As the polls begin to turn in the direction of the Democrats in the state of New Jersey this month, Garden State Republicans could be forgiven for feeling a sense of familiar dread as the countdown to Election Day drones onward.
The New Jersey GOP was going to kick the football with George W. Bush, and then with Doug Forrester. Most painfully, perhaps, they were going to kick it for sure in 2006, when Tom Kean Jr. seemed prime to knock off appointed U.S. Senator Robert Menendez. While less sanguine about their chances against Barack Obama, they thought that they had a reasonable shot at octogenarian Senator Frank Lautenberg, whose approval ratings lagged for much of the 2008 electoral cycle.
Alas, all for naught. Not only did the New Jersey GOP get shut out on all of those races, at the end of the day, they weren't even all that close. John Kerry's seven point victory in 2004 was the closest Republicans came to the taste of victory in the past five years in statewide elections.
But 2009? This was going to be different for them. This time, they were certain to grab the brass ring.
They had an incumbent Democratic governor to target, a man whose approval ratings languished in the 30s. Polling throughout 2009 had confirmed that the toughest political job to keep in America may well be Governor. They had a well-known political figure as their standard-bearer, who they had worked extremely hard to package as a tough fighter against the evils of government corruption.
And...yet...the final weeks of October have come, and the election in New Jersey is in a very familiar place. What was once a sizeable lead for Chris Christie has completely evaporated.
Statistically, the recent evidence has been a bit jarring. The last ten weeks of the campaign show a distinct movement in the favor of Democrats. That movement becomes particularly stark in the last few weeks.
Consider the best example of this phenomenon: Menendez-Kean, 2006:
Polling Data, 2006 U.S. Senate Race in New Jersey (# of Polls in Parentheses)
Aug 1-Sep 15, 2006: Kean +1.4 (7 polls)
Sep 15-Oct 15, 2006: Menendez +1.7 (13 polls)
Oct 15-Nov 7, 2006 Menendez +5.4 (25 polls)
FINAL RESULT: Menendez +9 (53-44)
In 2008, the same effect could be seen in the 2008 Senate race, although the effect in that campaign was not quite as sharp, because Zimmer trailed Lautenberg by a modest margin throughout the campaign:
Polling Data, 2008 U.S. Senate Race in New Jersey (# of Polls in Parentheses)
Aug 1-Sep 15, 2008: Lautenberg +11.1 (8 polls)
Sep 15-Oct 15, 2008: Lautenberg +11.0 (7 polls)
Oct 15-Nov 4, 2008: Lautenberg +15.5 (8 polls)
FINAL RESULT: Lautenberg +14 (56-42)
In 2009, despite the situational dynamics being dead-set against Democratic Governor Jon Corzine, we are seeing the same dynamics occurring again. Looking at a slightly different time frame, the progression is nevertheless quite clear:
NJ Governors Race, Average Lead For Chris Christie
July 1-31, 2009: Christie +9.6 (8 polls)
August 1-30, 2009: Christie +7.4 (10 polls)
Sept 1-30, 2009: Christie +5.6 (11 polls)
October 1-15, 2009: Christie +1.0 (11 polls)
(Source for all of the above data found here)
Now that the scoreboard confirms that the phenomenon is real, and not the stuff of Democratic dreams and Republican nightmares, it is worth exploring the possible causes for this phenomenon, which might allow Jon Corzine to defy the odds and attain a once-improbable reelection victory.
1) Democratic Voters On the Fence
One possible explanation for this late shift in numbers is that, in New Jersey at least, most of the fence-sitters in electoral politics lean a little bit to the left. There is some solid recent evidence for this: in the most recent poll by Quinnipiac, the highest number of undecided voters, by far, were in urban areas, a region that Corzine leads Christie by nearly 30 points. As those voters come home, they are likely to come home to the Democrats. By contrast, only four percent of voters are undecided on the Jersey Shore, which is Christie's best region by far.
Every pollster I checked in the last month that had a breakdown of the data registered more undecided Democrats than Republicans. Of course, that discrepancy was even more stark earlier in the summer (in one poll over the summer by PPP, only 8% of Republicans were undecided, while 16% of Democrats remained on the fence). This discrepancy explains, in part, the tightening numbers over the past few months.
2) Relatively Undefined Republican Candidates
Another thing that Democrats have indirectly benefitted from is the fact that, in many cases, the Republican challengers have been largely undefined. This allowed their Democratic opponents ample opportunity to define (or ill-define, as it were) the GOP standard bearers.
Certainly, that has happened this year. The most recent poll from Quinnipiac had Chris Christie sitting on a mediocre 38-40 favorability spread. When Quinnipiac polled the state just after the June primaries in New Jersey, Christie was sitting on a much more robust 36-16 spread in his favorabilities. In other words, in the four months since the primaries, Christie has gained scant few fans, and a whole host of detractors.
Part of that is on Christie. If Corzine and his team have done a solid job of defining the challenger, it is only because Christie has foolishly made himself easy to define. It has become readily apparent that Christie was content to coast on his lead, which had been built up on the simple calculus of an embattled governor being challenged by...well...some guy.
Christie assiduously avoiding defining his campaign, or his future administration, in anything other than broad platitudes that bordered on self-parody. By the time the campaign kicked into high gear, the Christie campaign had earned such a reputation for vagueness that even the right-wing Wall Street Journal called him out for it. This gave Corzine yet another avenue of attack, in which he has now been joined by Independent candidate Chris Daggett.
The net effect--the newly defined Chris Christie is far from beloved by the New Jersey electorate, and even an embattled Democratic governor starts to look better in comparison.
3. The State, It Is A-Changing
Having said all of that, perhaps Christie's penchant for equivocation, and his subsequent reluctance to provide concrete remedies for the state, are a smarter strategy than we think.
New Jersey is a state in transition. In 1992, it was narrowly carried by Bill Clinton. It was a two-point win, even as the Arkansas native was winning nationally by nearly six points. In 2008, Obama's margin of victory here (fifteen points) was well beyond his national margin of victory.
Look, even more simply, at how voter registration by party has shifted in the Garden State. New Jersey, at least in recent generations, has always had more registered Democrats than Republicans (and voters who decline to affiliate are greater than both). But look at what has happened in the past decade. From 1998-2008, Democrats gained a net of nearly 641,000 new voters in the state. During the same time frame, the GOP was able to gain a net of merely 183,000 new voters. This is, to say the least, a substantial discrepancy.
This is a state where hard-right appeals are unlikely to work, and where the Republican Party's label is badly damaged. Christie inadvertently admitted as much in July, when he put together a new ad on urban renewal in two languages, and intentionally omitted his party affiliation in the Spanish-language ad.
None of this, of course, should be interpreted as any sort of prediction that Governor Corzine has this thing locked up. Far from it, the Governor is still leader of a state during an economic time where virtually no decisions that he makes will please people. Furthermore, and counter to the conventional wisdom, he might be hurt by the Daggett boomlet. It is not hard to fathom that some of Daggett's support is coming from moderate Republicans (the type of GOP voter that used to abound in the northeastern US) who might otherwise find voting for a disciple of Karl Rove to be a bit too much to take. Corzine certainly faces challenges.
But so, too, does Christie. An incumbent languishing in the low 40s in the polls two weeks out from Election Day is usually consigned to the political trash heap. And yet Democrats are very optimistic about their chances here, and the Republicans seem very, very concerned.
Apparently, both sides are well scripted in the lessons learned from old Peanuts cartoons.