She’s talking up her personal story and reaching out to women. McMahon 2.0: Ready to rumble?

STRATFORD, Conn. — At a recent campaign stop here, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate talked to potential supporters about her hopes for her grandchildren, her modest upbringing and the tough financial times she faced after marrying and having children at a young age.

This wasn’t the same hard-shelled Linda McMahon — the tough talking former World Wrestling Entertainment boss who spent $50 million of her personal fortune and still failed to ride the 2010 Republican wave into the Senate last time around.


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“I met my husband in church, we were married when we were kids,” she told the crowd at a modest restaurant called Off The Hook. “The day before I graduated [from college], I found out I was pregnant with our first child. We had no job, no money, no insurance. So I get what that’s all about.”

Call it Linda 2.0.

McMahon has spent the past two years figuring out what went wrong in the 2010 election against Sen. Richard Blumenthal — a year when Republicans won big throughout the country and she outspent her opponent by a huge margin. The Linda of 2012 is more toned down. She’s talking up her personal story, reaching out to women and holding low-key, low-dollar fundraisers to get voters “invested” in her. She’s got a brand new campaign team and hired heavyweight Republican strategist Chris LaCivita to help.

And even though she’ll be an underdog here in deep blue Connecticut, McMahon’s political makeover and her money has made this one of the sleeper races to watch in the Republican effort to take control of the Senate.

It remains to be seen whether Connecticut voters will buy it — her name recognition is strong but a recent Public Policy Polling survey showed 48 percent of voters had an unfavorable view of McMahon versus 42 percent who had a favorable impression.

“It’s ironic that Linda McMahon is trying to rehab the image she spent $50 million brandishing into voters’ minds last cycle. The bottom line is she is a fundamentally flawed candidate, and no PR strategy can change that,” said former Blumenthal communications director Ty Matsdorf, now a senior adviser with the Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century.

McMahon’s campaign doesn’t need help from outside groups or the national parties. Her money, combined with an intense rebranding effort, could make the race to fill retiring Sen. Joe Lieberman’s seat more competitive than Democrats originally expected. So far this cycle she’s spent almost $9 million, much of it on advertising highlighting the wrestling magnate’s personal story.

McMahon is up against former Rep. Chris Shays in Tuesday’s Republican primary. But polls show McMahon up at least 30 points and she has her sights set squarely on the general election — she’s already gone up with ads attacking her probable Democratic opponent, Rep. Chris Murphy. Murphy won big at the Democratic convention and is way ahead in the polls against his primary opponent, former Connecticut State Secretary Susan Bysiewicz.

Murphy is a popular Democratic congressman representing the most Republican district in the state. But he’s not as well known as Blumenthal, who won statewide office as attorney general for two decades. The congressman said McMahon is the same candidate she was in 2010 and the “new Linda” is just a schtick to get votes.

”She’s a very smart marketer. She didn’t build a billion-dollar wrestling empire without knowing how to learn from her mistakes and adjust her marketing techniques,” Murphy said.

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The latest Quinnipiac poll showed Murphy leading McMahon, 46 percent to 43 percent.

“It’s pretty neck and neck right now,” said Quinnipiac pollster Douglas Schwartz. “The question will be, does [McMahon] use her millions to define Murphy before he’s able to define himself to a statewide electorate? But it’s also possible an onslaught of ads could backfire: voters last time found her excessive amount of advertising to be more annoying than informative.”

McMahon is also working overtime to close the gap with women voters, a group she lost by 12 points to Blumenthal in the last election. She’s held over 100 “Conversations with Linda” events with all-female audiences in a direct effort to narrow that gap. Schwartz said she’s doing slightly better since she first ran but still lags behind Murphy by 9 points among women.

“There was a misperception before that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” McMahon said in an interview with POLITICO. “And when they hear my story — I was born in a small town, and my parents were civil service employees and we lived in low-cost housing, and the story of my husband and I marrying young and going bankrupt and coming back from that — it lets them know I’ve walked in their shoes.”

She still talks about her time at the WWE but plays up how she turned the business around, touting her experience in the private sector as exactly what Washington needs more of. She says she’s still the tough CEO but with a softer side.

“People ask me, ‘Why would you want to do this? Do you just want a hobby?” she said. “No, I resigned as the CEO from a company I loved and built from the ground up because I really felt that we needed more people in Washington who had worked in business, made a payroll. … If I wanted a hobby, I would do something a lot more fun.”

But McMahon still comes to the campaign with significant baggage. And Democrats are employing much of the same ammunition they used against her in her 2010 race.

The attacks aren’t new, but expect to see more about how McMahon outsourced jobs at WWE and exploited her workers for her financial gain. The 2010 death of former wrestler Lance McNaught — who battled a painkiller addiction that started after he was injured wrestling — brought increased scrutiny of the business practices and culture of the WWE. Another difficult obstacle for McMahon to overcome: A cache of sometimes embarrassing videos easily found on YouTube of her performances at various WWE events, including one of her slapping her daughter.

“The central premise of McMahon’s candidacy is that she’s going to run the U.S government like she ran the wrestling industry,” Murphy said. “God help us if the U.S. government is run the same way Linda McMahon ran the wrestling industry because people died, workers didn’t get health care and jobs got shipped overseas. She has invited a conversation about her time as CEO so I think it’s fair game to talk about the way she made her money.”

Similar accusations of McMahon’s time at the WWE were made by Shays at a July debate, and McMahon refused to engage him on the topic, The Connecticut Mirror reported.

“It’s because the people of Connecticut are focused on the issues that I kept coming back to,” McMahon said, according to the paper. “They are not talking to me about WWE. They are talking to me about how their families are going to be secure. How they are going to have jobs.”

McMahon has also taken heat for refusing to meet with editorial boards and keeping local media at a safe distance.

“It appears the McMahon team has made a calculation that having the candidate questioned by a bunch of journalists would do more harm than good,” read one editorial in The Day, a southeastern Connecticut paper. “[I]t shows a lack of confidence by and in the candidate. The knock on Ms. McMahon is that she begins to flounder when forced to get past the talking points.”

While McMahon and her team are focused on the general election, Shays is trying hard to convince voters he’s the more electable Republican. But the topic of McMahon’s millions inevitably comes up.

“Nothing surprises me anymore, but I the one thing that did surprise me is that I thought I would raise more money,” Shays said after a meeting with editors at The Darien Times. “What I’ve encountered is the following: ‘Chris, how do you beat someone who has an unlimited checkbook?’”

Shays, a longtime friend of Lieberman, said Republicans lost the Senate election in 2010 “because of McMahon.”

“In the end, I believe that my experience trumps her money. I believe my supporters trump her money, and I believe if I win the primary, I’ll be able to take on Chris Murphy,” Shays said.

Schwartz said it’s “highly unlikely” Shays will pull an upset in the primary, and the Connecticut GOP has rallied around McMahon.

“When we look at the choices, we have in Linda McMahon someone who understands how to run a business and how to put people to work,” said Republican state Sen. Kevin Kelly. “If we’re going to change Washington, we don’t want to keep sending the same kind of ‘experienced’ individuals to Washington, people who have been in politics their whole careers.”

The man who has held the seat since 1989 has no interest in talking about the election to replace him. Lieberman only said that he’d “be watching with interest.”

“Chris Shays and I are great friends and have been for decades,” he said, “but I’m so enjoying not being a candidate for office that I’m trying to stay out of every other campaign I can.”