They just don’t think he can do the job.

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UNH dropped a Nutmeg State Poll Thursday, and the headlines will write themselves the way they always do in this state. Lamont leads Fazio, 52 to 37. Incumbent still in command. Third term looking tidy. Next slide.

Read the rest of it.

On the question that actually measures whether people think the man running Connecticut can run Connecticut, Ned Lamont is underwater. Forty-four percent approve of the job he’s doing. Fifty-two percent disapprove. Favorability is worse: 37 favorable, 43 unfavorable. That’s not a bounce after he buried Josh Elliott in the August primary. That’s a slide. June’s Nutmeg poll had him at 49–36 in the horse race with approval still hovering near even, 49–44. Two months later the lead got a little bigger and the job rating fell through the floor.

Here’s what that combination actually means. A lot of people in this state will still punch the Democratic line in November. They just don’t think the guy on that line has a handle on the things wrecking their household budget. Those are not the same opinions. Campaigns that treat them as the same opinion are the ones that wake up surprised.

Look at how they grade him on the work. Cost of living: 29 percent approve, 65 percent disapprove. Taxes: 22 approve, 59 disapprove. Housing: 34 approve, 59 disapprove. Economy: 31 approve, 51 disapprove. Crime and education are a wash. The only issue where he clears 40 is roads and bridges, at 41. So the official story of the Lamont years — surplus after surplus, “the comeback,” the grown-up in the room — is not what people are living. They’re living the grocery bill, the property tax card, and a housing market that treats a starter home like a luxury good.

When UNH asked the open-ended question — what’s the most important problem facing Connecticut — cost of living led at 30 percent. Taxes 19. Housing 13. Add those three and you’ve got a majority of the state pointing at the same pile. Climate is 2 percent. Immigration, as a volunteered first answer, is 3 percent. That last number will get waved around by people who want to pretend the border is a Fox News hallucination. It isn’t. It means kitchen-table pain is so loud it swallowed every other issue. In July the same shop found more than four in ten Connecticut residents saying they want to move out of state, and they named the same reasons: cost of living, housing, taxes. Highest “I want out” number in the New England states they surveyed.

That’s the record. Not the press release.

Ryan Fazio is not lighting the world on fire in this survey, and anybody on our side who pretends otherwise is doing the candidate no favors. Twenty-three percent favorable, 24 percent unfavorable, 26 percent neutral, 28 percent don’t know him well enough to say. Half the state has no real opinion of the Republican nominee. That’s a problem. It’s also an opening. You cannot beat an incumbent with a 15-point name-ID hole and a 15-point ballot lead and then act shocked when the incumbent is still ahead. Fazio’s numbers among men are already there — 45 to 43. Among voters with a high school education or less he’s up 60 to 34. In Litchfield County he’s up 58 to 35, in a small subsample, but the direction isn’t a mystery. Among Trump 2024 voters he’s at 81. The coalition that would actually change this state exists. It just hasn’t been introduced to the alternative yet.

Women are a different story: Lamont 61, Fazio 28. College graduates, 58–32. Postgrads, 69–17. That’s the Connecticut that shows up on MSNBC and in the Hartford Courant comment section and then calls itself “the electorate.” It isn’t the whole electorate. It is the part that still gives a failing job review and a winning ballot. Party gravity. Habit. The assumption that the other team is worse. I’ve watched that assumption carry a lot of mediocre tickets across the finish line in this state.

Independents are the tell. They give Lamont the horse race 59 to 17, and they disapprove of the job 51 to 45. Read that again. They’ll vote for him and they don’t think he’s doing it well. That’s not enthusiasm. That’s the absence of a reason to jump. Unaffiliateds are the largest registration bloc in Connecticut. If they ever decide the cost-of-living numbers matter more than the D next to the name, the 52–37 cartoon ends. Until then, Lamont gets to run as the default setting.

The camera fight is sitting in this poll too, and it’s more honest than half the hearings. UNH asked whether people would support a moratorium on new automated traffic cameras until the state actually writes rules against misuse, sharing, and selling of driver location data. Sixty-one percent said yes. Forty-seven percent said strongly yes. Democrats came in at 71 percent support. Independents 60. The same party that spent years telling you cameras were “safety infrastructure” and “smart cities” now has its own voters looking at Flock readers on every pole and saying hold it. Lamont’s August letter asking towns to pause new installs wasn’t leadership. It was a man reading the room after the room had already stood up.

Then there’s the immigration package the legislature sent him. The poll finds majority support for several of those provisions in the abstract — protected areas where you can’t be picked up on a civil immigration violation, a state inspector general poking at federal deadly-force cases, a ban on masks on duty. Question wording does a lot of work there. “Protected areas” polls better than “we will make it harder to remove people who are here illegally.” “Sue the feds for constitutional violations” polls better than “the state will spend your money fighting the federal government over enforcement.” Democrats are carrying those numbers. Treat the overall majority as a blank check and you’ll walk into the same trap every sanctuary jurisdiction walks into: popular in a survey, ugly when the consequences show up at a school or a hospital parking lot.

The tax-swap question is not a mandate. Thirty-eight percent support eliminating the property tax and jacking up the income tax. Thirty-six percent oppose. A pile of no opinion in the middle. Even the people drowning in mill rates won’t sign that IOU without seeing the fine print. Good. Anyone selling “we’ll just move the pain to a different form” as reform has not been paying attention to how Hartford spends a windfall.

I want to be precise about what this poll is and isn’t. It’s a UNH Survey Center probability-panel web survey, 809 likely voters, plus or minus 3.4 points, fielded August 20–24. Self-identified party in the sample runs heavier Democratic than the actual registration roll. That doesn’t make the issue numbers fake. It does mean the horse race is not a prophecy. GreatBlue and Sacred Heart had Lamont’s approval looking healthier earlier this summer. Different shop, different sample, same underlying complaint: housing and costs. When two houses disagree on the thermometer and agree on the fever, believe the fever.

Lamont will spend the next ten weeks talking like a CFO who balanced the books. He did squeeze some pension payments. He did put “historic tax cuts” in the speeches. He also presided over a state where the three problems people name first are the three problems he gets buried on. You don’t get credit for the spreadsheet if the people filling out the grocery card think you’re the reason they can’t stay.

Fazio’s job between now and November is not to become a nicer version of the status quo. It’s to make the job-approval numbers and the ballot numbers meet. Name ID. A sentence on property taxes that isn’t a shrug. A sentence on housing that isn’t “more process.” A sentence on energy that admits Connecticut’s rates are a policy choice, not a weather event. If he remains a rumor in 28 percent of households, 52–37 is what you get. If he becomes the guy who says out loud what 65 percent already believe about the cost of living, the incumbency cushion gets thinner than the Courant wants to print.

The folks listening already know this in their bones. You can feel a state getting expensive. You can feel a political class congratulating itself for managing the decline. A poll that shows the manager still ahead and the customers walking toward the door is not a victory lap. It’s a warning label.

Connecticut is not asking for poetry. It’s asking why a “success story” costs this much to live in. Until someone answers that without a brochure, Ned Lamont can keep winning surveys he is already losing on the merits. That’s not strength. That’s a head start the public has already started to spend down.

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