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Second-term U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, riding two-to-one support among women and college graduates, has a 53-to-40 percent lead over Republican challenger Leora Levy with six weeks to go before Election Day.
A new CT Insider/Channel 3 Eyewitness News/Western New England University poll of more than 750 people indicates that Levy has an under-water favorability rating of 18 percent. However, the Trump-endorsed Levy has a narrow 47-to-44 percent edge over Blumenthal in support among male voters; 49 to 43 percent among voters with a high school diploma or less; and a 50 percent to 43 percent edge among 55 to 64-year-olds.
Blumenthal, a Democrat who is the stateâs former longtime attorney general, dominates in almost every other category in the statewide phone and online survey that occurred between Sept. 15 and 21. He has a 62 to 32-point lead among women and an identical 62 to 32 percent edge among those with college degrees. Blumenthal is ahead by 20 points, 55 to 35 percent, among 18 to 39-year-olds; a 56 to 40 percent lead among 40 to 54-year-olds and a 57 to 36-point margin among those 65 and older.
Blumenthal, a sharp critic of Donald Trump, has a neutral 46-percent favorability rating among Connecticut voters, with an unfavorability rating of 42 percent. The Western New England University Polling Institute asked respondents their voting preferences âif the election were held today.â
âSenator Blumenthal is working to be Connecticutâs choice for the Senate while his opponent is Donald Trumpâs choice,â campaign spokesman Ty McEachern said. âAs always, heâs focused on his job, delivering results for the people of Connecticut. He will continue to work like heâs 10 points behind.â
Levy campaign spokesman Tim Saler disputed the findings of the survey. âDespite these errors, the facts of this race are clear: Dishonest Dick is vulnerable, even after spending more than $3 million on advertising and having his friend Chuck Schumerâs shady dark money super PAC come in with six figures worth of attack ads against Leora Levy,â Saler said in a statement. âOnce voters learn about his support for the open borders that flood our communities with fentanyl, how he stole valor from our veterans, his soft-on-crime record supporting the defunding of our police, and his vote to send our hard-earned tax dollars to build luxury resorts and hotels in other states, Dick will be in even deeper trouble.â
Among Republicans, Levy gets a 46-percent favorable rating, with 30 percent of GOP voters say they havenât heard enough about her, and 12 percent of GOP members said they had no opinion on her.
Veteran state political scientist Gary L. Rose, chairman of the Department of Government at Sacred Heart University, said that if Levy wants to make it closer on Nov. 8, her campaign had better change tactics soon. âSheâs become a phantom candidate,â Rose said in a Tuesday interview. âShe has clearly receded from the campaign. Blumenthalâs approval ratings are not great but they are not awful, and you would think that she would use that, at this point. I have never seen anything like this.â
Rose speculated that Levy might have a shortage of money. âShe was visible on TV and active when she was competing in the primary, but after she won, she disappeared,â Rose said. âTo me this is unprecedented that a candidate would just vanish like this after staging an upset against (former state House Minority Leader Themis) Klarides. I know sheâs low on cash. Maybe sheâs marshaling all of her resources for the last stretch of the campaign. I have a feeling itâs a resource issue.â
Rose acknowledged that it was Trumpâs endorsement in the days before the campaign that resulted in the primary win. âIt makes you wonder what the people who voted for her are thinking right now,â Rose said. âTo challenge Blumenthal, youâve got to really step up your campaign. This is without a doubt the most poorly run Senate campaign I have ever seen.â
âI havenât seen any pressing-of-the-flesh type of events that Leora Levy has been involved in,â said Gayle Alberda, a professor of political science at Fairfield University, who stressed that Blumenthal has been a formidable candidate for decades. âItâs kind of Blumenthalâs to lose. I donât see the race as super-competitive.â
Less money in a campaign means fewer campaign workers knocking on doors, as well as phone-banking and advertising. She noted that with 36 percent of voters not knowing enough about her to establish a favorable rating, plus 21 percent with no opinion, is bad news.
âItâs not a good place to be in when you are in the last few weeks of an election especially against an incumbent,â Alberda said, adding that Levy might have failed to do the traditional post-primary pivot from attracting the party base, to moving toward the middle occupied by most voters. âShe doesnât have a lot of name recognition, which means itâs a struggle beyond her core base.â
âAs the campaign heads into the final six weeks, Leora Levyâs top priority has to be building her profile among voters,â added Tim Vercellotti, professor of political science and director of the Polling Institute at Western New England University. âWith the electorate almost evenly divided over Blumenthalâs favorability, Levy could gain some ground if she becomes better known.â
Blumenthalâs edge is slightly less than a recent Quinnipiac University Poll where Blumenthal led Levy 57 â 40 percent, but identical to an Emerson College Poll from mid-month, when Blumenthal had a 13-point lead. âItâs clear they are making this seat a target,â Blumenthal said in a fundraising email on Monday night, noting that the change of one Senate seat to Republican would lose the Democratsâ their two-year-old majority. âItâs clear that in the final, most crucial weeks of the election, we must be in a position of strength to fight back.â
âThree skewed public polls in a row now all show the same thing, that Dishonest Dick Blumenthal is badly upside-down among independents, even in a survey that has comically over-represented college-educated voters,â said Saler from the Levy campaign. âPerhaps from the ivory tower it may look like 62 percent of Connecticut voters have a college degree, but in fact that number is much, much lower. This dramatically affects the results of the survey, as does the balance of partisanship. Unaffiliated voters, who are unfavorable to Dishonest Dick by ten points, are also under-represented in this survey, even compared to the blue wave midterm in 2018.â
The CT Insider/Channel 3 Eyewitness News/Western New England University poll carries a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points based on the sample size. In addition, Vercellotti added 1.5 percentage points of error margin to account for sampling error under industry transparency principles, for a total of 4.8 percentage points â rounded up to a margin of error of plus or minus 5 points. Smaller sub-samples such as men or women, Democrats or Republicans, carry a larger margin of error.
The voter reaction to Blumenthal in the new poll is similar to Gov. Ned Lamont, whom the poll found to have a 55 percent to 40 percent lead over GOP challenger Bob Stefanowski.
Tune in to WFSB-Channel 3 for more coverage of the debate including Eyewitness News chief political reporter Susan Raff at 6 p.m. and Dan Haar of Hearst CT Insider at 5:30 p.m.
[email protected] Twitter: @KenDixonCT