Good morning and welcome back to the Tip Sheet, a weekly newsletter from Tom Dudchik’s Capitol Report written by Mike Cerulli.

The week, we’re taking a look at the latest action in the Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Ned Lamont is going negative in the primary race’s final full week.

Let’s dive in…

Ned goes negative

It is said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Ned Lamont’s negative turn against Josh Elliott certainly rhymes with a familiar line of attack, one infamously deployed by Joe Lieberman against Lowell Weicker in 1988

Over the weekend, Lamont began airing an ad attacking Josh Elliott’s attendance record in the legislature. The Lamont campaign tallied 240 votes missed by Elliott. More specifically, Lamont is amplifying a story about a vote Elliott missed during the debate over the 2020 police accountability bill.

“When we needed his vote to pass civil rights protections, Elliott was nowhere to be found,” the ad’s narrator says. “He said he fell asleep.”

Elliott has offered an explanation for the missed vote, which was over a Republican amendment that failed due to a tied House. At the time, he wrote on social media that he had left the Capitol in the early morning hours to let his dog out, inadvertently fell asleep with his phone silenced, and ended up making it back to the Capitol after the vote on the amendment was taken. He voted to pass the whole bill after the lengthy debate concluded.

Lamont signs off his new ad with the obligatory legal approval and a zinger.

“I approve this message because I’m wide awake and fighting for you,” he says.

The attack on Elliott’s attendance record drew a quick response from the Hamden legislator’s team. Melissa Murray, Elliott’s campaign manager, called the tally of 240 absent votes “misleading.”

Murray said Elliott has “a strong voting record in the Connecticut legislature, participating in more than 95% of votes during his time in office.”

Attacks on legislative attendance have long been a staple of negative campaigning, as are rebuttals accusing opponents of misleading voters. Some of the most prominent examples date back to the 1980s. In 1984, a young Kentucky county executive named Mitch McConnell hired a media consultant named Roger Ailes to make a splash in what was viewed as a longshot bid to unseat an established Democratic incumbent. The resulting ad centered on a pair of bloodhounds searching for the incumbent, while a disembodied voice rattles off important votes that he missed.

Four years after McConnell delivered a surprising upset, an attendance-focused attack ad injected energy into another bid to unseat an incumbent senator. This time, it was Joe Lieberman seeking to topple Lowell Weicker. Instead of bloodhounds, Lieberman’s choice of metaphorical mammal was a large, sleepy bear meant to represent Weicker.

“Lowell Weicker is like a big bear,” Lieberman’s narrator says. “On things that matter to him personally, he will always growl, but sometimes when it matters, he is sleeping.”

In Lieberman’s ad, the cartoonish depiction of Weicker sleeping through votes was intended and received as a metaphor. Lamont’s charge against Elliott is obviously not metaphorical.

Contemporaneous coverage in the New York Times said the sleeping bear ad and its sequels were “generally considered to be the first media campaign to emphasize the negative in the gentlemanly modern-day history of statewide politics in Connecticut.”

Roles were reversed nearly two decades later when Lamont went after Lieberman’s attendance record, which had faltered over the course of two cycles on the presidential campaign trail. For his part, Lieberman tried to capture the magic of that 1988 ad, too. One Lieberman campaign spot cast Lamont as a “bear cub” of Weicker.

The decision by Lamont’s current campaign to go negative in the final full week of campaigning can be interpreted any number of ways. Of course, there’s the possibility that the Lamont campaign has received concerning poll numbers. The attack ad could also be part of a "better safe than sorry" approach by a campaign comfortable with its numbers but unwilling to let Elliott's attacks run unopposed. The most recent round of publicly-available polling commissioned by Impact CT showed an erosion in Lamont’s support, even as the governor still holds a significant lead over Elliott. All three gubernatorial campaigns have kept recent polling data close to the vest.

Throughout the race, Lamont has said that his approach to the primary’s air war is to respond in-kind when attacked. Elliott’s ads have grown increasingly critical, with his current wave of commercials using voters to target Lamont. Prior to this weekend, Lamont's commercials have steered clear from even mentioning his opponents, with the exception one brief, nameless reference to Elliott and Ryan Fazio.

As he begins airing his attack ad, Lamont enjoys a significant financial advantage over Elliott. The most recent public filings show the governor making a $6 million donation to his own campaign in mid-July, adding to more than $3 million already deposited by Lamont into his campaign’s account.

The 1988 bout between Lieberman and Weicker cost a total of about $5 million, or just over $14 million in today’s dollars.

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back next week with another edition of the Tip Sheet!