New Haven Independent

I was wrong, but I had a lot of company on Nov. 7.

I was one of 1,000 people poll-standing for Joe Lieberman in his successful effort to return to the U.S. Senate after being defeated in the Democratic primary forced to run as an independent. My post was at the Thompson School in West Haven, and older brick building sandwiched between two-and three-family wood houses on a narrow street off busy Campbell Avenue.

For company, I had a volunteer true believer for Ned Lamont who thought she was upholding the values of the real Democratic Party and a shadowy young man who said he was being paid $10 an hour to hand out Toni Harp literature. Nobody ever showed up to plead Alan Schlesinger’s cause.

The young man, who kept saying he was going to use the $100 he expected to earn poll-standing to get a haircut and buy toothpaste and a toothbrush, said he had shown up at a New Haven homeless shelter because he had heard someone, he wasn’t quite sure who, was paying homeless people to aid in the campaign. He was hired because most of the homeless people hired hadn’t shown up before dawn on Tuesday, he said.

The young woman true believer, who said she worked on computers for a pen manufacturer, said this was her first campaign and that she believed that Lamont would change things around in Washington and was sure he was going to win despite his dozen-point deficit in polls. She kept saying polls were unreliable and the young man said he didn’t trust any polls. It turned out the polls were pretty accurate.

The internal Lieberman poll proved to be right on.

My task Tuesday was somewhat different from my competitors.

The old wag is that the three most important things in real estate are location, location, location. The Lieberman campaign resembled that remark.

Although I wasn’t in on any strategy sessions, my guess is that polling a few weeks before Election Day had shown that we had gotten our message over. The problem was that we were on or near the last line on the voting machines, even below the minor party candidates. In West Haven, Lieberman was Row G, while Lamont was Row B.

So, the campaign morphed into an “a good man is hard to find” effort, complete with search dog. (One guy said he had voted for the dog.) So, sandwich signs were put together for poll standers to wear pointing out that Joe was near the end of the ballot. Thousands upon thousands of leaflets and door-hangers were printed with messages on one side and location primers on the other.

That meant, of course, that Lieberman poll standers like me had to stand out with that ridiculous-looking but ultimately effective about three-foot high sandwich sign in the mist and cold and rain. Can a thousand people who haven’t got the sense to come in out of the rain make a difference? The campaign said it feared we could lose as much as a half-dozen points to Connecticut’s version of hanging chads.

Even on Election Day, commentators were yakking about the “X-factor” and how much Joe could lose because of his location, location, location. In fact, people had called Lieberman headquarters to say they meant to vote for Joe but had become confused and voted for someone else. In the end, it wasn’t enough to do any real damage.

It was obvious to me that Lamont stayed with his more-is-better strategy into the last day of the campaign. The Lieberman campaign had allocated two campaign signs per polling place, a total of 24 for the dozen polling locations in West Haven. The true believer had put up at least a dozen signs. The young man contributed nothing to the sign forest.

My location may have been unique in West Haven in the ability to erect signs at all. Part of my duties on Tuesday was to deliver signs to the 11 other polling places, but I was only marginally successful.

The half-dozen people who were out poll standing before 7 a.m. at the Washington Avenue elementary school said they had been warned not to erect signs. I got the same message at a building in downtown West Haven and even at the large campus of a school far from downtown, where people said the police had just been around warning them about signs. Even at the campus of the Prete housing complex across from the University of New Haven on Campbell Avenue, signs were banned. A jungle of signs had grown up across the street, and I gladly added my sign

My task Tuesday was somewhat different As the day wore slowly on, few of the approximately 750 voters who would eventually show up had appeared and to pass the time, I inquired of the young man how he had become politically involved, and he assured me he was there for the hundred bucks that had been offered. He kept saying he hoped lunch and dinner would appear from the man who had driven him from New Haven.

He arrived at about 8 a.m. and his lunch appeared at about 2 p.m. He kept wondering out loud if his payment would come in the form of cash or a check and we assured him that the money would most likely be forthcoming. I asked why Toni Harp, who was projected to win big, would pay for poll standing. He said he thought it had as much to do with helping the homeless as helping Toni Harp, but he had no details.

As the day wore on, the true believer and the young man, who said he was recovering from an illness, but didn’t know what it was, decided that since Harp and Lamont were both Democrats, they would combine efforts and would just urge voters to “vote Row B for the Democrats.” They decided I was the enemy and when the rain started, shared an umbrella. I had brought a raincoat because I was determined that my soggy sandwich sign would be seen through the mist and rain and general yuck.

In the end, the young man was picked up about a half-hour before the polls closed and Joe won both in my district and, of course, in the state. The true believer didn’t know how the committee system worked in the Senate and how powerful a committee chair was. I tried to explain that Joe could do much more for the state and the nation than any first-term senator. She wasn’t buying. She said party was most important and it was vital that Democrats win.

Most of the time, I would agree.

Just not this time. And not in this location.

Leonard J. Honeyman is a veteran journalist who is now a freelance writer and editor and lives in New Haven. He did not report on this campaign. His views are his own and not necessarily those of any political organization.