Got a call today from “Lisa” of Stonington, who did not want her last name published.
She said that around 2:30 Sunday afternoon, as her family was preparing for Hurricane Sandy, she received a call from a Republican polling firm in New York called Central Research gauging her position in the race for U.S. Senate between Democratic U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy and Republican Linda McMahon.
“I’m literally putting things on blocks in the basement, worrying about food in my freezer, and I still stopped to take the time to do this because it’s important,” said Lisa, who for a long time was an independent voter but is now a registered Democrat.
“They asked all the standard questions. ‘Are you a man or woman?’ ‘How old?’ Blah, blah, blah. Then they got to these really weird questions. ‘If I told you that Chris Murphy accepted ‘x’ amount of money from Connecticut Light & Power and did not hold them accountable in the last power outage, would you be more likely/less likely to vote for Murphy?'”
That last outage was a reference to the two major storms that hammered Connecticut in 2011 – late August’s Tropical Storm Irene and the nor’easter which struck, like Sandy, in late October.
“I was like, ‘I’m sorry, what?!?!'” Lisa said. “And there were a few other questions like that … I’m not stupid. They’re not asking that question on the eve of the hurricane for nothing. And it’s so offensive. I don’t agree with their statement (and) all they’re doing is fishing for a way to use this hurricane to political advantage. That’s just wrong.”
Lisa assumed Central Research was doing McMahon’s bidding. But a McMahon spokesman said the campaign does not use that company and had nothing to do with the calls.
Murphy’s camp declined to comment.