My name is Andrew Rice, I use he/him pronouns and I am a Democratic Socialist exploring a potential run for the Democratic nomination to represent the people of Connecticut’s Third Congressional District!

I was born in Danbury Connecticut and have lived in Connecticut almost my entire life with the exception of one year in Kentucky as a toddler and 2 years in England as a tween. 

My childhood was mostly in the Second Congressional District of Connecticut until I moved to Milford in 2010 to begin working at Yale University. Before working at Yale I had just gotten my Bachelor of Science in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Connecticut. While working at Yale I simultaneously earned a Master of Science in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of New Haven. My life has been focused on the pursuit of scientific knowledge and how it can better the quality of life for everyone, and a lot of that drawing inspiration from being a Trekkie.  

With the exception of my magnificent mutt Yoshi, I have decided to be child free and part of the reason for that decision is I am worried about what the future holds for those that will come after me. I am also a renter. Although I have been blessed to have rented the same house for the last 13 years, like most people in my generation, I have been priced out of the housing market. My father provided a home for me to grow up in, and it’s hard to imagine not being able to provide the same for a child. Even still, Connecticut has blessed me with education, with work, and with a thriving life. It pains me that those blessings are more of an exception than a rule for the people of Connecticut. It pains me to see people struggling around me while I thrive and I have spent too many years trying to figure out how to help affect positive change as I foolishly believed the Democratic Party was the only option, and an option I have become jaded with in recent years. I was at a Hands Off rally in New Haven in April of 2025 and was approached by a member of Connecticut’s Democratic Socialists of America who spoke to issues I cared about and offered community based solutions to those issues. I became more heavily involved and active to make up for lost time of not finding an avenue to help sooner.

During an event to raise awareness for Gaza, fortune brought me in close proximity to Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut’s Third Congressional District where I confronted her about the 2 million people in Gaza on the brink of starvation. I asked her why she could not call this a genocide and how does she sleep with herself at night, and without a moment to pause she responded “very well.” I do not sleep very well at night knowing 2 million people starve. I can admit what is happening in Gaza is genocide and I still do not sleep well. I do not sleep well knowing that while a genocide is committed with our tax dollars, there are people in the third congressional district of Connecticut, losing their jobs, losing their ability to save, or get ahead. There are people who have multiple jobs who still struggle to pay for higher rents and higher grocery costs. There are teachers that worry how they will provide quality education to ever larger growing class rooms. The youth worry about our environment and if we will hand over a sustainable planet. And my question to Rosa DeLauro is, do you still sleep well at night knowing how your constituents suffer while our tax dollars support foreign wars?

Rosa DeLauro has been in Congress since I was a toddler. There are some truly wonderful ideas she has championed over the years especially her leadership on Head Start and the millions of children it benefitted. But 20th Century solutions are not meeting the demand of 21st Century problems. Head Start is a great start, but at the end of the day, it is still not enough to address the cost of living crisis and the American Dream for my generation and younger seems more like a fairytale. You can’t use a bandaid for a broken bone.

If Rosa was truly supporting our district, why have conditions over the last 15 years that I have been here gotten worse? As a member of the appropriations committee, Rosa has great influence on what Congress appropriates. And with that influence she sent 8.5 million taxpayer dollars from her home town in New Haven to fuel the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time instead of giving 5,431 New Haven Households one month's free rent, or 18,227 families in New Haven one month's free groceries, or 3,014 New Haven Children free or low-cost healthcare, and the list goes on.

If Rosa DeLauro truly represented the people, why is it that out of the $1.7 million dollars she raised last election cycle, only 5% came from small donations. How can she represent the true interests of the people when she takes corporate money from HP, Deloitte, AT&T, Verizon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, L3Harris, and SpaceX?!

After my confrontation I was approached with the idea of running against her, and I decided maybe this was how I can affect positive change. By helping people to see the lies that once fooled me, to realize that the people in power whether Democrat or Republican, do not truly value our livelihoods. And by providing a bold new platform of working class ideas made for working class people. A platform that offers new generational ideas versus ideas of older generations packaged in a younger body. I want to inspire the people of Connecticut’s Third District to imagine a better and brighter future for their kids and for themselves. And I want to inspire the working class to fight for what we deserve, the true value of our labor and our ideas, and build a coalition of people who will support me in demanding that our needs be taken seriously and that our needs are met. Together we are stronger, no one can change the future alone, and so I am asking you to explore with me the potential of building a movement that can deliver actual life changing results to the wonderful people of Connecticut’s Third Congressional District!!!