Last fall, just before Election Day, William Tong went pheasant hunting in South Dakota. He’s the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut, but most of the colleagues who joined him on the trip were Republican AGs.
Perhaps surprisingly in this polarized time, Tong has real friendships with his colleagues across the aisle. “William is a great person to have involved in efforts to find bipartisan agreement on issues. He’s very likeable and he’s very reasonable,” says Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican who went on that South Dakota trip. “There are opportunities to find points of agreement and find areas where we can work together, and it takes a reasonable person to do that. William is one of those people.”
To that end, Tong has spent his time in office clinching bipartisan wins, even as he has strongly denounced – and sued to block – multiple executive orders from President Donald Trump. Tong’s office, meanwhile, has secured some major victories for Connecticut, which has played an outsized role in major national lawsuits for a relatively small state.
Tong, 52, helped lead the charge in a $6 billion settlement against Purdue Pharma and its infamous Sackler family owners for their role in the opioid epidemic. Connecticut’s share is $95 million for opioid treatment and addiction prevention. Tong also finally closed the state’s longest standing desegregation case, Sheff v. O’Neill, which had languished for more than 30 years.
Tong worked with his counterparts in Texas and Oregon to reach a $440 million settlement with JUUL over the e-cigarette manufacturer’s marketing to children. He helped lead a bipartisan coalition of 47 states in an opioid settlement against consulting giant McKinsey & Company, and he has joined or led a multitude of other consumer protection suits with colleagues from across the country.
Tong manages to balance his personal and partisan values with his vow to uphold the law, says James Tierney, a former Maine attorney general who teaches courses on AGs at Harvard Law School. And he’s a capable leader in doing so. “His staff has zero turnover,” Tierney says. “To get a job in the Connecticut attorney general’s office is very, very difficult.”
The first Asian American elected to any state office in Connecticut, Tong served a dozen years in the state House before winning election as attorney general back in 2018. His parents are immigrants from China and he grew up working in the hot kitchen of the family restaurant. He holds strong convictions about the value of immigrant workers in the U.S. and has sued the Trump administration to protect them.
But he also believes in the value of bipartisanship, releasing statements in tandem with GOP colleagues calling for peace on Election Day and urging Congress to preserve health care for 9/11 first responders and survivors. “Everybody has a role and a responsibility to hold our country together,” Tong says. “It requires people of good faith saying, ‘I see why this issue is important to you. Here’s why it’s important to me. Let’s come together and do something about it.’”
He sees his own role as relatively straightforward. “My job is to protect Connecticut and Connecticut families and Connecticut small businesses,” Tong says. “And that’s what I’m doing. It doesn’t matter who the president is.”
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