Thursday, August 31, 2006

What Moderation Gets You

A new poll shows that Lincoln Chafee is down by 17 points to his primary challenger, Steve Laffey, and this is among likely voters. Worse news for Chafee: the number of undecideds is smaller than the margin.

I don't know much about Laffey. He's the mayor of Cranston. WPRI, the Ocean State's major television outlet (and a Fox affiliate), reports that he apologized for writing anti-gay columns while a student at Bowdoin in the 1980's. In one of the columns, he wrote that he'd never seen a happy homosexual. (Maybe he didn't know a gay person when he saw one.)

At the same time, the Democratic candidate, Sheldon Whitehouse, leads Laffey by 32 points (that's not a misprint), while in a statistical tie with Chafee. So, that makes Laffey the logical choice for Republicans worried about holding on to the Senate, right?

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