Recent polls in the New Jersey Senate race from Quinnipiac (July 2-7), Rasmussen (June 12-13) and Monmouth (June 10-11) show pretty much the same things. One is that Newark Mayor Cory Booker will be elected senator in the October. He gets more than 50% in Democratic primary pairings while other candidates struggle to get to double digits, and he gets well over 50% against any of the Republicans running. All the other candidates have less than 50% name identification and no good way to overcome that; New Jersey is the second most expensive state in the nation for television advertising because you have to buy the New York and Philadelphia markets, which together have a population about the same as the state of Texas.
But there’s another common finding that I find interesting. When pollsters pair the low-name-identification Democrats against the low-name-identification Republicans, the two candidates get about the same percentages – well below 50%. This in a state that voted 58%-41% for Barack Obama in 2012. This suggests that in a generic Republican-Democratic contest, Republicans would be in almost as good a shape as they were in 2010, when they carried the popular vote for the House in New Jersey by 50%-48%, rather than in 2012, when Democrats carried the popular vote for the House in the state by 55%-44%.
