NJ Republicans & The Gubernatorial Race
The Republican Party in New Jersey will have to do more than yell about Murphy’s handling of COVID-19
Republicans in New Jersey have a tough battle ahead if they hope to take back the governorship this fall, but it is not impossible. While the state is often thought of as a deep-blue enclave — its legislature has had a Democratic majority for years, and the state has not handed its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush — Conservative governors have managed to occupy the executive estate at Drumthwacket quite a few times over the past several decades.
However, it will take more than the trend of ping-ponging parties to give the GOP hope this fall, as the current governor, Phil Murphy, has enjoyed a ratings boost from the pandemic, and registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by approximately one-million voters during an extremely fracas time in our nation’s politics.
There has not been any recent polling that indicates whether Murphy has held onto his improved ratings or whether public opinion has declined with the COVID-19 pandemic on its last legs. But that’s the unwritten story of 2021; 2020, the year that saw the advent of a viral surge that killed millions across the country and world, offered a significant boost to governors that managed to — at a minimum — strike the right tone with their constituents.
According to a Monmouth University Poll, Murphy was one of those beneficial governors. In April 2020, during the pandemic’s first peak, 71% of New Jersey residents polled approved of the job Murphy was doing, while 21% disapproved. This was a significant boost from September 2019 when 41% approved and 38% disapproved. And nearly everyone had something to say about the gov. According to the Monmouth University Poll, only 8% of residents had no opinion about Murphy in 2020, down from 21% in September.
Worse yet for Republican hopefuls, this boost in favorable opinions about the state’s leading Democrat was unanimous amongst all parties’ voters. Between Sept. 2019-April 2020, Murphy’s approval rating jumped 21 percentage points among Democrats from 71%-92%, 41 percentage points among Independents (28%-69%), and 29 percentage points among Republicans (16%-45%).
But governors can only ride the wave of COVID-19 for so long. A lot has changed in a year — just look at the rapid decline of New York’s Andrew Cuomo. But thus far, Murphy has avoided having virus-related scandals tarnish his name in the media; the vaccine-rollout continues to chug along; and, while the governor is reopening state slower than some of his Republican counterparts, he has not balked and backstepped at a slight increase in cases over the past week.
Because of this, Murphy hasn’t given Republicans much ammunition to use against him in the form of ads and campaign speeches, nor has he given Lasse-fare independents enough motivation to boot him out en masse. Moreover, Murphy has garnered a reputation of being one of the “most progressive governors in America.”
And that last point only ratches up the difficulty Conservatives face this fall. Due to Murphy’s support among his party’s left flank, he remains unopposed for the primary season. This should not come as a surprise, though. Moderate Democrats are forced to run left in blue states or face woke challengers that are heavily backed by equally outlandish advocacy groups. Progressives rarely have to fear moderate challengers in states that lack political diversity.
Republicans, on the other hand, face a crowded field of virtual unknowns. They are unknown, of course, because the party has fallen into obsolescence. Also not in their favor is the fact that media coverage of their message will be nonexistent. For, what remains of local media is just as biased as their mainstream counterparts. What few openings newspapers have, are being filled by reporters working useless beats such as diversity and inclusion instead of people covering issues that matter to suburban towns with predominantly Republican populations.
Currently, the Republican primary field consists of four hopefuls: Jack Ciattarelli, former New Jersey assemblyman, and likely the most notable name on the list; Brian Levine, former Franklin Township mayor; Philip Rizzo, the pastor of a Hoboken church; and Hirsh Singh, an IT professional who used to work in my locale: Burlington County.
These four will duke it out in low turnout primary elections. The victor will have a larger challenge in taking down Murphy in the fall. But the news is not all bad. For starters, Democrats have not managed to get more than one term out of one of their governors since Brendan Byrne in the late 70s. Republicans, meanwhile, have managed to get two terms out of all of their candidates since then — acting governors excluded.
The GOP has other factors working in their favor this year. The breakdown of voters in the state is troubling but still has a lot of promise. While Democrats do outnumber Republicans by around a million registered voters, Independents make up the second-largest share of voters in the state and are nipping on the majority party’s heels.
The breakdown of the voter roll as of April is as follows: Unaffiliated — 2,427,183 (37%), Democrats — 2,550,077 (39%), Republican — 1,460,337 (22%). There are a total of 6,518,969 registered voters in New Jersey.
There is enormous untapped potential in the large share of unaffiliated voters in the state. Republicans only have to reach these disaffected voters with an agenda that will get them to the polls. This should not be difficult. The problem is Republicans will have to do more than say Murphy’s handling of COVID stymied life returning to normal.
By the time the election rolls around, life should more or less be returned to normal. Even if Murphy hopes to drag out the virus-as-a-crisis model for as long as possible (and there is no indication that is the case), it would be politically prudent for him not to give voters onerous lockdowns as a reason to boot him out come election time.
A more successful tack would be to tie Murphy’s plan to that of his party’s far-Left counterparts in the federal government. Joe Biden also campaigned on being a moderate. We see how that turned out. Murphy also has made the mistake of wading into national issues for the progressive side. Most recently, he hopped on the “‘the new Jim Crow’ in Georgia” canard. He also used the shade being thrown at the peach state to try to recruit businesses the New Jersey. The optics reeked of opportunism, and Murphy should know that for as long as taxes remain outrageous in the state, it will never be competitive.
Sometimes, though, Murphy’s travels into the national conversation may end up benefitting him with his constituents. President Joe Biden has recently stated that removing the SALT provisions that were created as part of former President Trump’s tax cuts was a crucial part of his future economic plan. Those provisions hammered state taxpayers who could only write off $10,000 worth of property taxes on their federal taxes. These tax caps were great for red states that maintained their budgets at the expense of blue states that were attempting to squeeze every ounce of juice out of their residents to fund their promises to the public unions that got them elected.
The bourgeois in Jersey, the wealthy, liberal elite, didn’t like that Florida and Texas and were no longer footing the bill for them. Instead of holding state Democrats responsible for this asset seizing, many voters blamed Trump and federal Republicans. That was a political benefit for New Jersey’s left. They were able to hide their failure to address spending behind the federal government.
But there is still a counter here for Republicans. The pandemic has laid bare the truth about Democrats and teachers unions in the state. If anything has affected voters of all stripes, those unaffiliated ones included, it was the having their children locked out of school by greedy unions.
Republicans can cut a whole campaign’s worth of ads on Murphy’s bedfellows in the NJEA. Such a strategy would be nothing new, though. Former Republican Governor Chris Christie made combatting the NJEA a hallmark of his campaign, and this was before their excesses were brought to the forefront by COVID-19.
Residents are fed up with the teachers’ unions. And if Democrats want to portray them as heroes to defend all those generous campaign receipts from the NJEA, they are free to try, but they can do so as a minority party.
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