Dave Weigel did a tour through New Jersey over the weekend, and posted a whole bunch of good stuff, including an interview with Barbara “Oh yeah — the Democrat” Buono. And a long, dispiriting piece on “Christie, Getting Ready to Go National“:
… The last poll taken on the governor’s race before Hurricane Sandy put Buono down by 16 points to Christie. The first poll taken after the storm put her down by 38 points. Since then, she has never trailed by less than 18 points. This deficit understates how well Christie has outplayed Buono, and the impossible time she’s had looking for a consistent message against him. She’s tried to convince the state’s reliable Democrats to bail on Christie over his opposition to gay marriage, over his thwarting of a gun control bill, over the fact that he will probably run for president. In one of her final TV ads, Buono talks straight to camera about how she’s “the only one running for governor.”…
“She keeps saying he’s going to run for president,” says voter Jim Logan at Christie’s Somers Point rally. “Who cares? Some people think that’s a good idea. She shoulda fired whoever was working for her and she should have focused on property taxes.”
Too late to speculate. The governor has steadily won over local Democratic power brokers, even ones who (pre-Sandy) said they’d never back him. Their big idea: Spare the Democrats in the state legislature from the fallout of a Buono rout. It’s working, according to Democratic state Sen. Loretta Weinberg. “We’re up in our tracking polls,” she tells me at a Democratic campaign office. Even that Rutgers-Eagleton poll, which Democrats don’t trust (it was 10 points off in the October race for U.S. Senate) has them up by 6 points in the race for the legislature. Christie’s “cult of personality,” as Weinberg calls it, hasn’t been transferred to Republicans. He’s outspent Buono; Democrat-aligned independent expenditures have buried the Republican candidates down the ballot…
Christie’s candidate, Atlantic County Sheriff Frank Balles, smiles and waves as the governor praised him. Not far away, in the highly diverse crowd, state Sen. Tom Kean Jr. grinned at the prospect of taking the majority. All voters needed to do, said Christie, was vote straight down the ballot—“you’re not gonna vote for Buono anyway.” But neither in Atlantic City nor in Somers Point, both rallies attended by Balles, did Christie mention any particular policy he was stymied from doing because he didn’t have a Republican Senate. In Virginia, the struggling campaign of gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli insists that it’s gaining as the candidate makes the election a “referendum on Obamacare.” Christie never mentions Obamacare, or Obama, or any national political issue more specific than Washington’s status as a sick joke…
“Last election, for Cory Booker, that Senate election, did you know that three out of four people did not vote?” asks Buono. “It was the lowest voter turnout in our history for a general election. Cory Booker has twice as many people following him on Twitter! This governor wants to disenfranchise people. He wants you to think it’s over. Why else did he veto a bill we sent him that would have allowed in-person early voting?”
That Senate race might be left out of Wednesday morning analysis. Christie, empowered to set an election to replace the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg, could have bundled it with the Nov. 5 race. He opted to set the Senate race for Oct. 16, a Wednesday—“People were showing up on Tuesday thinking they could vote!” says Buono—which unbuckled the fate of Buono or Jim Whelan from the fate of Cory Booker…
Voter suppression — the softer side. So hip!
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