FOR a brief 36-hour period until the New Jersey polls closed Tuesday night, it was starting to look like Bret Schundler might morph into Britney Spears and come out singing, “Oops, I did it again” – by stunning the experts and scoring another upset win in the gubernatorial primary.
Eyebrows were raised across the state Monday morning when the highly regarded Quinnipiac Poll showed Doug Forrester’s double-digit lead evaporating in just five days into a statistical dead heat with Schundler.
And with the former Jersey City mayor enjoying what was widely seen as the better get-out-the-vote operation, it seemed like last-minute momentum just might allow Schundler to eke out another surprise win.
It wasn’t to be, though. Forrester won the race by 5 points, even besting Schundler in more conservative areas where the latter was expected to run ahead. (Schundler clearly was hurt by the campaign of Steve Lonegan, the Bogota mayor who picked up conservative votes in a bizarre campaign that painted Schundler as a closet liberal.)
Ultimately, it appears, the biggest factor in Forrester’s win was the widespread belief – reflected in the Q-Poll – among Republicans that he had the best chance to win in November.
So now Forrester goes from being the rich man in the race – his primary campaign cost $9 million – to being the poor(er) one: He faces Sen. Jon Corzine, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, in November.
Forrester, of course, is not shy about using his wealth to finance his campaign. But his resources pale beside those of Corzine, for whom money and politics go hand-in-hand.
In 2000, Corzine – apparently bored with Wall Street – bought himself the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Bill Bradley, spending an all-time record $70 million in the process.
Now, having seemingly become bored with Washington just four years into his six-year term, he’s decided to spend as much as is needed to move into the statehouse.
Over the past four years, Corzine has certainly greased the palms of just about every Democratic and local community group possible. He’s the single biggest contributor to the political machine of Camden County Democratic boss George Norcross, one of the state’s biggest power brokers – who was caught on tape bragging, for all intents and purposes, that he has Jon Corzine in his hip pocket.
More Norcross bombshells may explode. A local politician secretly taped him for over 300 hours – but only 10 hours’ worth have been publicly released. The state’s Democratic hierarchy is trying desperately to keep the rest under wraps.
But what’s come out thus far may be Forrester’s best weapon.
In fact, Forrester is in the best place a New Jersey Republican can be: He’s an ideological moderate running at a time of public disenchantment with Democratic corruption and government mismanagement. In fact, that’s been the only winning formula for the New Jersey GOP in decades.
Which is why you can expect Forrester to run as much against the Democratic machine – including the hacks put into power by disgraced ex-Gov. Jim McGreevey – as against Corzine himself. And which is why you can expected Corzine to focus his efforts on tying Forrester to President Bush and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay by painting him as a rock-ribbed conservative.
Both messages will be all over the TV screens this summer and fall. So which one will work?
The edge clearly has to go to Corzine. New Jersey is a liberal state, which means his far-left voting record isn’t much of a liability. And he’s got the deeper pockets – and no qualms about writing very big checks as needed.
On the other hand, there are three issues in this race: Out-of-control state spending, out-of-control property taxes and out-of-control corruption in government.
Forrester’s primary win was helped by his property-tax proposal, a simple formula known as “30 in 3,” in which the state picks up tax payments and reduces the homeowners’ share by 10 percent in each of three years. But simple to grasp is not the same thing as being fiscally viable – and Forrester’s plan already has been subject to some serious challenges.
Whether he can win this fall depends in large measure on whether he can convince the voters that the first two problems – taxes and spending – are inextricably linked to the third issue, corruption.
Fix that last one, and the first two become that much easier to solve.