Day of Reckoning in Lamont-Lieberman Race

Tonight's the night! The Dem primary voters of Connecticut will finally cut through all the bluster and select their candidate to run for the Senate on the Dem ticket. Pundits, bloggers, insider strategists, anti-war activists and DLC naysayers are all poised to pounce after the results are in. The lastest poll shows Lamont ahead by only about 5 points, down from 13 in an earlier survey. Given the odd nature of this contest and the fact that nobody really knows how many people will vote in an August primary when so many are on vacation or preoccupied, it's safe to say the race is a tight one and can go either way. Nothing can be taken for granted, and I'm sure Lamont's campaign folks and volunteers will working like dogs until the very minute the polls close. Fasten your seatbelts -- we're in for a bumpy ride!

Many of these sites are live blogging the election and will have updates all day and into the night:

• firedoglake
• Connecticut Bob
• My Left Nutmeg
• ConnecticutBlog
• Ned Lamont (official site)
• LamontBlog
• (DFA)
• MyDD
• Daily Kos

I think David Sirota, as usual, has it just right about the four scenarios that might occur, depending on how the election results shake out. Excerpts:

1. Lieberman wins by more than 10 points: Champagne purchases in Washington, D.C. skyrocket, as the professional Democratic Party apparatus (ie. consultants, Hill staffers, think tankers, etc.) collectively celebrates the perception that they still do not have to worry at all about small-d democracy threatening their cushy lifestyles. Pundits like Cokie Roberts and Stu Rothenberg and neoconservatives Iraq War apologists like Robert Kagan, Peter Beinart, Al From, Marshall Wittman and other chickenhawk members of the 101st Fighting Keyboard Brigade clink glasses at restaurants like the Capital Grille.

... Meanwhile, the divide in the Democratic Party will grow far worse, as voters will feel that, once again, the Democratic Party apparatus was complicit in helping a Big Money candidate to buy an election and distort the debate over critical issues like the Iraq War.

2. Lieberman barely wins (less than 10 points): Again, champagne purchases in the Beltway are high ... They proceed to ignore polls clearly showing where the real center of American politics is and instead claim that Lieberman's right-wing, sellout politics represents the real "center." But, in the back of their minds, they know that something big is happening, and that a real small-d democratic power is building through the progressive movement. Though the Beltway never admits so in public, they know in the places they don't talk about at parties that the progressive movement has etched a very real win.

3. Lamont ekes out a win (less than 4 points): Xanax, Prosac and Valium fly off the shelves of DC pharmacies, as the Democratic Party Establishment goes into a depression because it realizes it no longer gets to give orders from Mt. Olympus. Lieberman, who for weeks has been trying to downplay expectations, cites the closeness of the results as a reason to go ahead with an Independent Lieberman for Lieberman bid, even though the fact that he - an 18-year incumbent with a massive warchest - should have won by a huge margin, and his loss is a clear repudiation of his corruption and his dishonesty. Though Lieberman's move threatens the Democratic Party's hold on the Connecticut Senate seat, and though Democratic voters have made themselves clear, at least some of Lieberman's Senate Democratic buddies decide to continue backing him, as does his wide network of Enron lobbyists, corporate lawyers and other professional business shills in D.C.

... Nonetheless, every Democratic officeholder in America realizes how totally out of touch Washington pundits/operatives really are and how important the progressive movement is.

4. Lamont wins big (by more than 5 points): Again, Xanax, Prosac and Valium fly off the shelves of DC pharmacies, though this time so does Immodium, because the Democratic Party elites get so scared, they collectively and uncontrollably begin soiling their pants. Incumbents begin worrying about whether their votes to sell out to Big Money or to preserve the Bush administration's "stay-the-course" nonsense in Iraq will draw them a serious primary challenge. Suddenly, votes by the Democratic caucus in both the House and Senate become far more unified. Instead of huge numbers of Democrats undermining their party on core economic and national security issues, there is more party discipline than has been seen in a long time because suddenly, every Democratic lawmaker realizes that they, too, might have to actually answer to voters.

... Despite begging from Lieberman's chief of staff-turned-Enron lobbyist Michael Lewan, Lieberman drops his bid for a "Lieberman for Lieberman" independent candidacy not because he's not a sore loser - but because most other Democratic politicians are embarrassed to be around him after such a shellacking.