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

This week, as early voting gets underway, we’re taking a look at what the final round of polling revealed.

Polls project a Lamont blowout

The polls hit one after the other, each painting a stark picture of where the gubernatorial race stands.

TL;DR Ned Lamont is winning. By a lot.

Ok, we’ll spare all the usual caveats about polls being fallible snapshots in time. But when three different academic institutions find a double-digit gap, well, that’s something.

Quinnipiac’s polling operation delivered perhaps the most striking assessment of the state of Ryan Fazio’s challenge to the two-term incumbent.

The Q-poll found Lamont with a 20-point lead over Fazio, with nearly a third of voters lacking enough information to have a view on the Republican nominee.

“Ned Lamont looks headed to a very comfortable victory,” Doug Schwartz, Quinnipiac's lead pollster, said.

Schwartz noted that Quinnipiac has not gauged a lead that large in a Connecticut gubernatorial race since the days before Jodi Rell routed John DeStefano.

The day after the Q-poll was released, Emerson College and WTNH News 8 released another poll showing Lamont with a 13-point lead. That margin is identical to the governor’s win in 2022.

The polling pile-on continued with the release of numbers from Wesleyan’s SurveyLab in partnership with the Connecticut Mirror. That survey found Lamont with a 23-point edge.

Taken as a whole, the new polling data adds to the sense of stasis we discussed in the Tip Sheet last week. Colin McEnroe put a finer point on that sentiment, writing that he’ll need some of that coffee from one of Lamont’s recent commercials in order to stay awake for the rest of the race.

Among Republicans, there are still some who believe the race will ultimately end up being closer than the most dire polling suggests. But overall, GOP insiders are bracing for impact and attempting to gauge whether a blowout at the top of the ballot will translate into a particularly bad showing in legislative races.

There are also whispers that underperforming Bob Stefanowski’s 2022 margin wouldn’t exactly bode well for a candidate who is widely assumed to be eyeing another run in 2030. Fazio still commands deep respect among many of Connecticut’s most active Republicans. They see him as a capable, diligent candidate running against immensely difficult national headwinds. And those headwinds appear to only be growing stronger.

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