Q Poll: McMahon Leads Murphy In Razor-Thin Poll

Republican Linda McMahon holds a slender lead over Democrat Chris Murphy in a new Quinnipiac University poll of likely voters released early Tuesday.

Forty-nine percent of those surveyed favor McMahon; 46 back Murphy. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

“The poll is good news for Linda McMahon,” said Douglas Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac poll. “In our first likely voter poll in Connecticut, McMahon has a three point advantage in a too-close-to-call race.”

McMahon’s background as the co-founder and former CEO of WWE, a wrestling and entertainment company  has long been a drag on her public approval numbers. But this poll shows WWE appears to have been neutralized as an issue. Forty-seven percent of voters said her experience as the former CEO of the company makes no difference to them, while 21 percent said it would make them more likely to back her and 30 percent said it would make it less likely.

Fifty percent said McMahon has “the right kind of experience” to be a U.S. Senator; 52 percent said Murphy does.

The poll showed that McMahon has made significant improvement among women and unaffiliated voters and that her much-discussed image makeover appears to have boosted in her favorability rating.

“Her edge is due to her double-digit lead among independent voters and being close among women, a group she struggled with in her 2010 run,” Schwartz said. “McMahon has worked on her image in the last two years and it shows. Voters like her more than they did when she faced Richard Blumenthal in  2010.”

The Murphy campaign released a statement that suggests McMahon’s showing is largely due to the millions of dollars she’s plowed into the race.

“This was always going to be a tough race, and we don’t take anything for granted and neither should McMahon,” Murphy spokeswoman Taylor Lavender said. “She’s spent her whole career getting rich at the expense of her own employees and at the expense of Connecticut jobs. Now she’s dumped over $65 million into a marketing campaign to try to fool voters into thinking she’s something she’s not.

”But McMahon’s wrestling fortune can’t buy the kind of grassroots support that Chris is building door to door and person to person in cities and town all across Connecticut, and it’s middle class families—the people Chris fights for everyday—that will decide this election in November,” Lavender said.

The McMahon camp, of course, reads the poll results entirely differently. “The new Q poll shows that people are sick of professional politicians like Chris Murphy, who get paid $170,000 a year while skipping 80 percent of their work meetings,” McMahon spokesman Todd Abrajano said. “But this poll is just a snapshot in time and the only poll that really matters is the one on Election Day.” 

Since entering politics in 2009, McMahon has been dogged by high negatives. But over the past six months, she has set about remaking her public persona. Instead of portraying herself as a hard-edge businesswoman, she has emphasized her biography: her modest roots in North Carolina and her struggle to build WWE with her husband Vince McMahon.

At the same time, she has launched a TV ad assault designed to drive up Murphy’s negatives. She has accused the three-term congressman of missing important meetings in Washington and said over and over again that he lacks a jobs plan.

Voters are evenly split about McMahon’s ads: 41 percent said they find them imformative while 42 percent said they are annoying. Only 12 percent said they had not seen McMahon’s ads. (Twenty nine percent of those who had seen Muprhy’s ads said were informative while 36 percent said they were annoying.)