I am really enjoying the mental gyrations the lefties are going through to paint the latest Lamont-Leiberman poll as good news for sinking Ned! Here is one diary and a second diary which are fun to read if you are a conservative. The delusional logic goes like this: In a prior Quinnipiac Poll (see June 20th results here) Lamont was further behind in a three way race. But if you look at the numbers Joe has not moved from his 50+% dominant position which is a lock for election in a three-way race. So while Lamont has improved, he has not moved Joe’s state-wide support one iota. The second bit of ‘logic’ is to claim Ned has increased his support among Dems from 52% to 65% from the primary to this poll because that is how much the Dem support has changed. Well, some of that is jumping on the bandwagon – which means they could jump right off again. But much of it is because the primary numbers reflect the hard core of the Dems and the poll relfects a much softer, less reliable set of voters. If the hard core of democrats are still in the same position as the primary results – then this poll is way to optimistic! If the split is really 50-50 as the primary indicated (and which is a much more accurate measure of democrat base views) then this is going to be a blow out.

Math is a tough patron and one the netroots folks avoid like the plague. Let’s look at the internals:

In this latest survey, Lieberman leads 75 – 13 – 10 percent among likely Republican voters, and 58 – 36 – 3 percent among likely independent voters, while likely Democratic voters back Lamont 63 – 35 percent.

The killer is the independents because in CT they represent the largest voting block. If the state is partitioned 30-R, 30-D and 40-I then Lamont is in a world of hurt (and this explains why Leiberman is above 50%). If we use the numbers above we see for every 100 people the votes split for Joe as 22 Rep, 23 Ind and 10 Dems for a total of 55 votes out of a hundred – right near what we are seeing in the polls. Getting more democrats will not help if Lamont loses the moderates and conservatives in the process. Also, this poll and the anti-war crowd’s need to surrender as fast as possible will not drive more moderates to Lamonts side. And if Lamont does go soft in order to go after centrists, his base will get disillusioned and give up because that is what all Dems do to win elections. And face it, once Lamont goes soft he looks like Joe without the experience and clout.

This is the problem with basing your campaign on a narrow, angry and emotional base that cannot tolerate any deviation from their marginal orthodoxy and thus create a barrier to the moderate independents. Game over.