When Sen. Christopher Dodd announced in January that he would step down rather than face a potentially doomed re-election battle, the state's longtime attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, jumped into the race. Hardly anyone was surprised: Blumenthal had served as attorney general for almost 20 years and had long been rumored to be interested in seeking higher office -- there was talk of him running against Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2006 and for governor in 2008. When he did neither, many bet that he would run against the increasingly unpopular Lieberman in 2012. In the race for Dodd's seat, he was also, immediately, the hands-down favorite, a hope to save the critical seat for the Democrats.
Despite the recent flap over Blumenthal's statements about his service during Vietnam, (questions have arisen over whether he described himself as serving "in" Vietnam while he was really a Marine Corps reservist), he still seems like the front-runner. A recent Quinnipiac University poll has him beating his likely Republican challenger, the wrestling businesswoman Linda McMahon, 56 percent to 31 percent. That's down only slightly from the 33-point lead he enjoyed before the Vietnam-service stories ran in The New York Times. Even his score on honesty and trustworthiness, which took a hit, remains higher than hers, at 60 percent to 45 percent.
The Vietnam-service controversy hasn't hurt him nearly as badly as many predicted, in part because those pundits don't know Connecticut politics all that well. Spending 20 years fighting criminals, fat cats, con men, and the tobacco industry as attorney general is a tough gig to screw up, and Blumenthal didn't. "He's just beloved. It's sort of like the wart on the face of the supermodel. It's something everyone pays attention to, but when you look at it in comparison to everyone else, it's not that bad," says Scott McLean, a professor of political science at Quinnipiac University.
But the Vietnam slipup just leaves more room for McMahon to attack Blumenthal and to make a name for herself politically. While it may not be true across the board that voters this election are motivated by anti-incumbent feeling, it might be true in Connecticut. That sentiment, after all, is what got Dodd out of the race in the first place. The big races -- for Dodd's Senate seat and the governorship -- have no true incumbents, and in the vacuum, political outsiders, or relative outsiders, are rising.
The two front-runners for governor, Democrat Ned Lamont and Republican Tom Foley, are both businessmen who are running on a jobs message. (Lamont, who founded a telecommunications company, has served as the town selectman of Greenwich, Connecticut, and famously beat Lieberman in the Democratic nomination for Senate in 2006, but has never held a full-time political office.) Both are pulling ahead of more establishment candidates, like Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele on the Republican side and Mayor Dannel Malloy of Stamford on the Democratic side. In this environment, and given the sheer amount of resources she has available, McMahon could still turn the race for Dodd's seat into a real one.
"Voters are attracted to that outsider message," says Gary Rose, a political-science professor at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Not everyone took McMahon seriously at first. While she is the former chief financial officer of World Wrestling Entertainment, her connection to the WWE was seen as a potential liability in a race against even a weakened incumbent like Dodd. But compared to the wildly popular Blumenthal, who entered the race with an almost 80 percent approval rating, the Republicans had nothing to lose and a lot to gain from McMahon, who said she was ready to spend $50 million of her own money to win the seat.
McMahon had been part of the WWE since its beginnings in 1980. Her husband, Vince McMahon, founded it as Titan Sports and acquired another wrestling company from his father, and Linda and Vince combined companies to form a national entertainment institution. It remains mostly a family-run business in Stamford, and the McMahons live in nearby Greenwich. The wrestlers tour the country, but the wrestling empire's staple remains its Monday-night television shows. Those shows, Raw and Smackdown, gave McMahon's Republican challenger, Rob Simmons, a former congressman who served as the state's first business advocate, a steady supply of violent, raunchy videos -- in one, Vince compared scantily clad female wrestlers to dogs -- with which to attack Linda. While the shows have plenty of female viewers, and the live events can sell out Madison Square Garden, it's still primarily a show that entertains 18- to 34-year-old men.
Rose says Linda McMahon's unpopularity is mainly connected to the sometimes tawdry WWE. Its appeal to the white working class doesn't give it a natural market in relatively wealthy Connecticut, and McMahon's on-screen persona, in which she and other WWE members pretend to fight over affairs, illegitimate childre,n and money, could explain her low integrity ratings. McLean says it's also polarizing, which could be McMahon's problem. When she uses words like "smackdown" and "headlock" in her campaign, she might appeal to some voters, but she's likely to turn off those who think professional wrestling is a low-brow plague on society. How well she overcomes wrestling's image will be determined by how well she defines herself as a candidate separately from her time at WWE. She resigned in November 2009.
But her campaign also relies on her executive experience. The state, a financial-services and insurance haven, took a hit in the recession, with unemployment reaching almost 10 percent during the recession and still at 9 percent in April. Both McMahon's and Blumenthal's campaign messaging concentrates on jobs and the economy. But McMahon might have the leg-up as a business leader from the state's business center, southwestern Connecticut.
McMahon's only previous public service is a 2009 appointment by Gov. M. Jodi Rell to the state's Board of Education, but a resume with no political office on it could help her with the anti-incumbent message. Right now, independent voters are leaning toward Blumenthal in polls, but they have the potential to move, and McMahon has the money to move them. She won the Republican nomination because she had the resources and hammered Simmons until he simply went away. Simmons started out as the front-runner as well. (He is still officially in the race until the primary in August but is no longer campaigning after McMahon won the party's endorsement at the convention two weeks ago.)
McLean thinks the race could tighten around Labor Day, but he still gives the edge to Blumenthal. But if ever there were a time for a political outsider to attack someone as popular as he is, now is it. "She has hired an A-team with her money to manage her campaign and to market her on television," Rose says. "A lot of Republican voters have been swayed by what they've seen on television." Now, she will try to hone that message for the general electorate, and Blumenthal, while still strong, might not be as sure a win as the conventional wisdom hold.
