Murphy, McMahon Open Up Big Primary Leads In Race For Senate

Less than 10 weeks before an August 14 primary, Linda McMahon has opened up a large lead over Republican rival Christopher Shays in the U.S. Senate race, according to this morning’s Quinnipiac University poll.

McMahon, the co-founder and former CEO of WWE, who won the endorsement of Republicans at the state convention last month, leads Shays, a former Congressman, by 29 percentage points.

“Linda McMahon is now the clear frontrunner for the GOP nod, crushing Congressmen Christopher Shays by 29 points, after having led Shays by only 9 points back in March. It is hard to see how Shays can overcome such a large lead by primary day, August 14,” Quinnipiac Poll Director Douglas Schwartz said.

On the Democratic side, convention-endorsed candidate Chris Murphy, a Congressman from the state’s 5th District, leads former Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz by 30 points.

In a head-to-head general election match-up, McMahon is also doing better against Murphy: Murphy gets 46 percent to McMahon’s 43 percent, compared to a 52 – 37 percent Murphy lead in the March Q poll. Among unaffiliated voters, the two are essentially tied.

McMahon’s surge in this poll — and the fact she is doing better against Murphy — takes away a key argument made by Shays: that he is the more electable of the two Republicans.

“McMahon’s improvement in the general election against Murphy 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,” Schwartz said. “Unlike in our last poll, McMahon would be a stronger candidate than Shays against Murphy.”

McMahon, who spent $50 million of her vast fortune in her losing 2010 bid for a Senate seat, has been running television ads for weeks. She is the only candidate currently on the air.

Shortly after the poll was released, McMahon tweeted a message to supporters. “Rs need to unite behind our campaign. Let’s focus on the real opponent-Murphy and professional political class killing jobs & econ. recovery,” she wrote.

Yet the poll showed areas of hope for both Murphy and Shays — and a possible problem for McMahon. Her unfavorable ratings are significantly higher than those of her two closest opponents. McMahon is seen unfavorably by nearly 40 percent of those polled, a slight improvement from the 44 percent unfavorable rating she notched in the March Q poll.

“We have our work cut out for us,” Shays spokeswoman Amanda Bergen said this morning. “We’ve been in this position before and won. Christopher has won 18 elections, including some very tough ones. He has the experience, knowledge and guts to hit the ground running on Day 1.”

Murphy and Shays are relatively unknown to much of the electorate: 46 percent said they hadn’t heard enough of Murphy to form an opinion.  Shays, who spent 21 years in Congress, remains unknown to 44 percent.

Voters also believed being a member or former member of Congress is a better qualification for a U.S. Senate candidate than running  wrestling and entertainment company. Fifty eight percent said Murphy has “the right kind of experience” to be a U.S. Senator, and 58 percent said Shays did.

In contrast, voters were split, 46 to 45 percent, over whether McMahon had the right experience for the job, even though she touts her years running WWE as her chief qualification for serving in the U.S. Senate.

The WWE, which made McMahon a multimillionaire and is still run by her husband, Vince McMahon, has become a source of controversy in the campaign, with some critics comparing its sexually suggestive content to pornography. Yet most voters disagree: 56 percent said WWE’s product is not pornographic, while 10 percent said it is and 33 percent had no opinion.

Fifty four percent of those polled said they want to see a “Washington outsider” as the state’s next Senator and 64 percent said they’d like to see more women in political office. Yet just 14 percent said they’d be more likely to support McMahon because she’d be the first women senator from Connecticut. For Bysiewicz, that number was 16 percent.

The poll showed Bysiewicz losing to all of the candidates from both parties, but her campaign remained on message this morning, continuing its effort to paint Murphy as a politician in the pocket of powerful Wall Street interests.

“Today’s poll does nothing to change the fact that Chris Murphy has taken over hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wall Street PACs, refused to return JP Morgan’s PAC contributions in the wake of their $2 billion loss driven by a return to casino style trading, and has no plan to hold Wall Street Accountable or fix the economy,” campaign manager Jonathan Ducote said in an email. “This election is about who will stand up for the middle class and hold Wall Street Accountable. Over the next two and a half months we’ll engage the 700,000 Democrats who are eligible to vote in the August primary about who has the best plan to accomplish these goals.“

Murphy spokeswoman Taylor Lavender highlighted his enormous lead over Bysiewicz. “No one in the field can match Chris’ record of fighting for middle class jobs and families in Connecticut,” she said in a statement.

“That’s why Democrats support him by a 30 point margin to take on Linda McMahon in November. McMahon has already spent millions on the air trying to change her image, and ultimately we know that she is going to massively outspend us on the airwaves. But we’re building the best and strongest grassroots campaign Connecticut has ever seen, and just like in 2010, voters aren’t going to let McMahon buy this election.”

The poll of 1,408 registered voters was conducted from May 29 to June 3. The survey of 381 Republicans has a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percentage points and of 538 Democrats, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.