Republican U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon, left, with Darien First Selectman Jayme Stevenson joined the Darien Times weekly community coffee at the Sugar Bowl on the Post Road. Stevenson was taking McMahon on a tour of Darien Thursday, June 28. (Darien Times/David DesRoches photo)
During a brief stop at The Darien Times’ weekly community coffee Linda McMahon, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, talked about how her campaign will be working hard to get out the vote — and possibly put Connecticut in play for Republican Mitt Romney — in November.
“It’s going to take a lot of hard work,” McMahon said Thursday morning, June 28, when asked by a Darien resident how President Obama can be defeated in November. “Here in Connecticut he’s still popular. His favorable ratings are higher here. But I do believe what we’re seeing with Gov. Romney all across the country is he’s continuing to run neck-and-neck.”
McMahon then focused on how impressive her campaign’s ground game is going to be at getting out the vote.
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“It’s going to be very important for us in the fall — and this cannot be reinforced enough — is to get our people to the polls to vote,” she said. “We can’t sit home. We can’t wait for other people to do it. If you know someone who can’t get there, offer them a ride. We are going to build a ground game here in Connecticut.”
McMahon said her campaign is going to have vans and buses all over the state to get voters to the polls on Election Day. “We’ll have a great grassroots effort,” she said. “We’ve already made, from the offices we’ve set up in the state, over 50,000 individual telephone calls and knocked on over 30,000 doors.”
The Republican, who lost her last Senate bid in 2010, is leading in the polls for her party’s nomination over former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, a Darien native. The primary is Aug. 14 but McMahon is already looking to November.
“We now have six field offices set up,” she said. “We’ll have nine by the end of July all over the state. The goal is to have volunteers who will be doing, you know, that grassroots effort. And on Election Day actually calling, picking people up, taking them to the polls to vote, maybe even give you a cup of coffee on the ride.”
McMahon said her campaign is working to identify local areas where voters need rides or can’t get out of their houses. And they’ll be providing rides or absentee ballots.
Darienite Walter Casey asked McMahon what her campaign was going to do about the Connecticut cities that are “110% Democrat.”
“Like Chicago,” she said.
“We have a lot of Chicagos here,” Casey said.
“We’ll be doing our voter fraud programs along the way to try to educate people and have good spotters to prevent as much of that as we can,” McMahon said.
In 2010, the state allowed Bridgeport to vote for an extra hour because it ran out of ballots. The city has one of the highest percentages of Democrats in Connecticut. While it turnout out to likely not make a difference in the final numbers, it was big topic of concern for Republicans as the race for governor fell within just 5,600 votes: Democrat Dan Malloy beat Republican Tom Foley.
This is the third story on DarienTimes.com from Thursday’s meeting with McMahon at the newspaper’s weekly community gathering. More stories will be posted online and in Thursday’s print edition.
