Last night Hugh Hewitt talked to Christopher Daggett, the independent third-party candidate in New Jersey’s governor’s race. Strangely, the independent didn’t seem to think the word “corruption” applied to Jon Corzine, the incumbent governor: “Jon Corzine’s not corrupt, but I believe that he hasn’t done a good job as governor . . . There’s not a lot of corruption in the Corzine administration.”

I would note that while only one Corzine cabinet member has resigned after the FBI raided his house, lawmakers (of both parties, but more frequently Democrats) are being taken away in handcuffs by the boatload by the FBI, and Corzine’s never done much more than shake his head sadly after the scandals break. He stood by his then-fellow senator Bob Torricelli until the bitter end. Jon Corzine may not endorse corruption in state government, but he’s never expressed much interest or effort in rooting it out.

Daggett also insisted that a poll has him at 17 percent. On his web site, in fact, it says, “The latest FDU poll shows Chris Daggett now at 17%.” Strangely, there is no link to that poll.

Unfortunately for Daggett, that’s not the latest FDU poll. The most recent one has him at 4 percent*. In fact, there’s no sign of a poll putting Daggett at 17 percent anywhere on the Fairleigh Dickinson web site, and it didn’t get on Pollster.com, which does a pretty good job of collecting poll data.

Was Daggett misinformed? Did FDU release and then rescind the poll? Was it a hallucination? Or is the candidate and campaign just making stuff up?

*UPDATE: Ah-ha. Daggett is at 4 percent when the pollster doesn’t mention him and respondents have to volunteer him and at 17 percent when he is listed. The result was listed at Race42008.

In light of this, it’s a little cynical of FDU to list Daggett at 4 percent in their opening paragraph and mention that he’s at 17 percent in the middle of the fifth paragraph. Daggett’s name will be on all the ballots; it’s not like he’s running a write-in campaign . . .