Predicting the Unexpected: Polling in the Lieberman-Lamont Senatorial Election

By Douglas Schwartz

Editor’s Note: The most watched election in America in 2006 was the Senate race in Connecticut, where veteran Democratic incumbent Joe Lieberman was defeated in a primary by a political unknown but came back in the general election to win easily. The Lieberman race offered pollsters unique and demanding challenges, which the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute met with a total of twelve polls during the election year—a record for one election.

There is no more difficult job in political polling than trying to determine who will win a primary election. Nearly as difficult is polling a three-way general election race with the incumbent running as an independent against Republican and Democratic challengers. Throw in an unpopular war in Iraq and the fact that Senator Joe Lieberman was not your run-of-the-mill incumbent, but a Democrat once nominated by his party to run for vice president, and you have a polling nightmare.

On the eve of Election Day 2006, Lieberman and both his Democratic and Republican rivals claimed that the final Quinnipiac Poll which showed Lieberman ahead with 50 percent, followed by Lamont with 38 percent and Schlesinger with 8 percent, was wrong. The next day the voters proved the poll was right.

When it comes to using polls to predict primary outcomes, most pollsters don’t, and for good reason. Voter turnouts are always small, candidates are often unknowns, and it is impossible to know what party or political organization or candidate has the better get-out-the-vote operation when the goal is not to get out a majority to vote, but maybe just 20 percent or so. In the best general elections, screens to determine likely voters still produce unrealistic turnout predictions. In a primary such screens are even more risky predictors. Even a history of voting in past primaries can’t be trusted because voters who came out in the last primary where, say, abortion was the big issue probably won’t come out the next time if the issue is the Iraq War.

Connecticut presented a particularly difficult venue for primary polling, as the state has an August primary, when many voters (but who can tell which ones?) are on vacation; and the fact that Lieberman was challenged by a young—but wealthy and attractive—Ned Lamont meant that there would be a lot of first-time voters casting ballots (but who could tell how many?)

What was known was that the tremendous interest in the race promised a turnout larger than the usual 20 percent, which helped because it increased the chances that those Democrats polled were likely voters. Normally only two in ten polled would show up, but with the 43 percent turnout in this primary, the numbers more than doubled.

In the event, the primary and the general election that followed produced some twists and turns that will keep pollsters and pundits analyzing them for years to come.

A first rule of primaries violated by Connecticut voters was that incumbent senators aren't supposed to lose them. Only four in the past twenty-five years had done so; and Lieberman was a popular three-term U.S. Senator and former vice presidential nominee, liberal and Jewish in the bluest of blue states. But his strong backing for an unpopular war had cost him support among his own party members. As early as January, the Quinnipiac Poll found a surprising danger sign for Lieberman: Only 52 percent of Democrats wanted the party to nominate him. 

Despite some grumbling from antiwar voters in his own party at that time, however, Lieberman was considered safe because no potential candidates were on the horizon with the stature to pose a serious threat. There was some buzz that perhaps Lowell Weicker, the former Connecticut senator and governor, would take on Lieberman in a fascinating rematch of their 1988 battle, but Weicker declined, and instead encouraged his friend Ned Lamont to be the candidate.

Challenging the old political saw that you can’t beat a somebody with a nobody, Lamont went on to take a page out of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s political handbook for antiwar candidates and demonstrate that with the right message and lots of money, even a political novice can defeat a well-known incumbent, at least in a primary.

When Lamont jumped into the race he was fifty-five points behind Lieberman. But the same polls that found Connecticut voters unhappy about Lieberman’s status as President George W. Bush’s favorite Democrat in the Senate also showed that Connecticut was one of the earliest and strongest antiwar states in the nation. The Lieberman camp was slow to react to the forewarnings, but young Democratic leaders around the state sensed that in Lamont they had a candidate with a message that would appeal to the growing poll of young voters who had never cast a primary ballot in their lives.