It's Primary Day...
...in Connecticut, the day when people finally get to vote on the Lieberman vs. Lamont choice. By most accounts, Lieberman has the momentum.
A new poll shows him pulling to within six points of Lamont, the margin of error. (It's 51-45, Lamont; a week ago, it was 54-41.) Despite his cries of not having enough money, he's blanketing the state with TV commercials and paying his get-out-the-vote staffers almost twice what Lamont is paying his. Lieberman's tone has, as expected, gotten considerably nastier. The Lieberman campaign is even claiming that left-wing bloggers hacked their website, which crashed. Typical Lieberman:
A blogger captures a screen shot showing that the campaign simply forgot to pay its web-hosting service.
A slight digression: Though the Times actually endorsed Lamont, its news coverage seems decidedly slanted towards Lieberman—something which is important in Connecticut, where lots of people read the Times. In the past few days, there have been several stories about Lieberman and virtually nothing on Lamont. And look at
the web version of this page one story: It opens with a big picture of Joe Lieberman—but has none of Lamont—and in the first sentence, it hyperlinks Lieberman's name and not Lamont's. It'd be interesting after this is all done to go back and look at the coverage, which has given Lieberman an enormous amount of attention while virtually ignoring the man who may well unseat him.
I was confident that Lamont had this primary well in hand; it's highly unusual for polls to swing six or seven points in a week. Now, I'm not so sure. And you can argue the polls either way. Narrowing the gap obviously helps Lieberman, but it might also make Lamont supporters even more determined to vote.
That's the wonderful thing about politics: You just never know what's going to happen until the votes are counted. And sometimes—as with, oh, certain presidential elections—not even then.
