Dwarfed by Democrats, candidate seeks support

? Overshadowed by two Democrats whose primary battle has drawn national attention, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Alan Schlesinger finds himself fighting for support from his own party.

Schlesinger said Saturday that he was told long before Sen. Joe Lieberman lost the Aug. 8 Democratic primary not to count on support from the national Republican Party unless he could show he had a shot to win.

Schlesinger would pull just 4 percent of the vote in a three-way race with Lieberman, who is now running as an independent, and Democratic primary winner Ned Lamont, according to a poll released Thursday by Quinnipiac University in Hamden. His support slipped from 9 percent in July’s poll.

The telephone survey of 1,319 Connecticut voters from Aug. 10-14 has a sampling margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Though Lamont edged Lieberman by 10,000 votes in the primary – largely by criticizing the centrist senator’s support for the Iraq war – the new poll shows Lieberman attracting 53 percent of the likely voters to Lamont’s 41 percent.

Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential candidate, enjoys strong support from Connecticut’s Republican voters – the latest poll found that 75 percent supported him, as well as 53 percent of unaffiliated voters.