What a difference a few years can make in Senate campaigns.

It was just two short years ago, in the summer of 2010, when the dead wrestlers of Linda McMahon's TV wrestling empire began haunting her first campaign for one of Connecticut's U.S. Senate seats.

There were so many it's hard to keep track.

Dead wrestlers, many succumbing to work-related drug addictions, were a hot topic in political blogs and commentary all around the country that summer.

I think this blog on thenation.com gave a good summary:

"Just this fall alone, during her campaign, we have seen the deaths of wrestlers Eddie Fatu at 36, Lance Cade at 29, Luna Vachon at 48 and Jorge Gonzales at 44. In recent years we have seen the death by heart attack of wrestling legend Eddie Guerrero in 2005 and the suicide of Chris Benoit, which took place after he murdered his wife and child," wrote Dave Zirin.

"To call the response to these tragedies coldblooded would be an insult to reptiles."

Zirin likened the company's explaining away the wrestlers' deaths to a tobacco company executive saying "Well, lots of people get cancer."

Indeed, the working conditions and health practices of McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment - consumed but ultimately exonerated in a steroid abuse scandal in the 1990s - dominated the Senate campaign season two years ago.

A blogger on slate.com ended her commentary in 2010 on the dead wrestlers by pondering whether then-candidate Richard Blumenthal, the Democrat in the general election, was up to the challenge of holding McMahon's hand to the hot fire of accountability.

"Does Blumenthal have an ad in him that will cast McMahon as a wrestling lady of death?" she wrote then.

I am sure that some supporters of Christopher Shays, McMahon's opponent in this year's Republican primary, might be inclined to ask the same question.

Alas, Shays doesn't have the money to launch a damaging television campaign.

Shays went on the attack during the last debate, suggesting that McMahon has a lot of nerve casting herself as a grandmother in this campaign when her company has denied loving family relations to so many employees.

McMahon sweetly smiled it all away, going on to mention that, yes, she is a grandmother.

Some of the most devastating testimony against McMahon and her company's treatment of its entertainers came in 2010 from the parents of wrestlers who had died.

One of them, Chris Benoit's father, flown into Connecticut by the Blumenthal campaign, gave a rambling hour-long press conference in which he said he believed the cumulative brain injuries his son suffered in the ring led him to kill his wife and son before hanging himself.

He said McMahon and WWE did not take the health and safety of its workers seriously.

"This is a caring CEO?" Mike Benoit said of McMahon. "This is what the state of Connecticut wants to send to Washington to look out for your interests?"

Joshua Green, writing for the Atlantic in 2010, complimented The Day's political writer at the time, Ted Mann, for a long story on the father of Lance McNaught, a former WWE wrestler who abused steroids and painkillers before dying of a heart attack at 29.

The article quoted McMahon as saying of McNaught that she "might have met him once."

McNaught's father said McMahon met his son on multiple occasions and her attempt to brush off his death was disrespectful.

"The article, which is long, well-reported and substantial, goes on to make a convincing case to back this up … One thing that really jumped out at me is that WWE wrestlers weren't even provided health insurance, so most wrestlers self medicated."

The McNaught story did not appear until August 2010, farther along in that Senate campaign season than we are now in this one.

So maybe Connecticut voters will still get more of a reprise of the expensive but unsuccessful 2010 McMahon bid for a Senate seat.

This is the opinion of David Collins