Yesterday I wrote, "For what it's worth - and it's not much - my guess/prediction in today's Democratic Senate primary is Ned Lamont by a small margin - say, 51-49 or 52-48." With 98 percent of the precincts reporting, it's Lamont 51.79 percent, Lieberman 48.21 percent.
Feeling my oats, I'm now going to predict that between now and Election Day you're going to see polls showing Lamont up big. And yet, he's doomed.
Let's do some math. According to state records, Connecticut has 1.95 million active registered voters as of last year, of whom 653,055 were registered as Democrats, about 33.4 percent. Registered Republicans amount to 427,803, or 21.9 percent, and unaffiliated voters number the largest chunk, 867,761, about 44.4 percent.
Last night, Lamont got a bit more than half of the Democrats to vote for him. His supporters will contend that Democrats will abandon Lieberman in droves. (I'm somewhat skeptical - if you're motivated enough to show up on primary day and vote for him against Lamont in August, either because you really like Lieberman or because you really don't like Lamont, what will change your mind in the 90 days until Election Day?)
Let's give Lamont just about the best case scenario. (For the sake of this exercise assuming turnout will be roughly equal percentage turnout rate among Democrats, Republicans, and unaffiliated. If anyone has a plausible argument that one of these groups won't show up on Election Day, let me know.) Let's say a significant number of Lieberman supporters abandon him now that he's an independent. Let's say about 20 percent, and let's assume that they all decide to support Lamont.
That gives Lamont just under 60 percent of the Democratic vote, about 20 percent of the electorate. Lieberman is left with just over 40 percent of the Democratic vote, about 13.3 percent of the electorate.
Now let's be really generous regarding the unaffiliated. Let's assume that 45 percent of the unaffiliated support the Democratic nominee, Lamont. (I think this is generous, since Lamont's argument is that he's a true-blue Democrat, less independent and less centrist.) This gives him another 19.9 percent of the total electorate. Let's give Lieberman, who's always done well among this group, 55 percent, and let's assume the Republican candidate, Alan Schlesinger, gets none, giving Joe 24.4 percent of the electorate. (Yes, I'm underestimating independent/noaffiliated support for Schlesinger, but probably not by much.)
This brings us to a 39.9 percent to 37.7 percent lead of Lamont over Lieberman. Joe would need to make up that 2.2 percent from among the 21 percent of the state voters who are registered Republicans. In other words, Lieberman would need to carry about 10.4 percent of the state's GOP voters to eke out a win (and presuming that Lamont does not get any significant support from Connecticut Republicans).
I imagine Joe can win 10.4 percent of Republicans in his sleep. Earlier in the year, 75 percent of Connecticut Republicans were willing to give Lieberman another term.
To win the Senate race, Lamont needs either a) more than 20 percent of Lieberman's supporters to abandon him and switch to Lamont b) more than 45 percent of unaffiliated voters to support him or c) less than 11 percent of Republicans to vote for Lieberman. I suppose yesterday's results show that things can change quickly, but right now those scenarios look awfully unlikely.
UPDATE: Dave, a TKS reader in Connecticut, writes in:
Lamont was the big story, but the underticket vote for Gov/Lt Gov was very interesting.
The two mayors running for Gov were DeStefano of New Haven (very left wing) and Malloy of Stamford (considered a telegenic successful mayor). Malloy’s partner for Lt. Gov was Mary Glassman a lawyer and former First Selectman of Simsbury (my home town). She is a younger Hillary Clinton wanna-be with a devoted following of middle-aged professional women.
DeStefano just edged out Malloy for Governor, but Glassman won handily for Lt. Gov.
De Stefano has no chance of beating incumbent Gov Rell, but Malloy would have had a good chance.
My reading is that the left wing activists really pushed their own agendas very hard.
Interesting. I wonder if the Governor's race will have an impact on the senatorial race.
In other news, I was surprised to hear from Gary Andres the idea that McCain might go to Connecticut to campaign for Independent Lieberman.
.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: If you didn't see Nathan Goulding's assessment of the troubles of Lieberman's web site on Sixers yesterday, it's a must read. If Nathan says "it looks to be simply the work of an inexperienced technical consultant," I believe him, as Nathan is the guy who always knows how to fix NRO publishing system problems when I say, "Ahhh! The magic box that makes my words appear on the Inter-web is broken!"
.
As he notes:
More likely, this whole episode started last night with a simple over-usage of bandwidth. In the rush to get the server back up, a temporary site using minimal bandwidth was likely uploaded — “Vote for Who You Know, Vote Joe.” I looked at the source code on this particular page, and it didn’t appear to be coded by a hacker — the code was much too fancy. (Who ever heard of a W3C-compliant hacker?)
Exactly. I mean, really! The moment I heard that this was a case of things being W3C-compliant*, it was so obvious. Duh. Clear as day.
.
* I have absolutely no idea what this means.
