the Community Investment Fund, a compromise Ritter struck with the governor in 2021 that creates a competitive process for nonprofits and municipalities to get funding and defused a legislative-executive turf battle over borrowing.

Lamont, a Democrat who took office in 2019 vowing to put Connecticut on a “debt diet” curtailing lawmakers’ desires for bringing home the bacon, embraced the idea of setting standards on a process that formerly was ad hoc, often reflecting the desires of a single lawmaker.

With Lamont’s assent, the law Ritter crafted in cooperation with the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus commits the state to $875 million in borrowing over an initial five-year period, assuming about $175 million in grants in each of those five years. 

“I’m going to be honest with you. I think he’s done a really good job, and he’s a really good speaker. I love working with him,” Rojas said.

But Rojas, who has hopes of becoming the first Latino speaker of the House, is less than happy about pushing off that possibility from the end of a third Ritter term as speaker in January 2027 to the conclusion of a fourth one in 2029.

“I think it’s less about any of the specific people in these roles and more a question about what’s best for the institution,” Rojas said. And a regular infusion of new blood — “renewal in leadership,” in his words — is better for the institution than not,” Rojas said.

At some point, Ritter and Rojas are likely to be asked their difference on the issue, while seated side by side. The leaders hold a joint press conference for a half-hour before the start of every session day, a practice begun by Aresimowicz and Ritter, when they were speaker and majority leader.

It is one House tradition expected to continue.