Gary Steele, a 50-year-old tax attorney and former hockey coach from Kinnelon, has never run for office before.  He has no apparent political base, practically no money, and has attracted little attention since he announced his candidacy for Governor as an independent four months ago.  But he's polling at 12% statewide against Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine and Republican Christopher Christie in a poll of likely voters conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University.  Against Steele, Corzine and Christie, the former U.S. Attorney, are tied at 38%.

FDU's decision to include an obscure independent candidate in their poll offers an interesting contrast to another independent candidate, Christopher Daggett.  Daggett, a former state Environmental Protection Commissioner, has raised enough money to qualify for public financing - that means he'll have more than $1.2 million to spend on his campaign, and gets to participate in gubernatorial debates with Christie and Corzine.  The FDU poll has Daggett at 17%, with 38% for Corzine and 37% for Christie. 

Daggett gets 4% from likely voters who picked him without his name being mentioned.  In that survey, Corzine leads 44%-43%. 

That means that despite his advantage of money and exposure, Daggett is running just 5% better than Steele among likely voters. 

Daggett has favorables of 16%-17%.  His name ID is at 50%, although more than half the people who have heard of him (27%) say they don't know enough about him to form an opinion.  Steele has statewide name ID of 15%, with favorables of 2% and unfavorable of 2%.  According to his poll numbers, Steele is about as well known statewide as State Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D-Teaneck) and Monmouth County Sheriff Kim Guadagno, the two major party candidates for Lt. Governor.

(You have wonder if any voters confuse him with now-jailed former Assemblyman Alfred Steele (D-Paterson), soon-to-be-jailed former Irvington Mayor Michael Steele, or Republican National Chairman Michael Steele.)

Until today's FDU poll, Daggett has been the only one of the ten independent candidates to be included in an independent poll.  Some pundits have suggested that Daggett is a surrogate of sorts for all the other third party candidates who will win votes not intended for Corzine or Christie. 

In 1997, the last time a third party candidate received public financing and was included in the debates, a Quinnipiac poll had Libertarian Murray Sabrin at 8% in a three-way race with Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman (45%) and Democrat James E. McGreevey (37%). When the choices were expanded to all ten candidates, Sabrin dropped to 5% (which was his actual percentage on Election Day), with Whitman at 46% and McGreevey at 36%.

PolitickerNJ.com's Matt Friedman wrote last week that Daggett's ballot position could be a problem.  Unlike Christie and Corzine, who each automatically receive either the first or second position on each county's ballot, Daggett competed in random drawings for ballot placement with the nine independent candidates.  He's hard to find in many counties. 

Then again, so is Gary Steele.