Ned Lamont celebrated with his supporters after winning the Connecticut primary tonight. More Photos »
Profile: Edward Miner Lamont Jr. (August 9, 2006)
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman attended a support rally at a fire station in Stratford on Primary Day. More Photos >
Senator Lieberman, a national party leader and the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000, conceded defeat in a phone call to Mr. Lamont shortly before 11 p.m. But then, in a speech to supporters in Hartford that was carried live on television news, the senator declared that he was not dropping out of the race, but would instead run for re-election as an independent this fall.
“As I see it, in this campaign, we’ve just finished the first half and the Lamont team is ahead — but in the second half, our team, Team Connecticut, is going to surge forward to victory in November,” Mr. Lieberman told cheering supporters.
The senator said he was staying in the race because Mr. Lamont had run a primary campaign of “insults” and “partisan polarizing” that relentlessly blamed Mr. Lieberman for President Bush’s wartime policies, which the senator has both supported and defended — as well as criticized at times.
“For the sake, our state, my party, and our country, I cannot and will not let that result stand,” Mr. Lieberman said.
A few minutes later, Mr. Lamont appeared before a thrilled roomful of supporters, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and called for Democrats to unite around his candidacy. Indeed, even before Mr. Lieberman conceded, Lamont advisers were making plans to pressure Mr. Lieberman to drop out if he did not do so on his own.
Tom Swan, Mr. Lamont’s campaign adviser, said last night that the candidate would appear on television talk shows in the morning to call on Mr. Lieberman to respect the will of the Democratic majority, and that he would send the same message at a “unity press conference” later this morning at state party headquarters.
With 98 percent of the precincts reporting, the unofficial returns showed Mr. Lamont had 51.8 percent of the vote and Senator Lieberman 48.3 percent.
Mr. Lamont intended to call national Democratic leaders in Washington, including Senate colleagues of Mr. Lieberman, and ask them to speak to the senator about dropping out, Mr. Swan added.” We think that Joe should respect the will of the Democrats,” Mr. Swan said. “We will seek and welcome help from any Democratic leaders in making sure that Joe respects the will of Democratic voters.”
Advisers to the senator said last night that Mr. Lieberman was emboldened to continue in the race because of the narrow margin of Mr. Lamont’s victory. Yet the advisers said he might still drop out if the next round of opinion polls showed Mr. Lamont well ahead of Mr. Lieberman in the fall general election.
The Connecticut race drew national and even international attention this summer as a barometer of the mood of American Democrats over the Iraq war. Among political insiders, too, it was seen as a test for liberal bloggers to affect a major election, instead of merely commenting on politics in cyberspace.
Mr. Lieberman, a leading moderate Democrat, drew scorn from members of his own party for supporting the war and for forcefully defending President Bush’s foreign policy. Some voters also felt that Mr. Lieberman had lost touch with Connecticut after 18 years in the Senate, a period in which he was influential in national affairs, a vice presidential nominee in 2000 and a presidential candidate in 2004.
Many liberals never forgave him for his friendly manner in a vice presidential debate against Dick Cheney in 2000, and they were further angered when Mr. Lieberman said on national television last year that he would have kept Terri Schiavo on a feeding tube against her husband’s wishes.
Mr. Lamont, a former Greenwich selectman who, at 52, has never held statewide office, capitalized on the disaffection by spending at least $4 million of his own money on hard-edged television commercials, like one in which Mr. Lieberman’s face changed into President Bush’s as an announcer said the senator “talks like George W. Bush and acts like George W. Bush.”
Mr. Lamont battled the perception that he was a multimillionaire pawn of the bloggers, trying to broaden his antiwar message with a liberal load of proposed federal programs, such as universal preschool and expanded health insurance.
The returns showed Lamont narrowly winning such cities as Danbury and New London and having a commanding edge in Norwalk and his hometown of Greenwich, where he captured 68 percent of the vote. He also held the edge in incomplete returns from New Haven. Mr. Lieberman was ahead in Stamford, which is in Mr. Lamont’s home county of Fairfield.
Douglas Schwartz, director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said last night that a Lamont victory would scramble Mr. Lieberman’s current edge in polls forecasting the general election.
“Lamont is going to get even more positive news coverage from his win, and Democrats will likely rally around their party’s candidate,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Lieberman will be viewed differently Wednesday — he will be viewed as the losing candidate.”
Mr. Lamont was a virtual unknown among Connecticut Democrats only two months ago, yet, for a relative rookie, he ran a campaign that impressed voters.
According to interviews of voters leaving the polls yesterday, Mr. Lamont appeared to be particularly popular with Democrats who opposed the war in Iraq, young people, African-Americans, liberals and college graduates.
Polls closed at 8 p.m. after a day of relatively heavy voting. Connecticut officials said the turnout could climb above 40 percent, which would exceed the previous record for a statewide primary in a nonpresidential year, 38.8 percent in the 1970 Senate race.
The hard-fought contest took an especially bitter turn this week as Lieberman advisers denounced the collapse of their campaign Web site, which disrupted communications among supporters on the final day of the campaign. The Lieberman camp blamed unnamed “political opponents.”
Yet it was not clear who was at fault. The Lieberman advisers said they had no evidence implicating the Lamont campaign and could not explain the precise nature of the problem, except to say that the campaign server’s bandwidth had been overwhelmed.
Lamont aides and Internet bloggers who oppose the senator said the problem appeared to be that the Lieberman campaign did not spend enough money for a Web site that could handle high traffic.
Mr. Lieberman’s campaign manager, Sean Smith, said the problem amounted to suppression of the turnout, since it disabled e-mail and left aides without a tool to communicate with tens of thousands of supporters on Primary Day.
Mr. Smith said the campaign would file a formal complaint asking state and federal legal authorities to investigate.