The most recent Quinnipiac poll,
usually reliable, shows U.S. Senate Republican Nominating Convention choice
Linda McMahon surging over primary challenger Chris Shays. Mrs. McMahon leads
Mr. Shays in the primary poll by nearly 30 points, a considerable increase in
March figures showing Mrs. McMahon leading Mr. Shays by a slender 9 points.
At the same time, Mrs. McMahon has reduced the lead enjoyed
last March by U.S. Representative Chris Murphy, having reduced a 15 point
Murphy lead to 3 points, a virtual tie.
The poll removes from Republican primary challenger Shay’s
quiver an especially wounding arrow. Thus far, Mr. Shays has been arguing to the
steady drumbeat of Connecticut’s left of center media that only he could
successfully challenge Mr. Murphy in a general election campaign. March polling
figures showed Mrs. McMahon lagging far behind Mr. Murphy, while Mr. Shays was
snapping at his heels.
The most telling datum in the poll is Mrs. McMahon’s
improvement among unaffiliated voters.
“McMahon's improvement in the general election against
Murphy,” said poll director Douglas
Schwartz, “is due to her better performance among independent voters.
She now has 43 percent of these key voters, to Murphy's 41 percent, overcoming
a 15-point deficit in March.”
This figure, reducing a deficit among Independents from 15
to 2 points, perhaps may tell Democrats in the state more than they would wish
to know about the political orientation of Independent voters.
Mrs. McMahon’s surge comes at a time when the Shays campaign
has brought in such heavy Washington hitters to stump for him as Karl Rove, once
thought to be President George Bush’s brain, and Dick Morris, the pollster, author
and columnist who made himself unwanted during the Clinton administration. Mr.
McCain’s past association with Shays – the author of the equivalent of the
McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill in the U.S. House – is particularly
warm. Mr. McCain once told Mr. Shays that if the reform effort succeeded they
would call the bill McCain-Feingold, and if it failed they would call it Shays-Meehan.
Endorsements, evidently, do not have the same heft as in times past. Mrs.
McMahon’s surprising surge has been attributed by many commentators to a raft
of ads made possible by … wait for it … Mrs. McMahon’s obscene fortune.
The planted axiom in most media accounts of the race so far
has been that Independents tend to be moderates, an assumption that assumes far
too much. There are some indications that Independents, while formally
unaffiliated with either of the two major parties, tend to be contrarians; and
since the dominant political party in Connecticut – the ruling Democratic Party,
ever since Dannel Malloy was elected Connecticut’s 88th governor by
a slender majority – is now virtually unchallenged, the Independent contrarian
may be strongly attracted to vigorous candidates whose history of party
attachment is slight.
As both state parties begin to lose influence over a
shifting landscape of distressed voters, Independents on both sides of the
ideological barricades seem to have adopted as their operative principle a
boast of Archimedes, the great Greek military engineer: “Give me a place
outside the world where I may place my lever, and I will move the world.” But no
place outside either of the nation’s two political parties offers a politically
effective footing.
The natural instinct of a potential fire victim caught inside
a burning building is to escape the fire; once outside, proprietary interests
take over and, assuming he is invested in the property, he may want to join the
effort to quench the fire. Both the Democratic and Republican fire brigades are
very much interested in recruiting Independents to join in their separate and
quite distinct efforts to save the burning house. As the danger becomes more pressing,
the choice becomes more imperative and fraught with dubious consequences.
We know very little about the political psychology that moves
Independents. Academics would perform a great service for their country if they
were to probe Independents with their “scientific” instruments with a view to
determining what William James, the father of American pragmatism, might have
called the “live options” at the molten core of the county’s political
structure, especially now when many indicators suggest the nation – indeed,
the entire Western world – may be tottering on the brink of a new political
realignment.
We
have had enough of polls. We need a serious scientific based analysis of the
county’s shifting vital center
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