By Stephen Hamel
NEW HAVEN, Conn.—The struggle for name recognition has been an uphill battle for U.S. Senate candidate John Mertens of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party.
“We always expected it to be tough to get equal time,” Mertens said. “But to be honest I didn’t expect it to be as bad as it has been.”
Despite his best efforts, Mertens was excluded from both of the televised debates featuring rival candidates Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Linda McMahon, but an innovative solution allowed him to participate, albeit in front of a much smaller audience.
While Blumenthal and McMahon fielded questions at the Garde Arts Center in New London, Mertens sat on a stool in his campaign manager’s living room among a small group of supporters and their families. Using a digital camera to stream live video to his website, Mertens listened to Blumenthal’s and McMahon’s answers to the questions, then muted the television to give his responses.
The live stream is just one of the many ways Mertens has used the internet to build momentum for his campaign. He has also been running advertisements on Facebook and Twitter and posting videos on his blog. “I have hopes of getting six percent of the vote,” Mertens said. “If it weren’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t have a chance of doing that.”
“Facebook has been huge and it’s enabled me to get onto traditional media shows like TV and radio by getting my name known,” Mertens said.
In addition to being shut out of debates, exclusion from polls has hindered Mertens’ effort to build name recognition. “(Quinnipiac University poll director Doug Schwartz) absolutely refuses to ever include third party candidates in his polling,” Mertens said. “If I’m not included in the polls, I get zero percent. I did some polling on my own a year ago and, with no name recognition, I was getting 13 percent because there are more unaffiliated voters in Connecticut than there are Democrats. If they knew there was an independent on the ballot, they would be excited.”
Mertens, a professor of engineering at Trinity College who also teaches public policy and environmental science, was the first candidate for Connecticut’s U.S. Senate seat to earn a ballot line for the 2010 election, when he earned the Connecticut for Lieberman (CFL) Party’s nomination on Jan. 13, 2010. He ran for U.S. Senate in 2006 as an independent, but switched to the CFL this year because the party already had a ballot line.
“We’re using the CFL because we were denied a petition by the Secretary of State’s office in 2006 for the independent party,” Mertens said. “They betrayed the public trust by preventing us the opportunity to get on the ballot and we weren’t sure we were ever going to defeat them on that.”
While he has never held public office before, Mertens says his experience on faculty committees would serve him well in Congress. “Anybody who’s done a lot of committee work understands that working on a committee is about building consensus, it’s about educating people face-to-face,” Mertens said. “In my first hundred days, if I were elected, I would meet with all 99 senators one-on-one, Republicans and Democrats, and I would move them to the right positions on a lot of issues. You can do it if you aren’t afraid of the other party getting credit for something good happening, and that’s the problem now. Republicans or Democrats would never give each other any credit for anything. Their main goal is building their party’s power instead of solving problems.”
Mertens’ long-term goal is to help build the independent party into a major third party over the next decade. He plans to run for U.S. Senate again in two years, but is not sure whether he wants to run beyond 2012. “I’ll still be involved with the independent party, but I don’t know, we’ll just have to wait and see,” Mertens said.
