East Brunswick, New Jersey
On the surface, the race in New Jersey doesn’t make much sense: Jon Corzine is a Democratic millionaire incumbent in a very blue state. He is outspending his Republican opponent, Attorney General Chris Christie, by more than 3-to-1. He has behind him the stars of the Democratic firmament. And yet Corzine has run behind Christie from day one.
The climate is that bad for Corzine in New Jersey. Unemployment is 9.8 percent. There’s a budget deficit of $8 billion. Taxes are rising across the board. After Christie won his party’s nomination in June, he jumped to a double-digit lead. Unable to move his own numbers–he’s polled over 42 percent only once since January–Corzine went negative, trying to drive some of the anti-Corzine vote away from Christie and to Chris Daggett, an independent candidate who, luckily for Corzine, raised enough money to qualify for matching funds and to be included in the debates.
The governor attacked Christie for an undisclosed loan to one of his subordinates. He attacked the husky Christie for his weight. He attacked Christie for being a tool of the Bush/Rove/Ashcroft axis of evil, which is awfully brazen, as Christie first achieved national notice as one of the U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush Justice Department. To some degree, though, the ads worked. In June, the polls had Christie at 50, Corzine at 37, and Daggett at 4. Today it’s Christie 40, Corzine 39, and Daggett 14–Daggett’s gains have all come from Christie.
Thrilled to be anywhere close to even, Corzine began last week with a big rally in Edison with Joe Biden as his very special guest. Hundreds of people packed a gymnasium to hear the vice president testify about how vital Corzine’s help has been to the Obama administration. While talking about Obama’s stimulus bill, for example, Biden said: “I literally picked up the phone and called Jon Corzine and said ‘Jon, what do you think we should do?’ ” The next day, Corzine held two rallies with Bill Clinton, each drawing more than a 1,000 people. On Wednesday, President Obama headlined an event in Hackensack, which drew a crowd of 3,500, and New York’s almost senator, Caroline Kennedy, barnstormed with the governor.
The New York Times has also been riding shotgun. To kick off Corzine’s big week, the Sunday edition of the Times gave him an emphatic endorsement. On Monday, the paper ran a blockbuster story in which unnamed sources suggested that the subordinate to whom Christie had loaned money might have done favors for Christie and that it was possible that some of these favors might have been improper. The breathless, anonymously sourced piece was eerily reminiscent of the Times‘s McCain-lobbyist-affair hit job from February 2008. To cap off its run, the Times produced a poll showing Corzine magically leading Christie by 3 points. (Of the dozens of polls conducted this year, only one other survey has suggested Corzine was doing so well, and that came from a Democratic research firm.)
But Corzine’s real strength is his money. He has only raised $1.2 million, but has kicked in $15.6 million of his own money to wage a massive ad war. That number, which includes only donations made before October 6, will be a lot higher at the conclusion of the race, but it brings his lifetime total of spending on his political races to $120 million. The money has made Corzine ads ubiquitous in both the Philadelphia and New York markets.
Corzine’s real problem, though, remains unchallenged: He’s wildly unpopular. His campaign has tried out three messages to overcome this: (1) Corzine has done a good job, and New Jersey is better off now than it was before; (2) these are scary times and we can’t trust a right-wing Republican like Chris Christie; (3) Barack Obama will be disappointed if Corzine loses.
The first case is particularly unconvincing, and even Corzine’s people don’t seem to believe it. Bill Clinton, for instance, tried to bolster Corzine’s accomplishments by noting that Jersey’s foreclosure rate, while still high by the state’s historical standard, is down by 30 percent. Ticking off the governor’s top accomplishments, Representative Rob Andrews boasted that “Someday, you’ll be able to take a train from Camden to Glassboro because of Jon Corzine.” (If you aren’t from Jersey, try to imagine celebrating future ferry service between Hades and Limbo.)
The charge that Christie is a conservative nut is no more convincing. At one rally last week, Corzine attacked Christie by non sequitur, saying that he “would have sided with Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford” on the subject of stimulus money.
The third message is all about nationalizing the race. Corzine is blaming New Jersey’s lost jobs on George W. Bush and invokes the Obama mantras “Si se puede” and “Yes we can” on the stump. At the rally in Hackensack, Corzine supporters wore T-shirts proclaiming “Yes We Can 2.0.” Clinton began his remarks by telling the audience, “I’m here because I want the president and our people in Congress to succeed in bringing this country back.” Another surrogate noted ominously that if Christie wins, “on the morning after the election, the president’s chief of staff will walk into the Oval Office and have to say, ‘Mr. President, we’re sorry, but someone who opposes your agenda and wants to take the country back to where it was under George W. Bush won the election.’ ”
Christie wants no part of this larger narrative. The only prominent Republican to campaign for him has been Rudy Giuliani, who is as much a regional figure as a national one. He never talks about ideology and actually welcomed Obama’s presence last week, “It’s a wonderful thing for the president to come to the state of New Jersey. I’ve always said, if the president of the United States, no matter what party they’re in, comes to New Jersey–even if they’re coming to campaign against me–it’s good for the people of the state of New Jersey to see their president.” He even went so far as to release a web ad which unironically runs a voiceover of the president’s “change” speech from the 2008 campaign while positing Christie as the inheritor of Obama’s ethos.
A couple hours after Corzine and Biden took the stage together, Christie held his only event of the day in the house of Dan and Allison Brown, on a middle-class cul-de-sac in East Brunswick. He sat in the Browns’ living room with nine people from the neighborhood. No stage, no lights, no theme music, no out-of-town superstar supporters. The Browns have two small children, and a Pack-and-Play was tucked into one corner of the room. The glass and wrought-iron coffee table in front of Christie had its edges wrapped in child-proof padding. Besides the nine voters, four local TV cameras and four print reporters were present. The candidate talked for barely two minutes before opening the floor to questions, first from the neighbors and then from the reporters.
Christie started out emphasizing property taxes, his campaign’s main focus for the home stretch. When he ran four years ago, Corzine had promised to cut property taxes by 40 percent. Instead they’re up across the state, by an average of $1,000. (In East Brunswick, they’re up 19 percent.) But Christie quickly went off message. He answered questions on point, instead of turning them back to his preset theme. So, for instance, he talked seriously about state constitutional conventions, urban education, AG appointments, the state supreme court, pension overhaul, and the regulatory hell New Jersey foists on businesses. He is friendly without being cloying, charming without being smarmy. He’s asking for your vote, not your love.
Truth be told, Christie isn’t an electric campaigner. Since winning the nomination he has run a relatively no-nonsense reform campaign. Christie’s initial case was that Corzine had made a hash of New Jersey and that, as a crusading, reform-minded attorney general, he was the guy who could clean it up. Voters already agreed with the first half of this proposition. And while Corzine might plausibly blame part of the problem on macro-economic conditions, he has only made matters worse with increases in income taxes, the sales tax, and property taxes. (He also hiked tolls on the state’s highways and recently said that he’s “more than happy” to consider raising the gas tax after reelection.)
Christie’s is a very simple message: “lower taxes, lower spending.” He sometimes loses sight of it and gets sidetracked with small potatoes like Corzine’s questionable use of his private foundation. But the Christie campaign plans to be on air hammering taxes and spending these last two weeks.
If they do, Christie has a good chance to win. It’s unlikely the independent Daggett will actually get the 15 percent he’s polling at now. Third-party candidates generally under-perform polls on Election Day, and New Jersey’s electoral rules mean that Daggett’s name will be muddled in with a large group of independent candidates. If Daggett drops and Corzine polls at the 40 percent he’s been hovering near all year, there’s a path to a narrow Christie victory.
Christie has been the frontrunner from the start. But if he topples Jon Corzine and his many friends, it’ll still be an upset.
Jonathan V. Last is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
