While Democrats have a solid chance at winning the House this year, they also have a realistic shot at taking back the Senate. If the polls stay as they are between now and Election Day, four Republican Senators are likely to lose – in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio and (gasp!) Montana. Even in the Republican landslide of 1994, only two Democratic Senators were thrown out of office. In Missouri, Virginia and Tennessee, Democrats are running neck-and-neck with the Republicans.

But in Connecticut, a solid blue state, Democratic nominee Ned Lamont is lagging behind Joe Lieberman – a neo-conservative Senator who angrily refused to accept losing the primary to Lamont and is now running as an independent with Karl Rove’s advice. Earlier this year, Lamont challenged George Bush’s favorite Democrat in the primary because Lieberman consistently supported the War in Iraq, attacked critics of the President as unpatriotic, and supported intervention in the Terri Schiavo matter. But now that the race is between Lieberman, Lamont and Republican nominee Alan Schlesinger, Ned Lamont is currently behind by a double-digit margin. In such an anti-Bush climate, why is Joe Lieberman still favored to win?

Ever since Lamont won the August primary, the national media has basically ignored this race. Because Lieberman and Lamont are both Democrats, and one of them is going to win (Schlesinger is only polling in the single-digits), mainstream pundits don’t think the outcome will determine which party controls the Senate. They’re wrong. While Lieberman says that he will caucus with the Democrats if re-elected, he won’t even say that it would be a “good thing” for Democrats to re-take Congress. With the vast majority of Democrats supporting his opponent, Lieberman, a notoriously vindictive and bitter politician, will be tempted to switch parties. If after the election, the Senate is divided by a 50-50 margin (a very likely scenario), and the Republicans offer Lieberman enough incentive to bolt, he may just do it.

In the primary, Lieberman was clearly uncomfortable campaigning for the Democratic nomination. He ran as a staunch supporter of the Iraq War with an electorate that passionately opposes it. Now that he faces Lamont in the general election with Republican and independent voters, he feels more liberated because the electorate is closer to his liking. But given the political dynamics this year, you would think that someone with Lieberman’s politics in a state like Connecticut would lose. But because the local Connecticut media has done an atrocious job reporting how conservative he really is, because Lieberman has muddled his rhetoric to convince enough Democrats that he is a palatable option, and because local Connecticut operatives know how vindictive Lieberman can be and are fearful of his revenge, Ned Lamont is struggling while similar candidates in similar states are favored to win.

The Connecticut Senate race is starting to mirror what happened in the 1999 San Francisco Mayor’s race between Willie Brown and Tom Ammiano, which was my first involvement in local politics. Like Joe Lieberman, Brown was a legendary Democratic politician and a Machiavellian genius who had angered, offended and insulted progressives with his policies and harsh rhetoric. Like Ned Lamont, Ammiano entered the race as an upstart challenger (albeit three weeks before the election and as a write-in candidate) and energized the city’s progressive base. To everyone’s shock and surprise, Ammiano received 44,000 write-in votes, putting him in a run-off with Brown.

But six weeks later, Brown won re-election with a strategy similar to what Lieberman is doing now – he got the Republican Party endorsement, attacked Ammiano as a partisan “tax and spend” liberal who is unable to build consensus, deluged voters with an unprecedented $5 million of corporate-funded soft-money, and gave just enough lip service on progressive issues (e.g., affordable housing) that allowed the compliant media to frame the race as “liberal” vs. “ultra-liberal.” When it looked like Brown would win, many of Ammiano’s natural allies refused to help the campaign for fear of Brown’s well-deserved notoriety for being petty and vindictive. If such a strategy worked in the Left Coast City, you can bet that it could happen in Connecticut.

But it’s still hard to understand why Lieberman’s strategy is working – given that the things he has recently said would be suicidal for most Republicans. As Arianna Huffington wrote, “Lamont is somehow letting Joe Lieberman get away with being the only candidate in the country who's actually benefiting from running as a Republican.” He has said that he supports regime change in Iran. He supports the confirmation of John Bolton. His campaign is largely funded by Republican donors – for example, Mel Sembler, a Republican activist who founded Straight Inc. (which helps “convert” homosexuals) did a fundraiser for Lieberman. And now he’s even sticking up for House Speaker Dennis Hastert – as he complained that the whole Mark Foley scandal is “spinning out of control” and has “become another partisan frenzy in Washington.”

All of this is verifiable if you read websites like Daily Kos. But that’s not how most people in Connecticut get their news – and certainly not if they are moderate Democrats or unaffiliated voters. Lieberman has a long relationship with the Connecticut media, and his most provocative statements haven’t reached the voters who could tip the election. There has been no local coverage of Lieberman’s support for John Bolton, although it made headlines in out-of-state newspapers. While the New Haven Register mentioned that Lieberman supports regime change in Iran, it was buried in the middle of a long article. While the liberal blogs went nuts over Lieberman’s defense of Dennis Hastert, we didn’t hear a peep from the Connecticut media. While the local media has talked about money in the race, the vast majority of its coverage has been on how much each candidate has raised, and how Lamont is a self-financed millionaire. While the Hartford Courant did an excellent report on October 21 about Lieberman’s Republican donors, it’s uncertain yet how effective that’s going to be.

Lieberman has also re-shaped and re-invented his campaign message to muddle his differences with Lamont on Iraq. In the primary, Lieberman stood by his strong support for the War – but he asked Democrats to judge his overall record and vote for him anyway. But in his first campaign commercial after the primary, Lieberman told voters that he “wanted to help end the War in Iraq.” Nobody has called him out on this flip-flop, and he has managed to hold onto a sizable chunk of Democratic and unaffiliated voters because he still claims to be a Democrat. If Lieberman were the Republican nominee, his right-wing positions and blatant lies would probably get attacked and he would suffer a similar fate as vulnerable Senators like Rick Santorum. But because he’s not the “official” Republican in the race, he gets away with it.

Of course, it’s easy to want to blame Ned Lamont for running a bad campaign in the general election. On October 15, Arianna Huffington wrote a scathing critique of Lamont, as she despaired that his campaign was no longer capturing voters’ imagination. But Huffington is wrong when she accuses Lamont of letting D.C. consultants control his message – Lamont’s television commercials are produced by Bill Hillsman, a brilliant and irreverent adman who did commercials for Paul Wellstone and Jesse Ventura, and who has been shut out of the Beltway mafia of loser consultants. Secondly, I never trust someone like Huffington who was a right-wing Republican ten years ago and now claims to be a liberal -- she often seems to delight in attacking Democrats from the sidelines about how weak and pathetic they are. I watched the October 16th debate online, and found Lamont to be offering the same principled and progressive message that helped him win the primary. The bigger problem with Lamont is that he didn’t run commercials through the month of August, which let Lieberman lie and re-invent himself as a “non-partisan” figure who will “change the tone” in Washington.

Ironically, Ned Lamont can still win because the Republicans have an official nominee – Alan Schlesinger. While the party’s top guns are supporting Lieberman and have left him for dead, Schlesinger has been invited to all three debates and he clearly stole the show in the first two. Some have compared it with Ross Perot’s performance in the 1992 presidential debates, which took away enough votes from George Bush that Bill Clinton was elected President. The last debate is tonight – I suggest you tune in to blogs like Daily Kos and MyDD.com tomorrow to find out what happened.

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