CA Sen: Fiorina Leads Tom Campbell 38% – 23%, Campbell Campaign Goes Dark Six Days Before Vote, Tea Bagger Trails Fiorina By 22 Points

Carly Fiorina
Carly Fiorina
Support for Tea Party’s DeVore Nearly Doubled to 16% After Sarah Palin Endorsed Fiorina

With the California primary election in less than a week, the race to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken a harrowing turn for Republicans. It appears that failed former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina now has an insurmountable lead over former Rep. Tom Campbell. The Campbell campaign reportedly ceased television advertising as of June 1.

In the 2000 U.S. Senate race, Campbell lost to incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein by 19 points, but Democrats considered him to be much more electable against Boxer this year than Fiorina, a self-financed political novice who was fired from Hewlett-Packard after a scandal that included allegations she wiretapped members of the HP board of directors.

Interestingly, in the month or so since right-wing celebrity Sarah Palin dissed the tea bagger candidate Chuck DeVore by giving her kiss-of-death endorsement to Fiorina, his polling has almost doubled, from 9 percent in early April to 16 percent now.

It’s hard to prove that Palin’s endorsement of Fiorina — whose gaffes as a McCain-Palin surrogate often dominated headlines in the 2008 campaign — has helped DeVore. It’s just as likely he’s gotten a bump among extreme right-wing voters from a web ad in which he compared himself to Jack Bauer, the lead character in the Fox terror-porn series “24.”

Los Angeles Times:

With a week before the primary, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Campbell has pulled his television advertising and is relying on web ads and telephone calls to drive his message to likely Republican voters.

The decision to go dark — Tuesday was his last day on the air, for now — creates enormous hurdles for the former Congressman at a time when his chief rival, Carly Fiorina, has lent several million dollars to her campaign and shot ahead in the polls in what had once been a close race.

After a push to reach voters through several weeks of ads on cable and broadcast channels, Fiorina led Campbell 38% to 23% in the new Los Angeles Times/USC poll. The poll showed Assemblyman Chuck DeVore of Irvine pulling in 16% of the vote.

Campbell’s precarious financial position was evident in the most recent round of campaign finance reports. Though Campbell raised more money than Fiorina in the period between April 1 and May 19, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive lent her campaign an additional $3 million in the past few weeks, bringing her total personal contributions to $5.5 million.

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