Congresswoman Elizabeth Esty’s campaign said Monday that internal polling shows her up 16 points with a 52 to 36 percent lead over Republican Mark Greenberg in her bid to seek a second term representing Connecticut’s 5th District.
Esty spokeswoman Laura Maloney said that the poll of 400 “likely” voters was conducted Oct. 8-10 and showed 12 percent of respondents undecided with less than a month before the election.
The campaign did not release the poll itself or any other details, including the breakdown of respondents’ party affiliation or other demographics. Nor did the campaign release previous internal polling that might indicate whether this result was an improvement or worse than Esty’s previous numbers. The poll came on the heels of a negative TV ad blitz the Esty campaign launched against Greenberg.
Unlike gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races in Connecticut, which get attention from Quinnipiac University and other polling companies, there has been little independent pre-election polling of 5th District congressional campaigns in recent years. Occasionally, an individual campaign will release some details of their own internal polling, but like Esty in this case, they often withhold information that doesn’t fit with the narrative they want to present about their candidate.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had ranked the 5th District as one of the most competitive congressional match-ups in the country this year after Esty won by a razor-thin margin against Republican Andrew Roraback two years ago. But the DCCC recently pulled money that it was going to spend on her behalf, however, and diverted it to races where it presumably deemed the Democratic candidate to need more assistance.
