Former U.S. Rep. Sam Gejdenson endorsed Greenwich entrepreneur Ned Lamont for governor Wednesday – four years after he supported New Haven Mayor John DeStefano for the same post.<\/p>\n
Gejdenson was one of Connecticut’s best-known Democrats when served in the U.S. Congress for 20 years before losing in 2000 to Republican Rob Simmons, who is now running for the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n
“Ned has a proven record of not only creating jobs, but also standing up to the establishment and doing what it takes to deliver for the people of Connecticut,” Gejdenson said in a statement Wednesday. “I trust him to be the type of governor we need to put people back to work and get Connecticut back on offense competing for jobs and commerce worldwide.”<\/p>\n
In 2006, Gejdenson became involved in a high-profile clash when he went public to say that he had received a push-poll from the campaign of gubernatorial candidate Dannel Malloy.<\/p>\n
The whole thing started when Gejdenson said he picked up his telephone at his Branford home on Monday, July 24, 2006, to find a political pollster on the other end. The conversation started innocently as the caller asked whether the state was going in the right direction and how he felt about the races for governor and the U.S. Senate. But as soon as Gejdenson said he was voting for DeStefano instead of Malloy in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, he said the conversation abruptly turned to a series of anti-DeStefano questions.<\/p>\n
What the pollster did not know was that the Branford man was Gejdenson, the former U.S. House member who had already publicly endorsed DeStefano.<\/p>\n
“There was a lot of noise in the background, so it was a big phone-bank operation,” Gejdenson said at the time. “It was definitely just a push poll to beat up the other guy. They said [DeStefano’s hometown of] New Haven was dangerous. I’ve never felt endangered in New Haven.”<\/p>\n
Malloy’s supporters, who were not on the telephone call between Gejdenson and the pollster, argued repeatedly and vociferously that it was not a push poll.<\/p>\n
“If Sam Gejdenson thinks he got a push poll, it certainly wasn’t from the Malloy campaign or anyone we consider supporters,” campaign manager Chris Cooney said at the time.<\/p>\n
Even though the Malloy campaign had been conducting research polling for two years, Cooney said, “We have never done push-polling, ever.”<\/p>\n
After serving in Congress for 20 years, Gejdenson said that he clearly knew the difference between a push poll and a research poll.<\/p>\n
Push-polling is a campaign practice in which candidates spread disinformation and sometimes outright lies about each other in the guise of an opinion survey. The line between that and the more accepted practice of research polling, in which candidates try to determine what messages might work best against their opponents, can be thin.<\/p>\n
At the time, DeStefano’s spokesman, former television reporter Derek Slap, strongly defended Gejdenson and denied that the DeStefano campaign had made any anti-Malloy calls.<\/p>\n
“We’d expect this from Karl Rove, but not from Dan Malloy,” Slap said at the time. “Are they calling Sam Gejdenson a liar?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Former U.S. Rep. Sam Gejdenson endorsed Greenwich entrepreneur Ned Lamont for governor Wednesday – four years after he supported New Haven Mayor John DeStefano for the same post. Gejdenson was one of Connecticut’s best-known Democrats when served in the U.S. Congress for 20 years before losing in 2000 to Republican Rob Simmons, who is now running […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4001,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-546305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4001"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}