The New Jersey State Legislature, Part Three: The Assembly, Continued

Welp, before we continue Blue the Nation, let's lead off with the big New Jersey news: Cory Booker isn't running for Governor. Even with all the reports and rumors flying around that he was leaning more toward taking a run at Frank Lautenberg's Senate seat in 2014 (Lautenberg, a Democrat, is probably set to retire), I still believed Booker would ultimately take a shot at Christie. This decision may not guarantee that Booker doesn't run for the Democratic Presidential nomination, but it basically guarantees that he won't get it if he does. It seems Cory Booker is banking on the Democrats not winning the White House in 2016 and then making a run in 2020.

Ultimately, Booker may have made the right decision. Two good friends running
against one another in a governor race would have been a little too made-for-a-comedy-film.
I think we just avoided a terrible political comedy involving a Wayans brother and Jim Belushi.

This changes a lot for the legislative elections. Booker's rising tide would have lifted all the Democratic boats in the state, much as Obama's coattails created a full-blown national wave in 2008. With Booker out of the picture, the only declared candidate for the Democratic nomination is state Senator Barbara Buono, of the Eighteenth District. Buono was the Majority Leader in the Senate (not the same thing as the Senate President, mind you) for a couple of years recently, is a strong progressive, and has a long history of electoral success. She appears to have a good level of early support across various local Democratic parties and allied interests. She's a good candidate, but running against a national political rising star, she won't have significant coattails.

Of less concern is her state Senate seat, which is safe and will be held by the Democrats, regardless of whether Buono wins the gubernatorial nomination. Of greater concern is what could shape up into a real intraparty bloodbath. As noted in a prior entry, the New Jersey Democrats have a longstanding feud simmering. It hasn't presented huge electoral problems recently, but if there's a bruising primary fight, the nominee won't look good going into the general.

We'll talk more about the gubernatorial race in another entry, but for now, a last thought on the subject. We can expect to see much more well-organized and disciplined Republican opposition in 2013 than we saw in 2011. A lot of the local party heads are talking up the presence of Christie on the ballot as a strong motivating factor for getting the party's business in order. Look for them to field many more competitive legislature tickets than they did last time around. Look for Christie to campaign aggressively for his fellow Republicans. And note that the Democrats will have no such captain to lead them. Buono is, as I said before, a fine candidate, and she might even be able to beat Christie if she gets the nomination, but she doesn't have the ability to create a Democratic wave.

"I am running for Governor. Governor of healthy snack food, bitchez."

With that, let's dive into the third portion of our look at the New Jersey state legislative elections coming up in 2013...

Competitive Assembly Seats, cont.:

District 11.

The Incumbent: Caroline Casagrande and Mary Pat Angelini.

Why they're weak: District 11 should have been the inverse of District 7 in 2011: in a purple district, the Democrats should have come very close to unseating one or both of the Republican incumbents. They did come pretty close, but not as close as they should have. Fourth-place vote-getter Kathleen Horgan finished 5.2 points behind first-place vote-getter Caroline Casagrande, and third-place vote-getter Vin Gopal finished 4.4 points behind third-place vote-getter Mary Pat Angelini.

Pro tip to Kathleen Horgan, Vin Gopal, and Raymond Santiago: This picture looks like dogshit.
The Democratic ticket should not look like Granny McChurchtime, Bill the Space Cadet, and
everybody's stupid uncle with the big dumb invention ideas he talks about at the barbecue.

Why they're strong: Gopal was a strong-enough candidate. The Eleventh was reshaped as a minority opportunity district, which gave Gopal an edge. Horgan, on the other hand, was a last-minute ballot replacement for Marilyn Schlossbach, who withdrew after the primary due to business-related complications from Hurricane Irene. Gopal is a business leader, a political and entrepreneurial rising star in the area, and a minority in a district engineered to favor minority groups. Horgan was pretty much just a name with a D next to it. She hindered the ticket.

"Look, I got tricked into running. I thought I was signing up for the Columbia Record Club."

Who can beat them: The Dems should bring Gopal back again. He was seen as a strong candidate at the time, and he'll still be one. In a lower-fundraising district, he raised $100,000 for his campaign. To contextualize that, the top fundraiser in the district was victorious Republican state Senate incumbent Jennifer Beck, who raised about $375,000. Gopal also basically campaigned alone, distancing himself to some degree from Horgan and his other ticketmate, state Senate candidate Raymond Santiago. In a district with a weaker Republican state Senate incumbent, I'd argue for him to head the 2013 ticket, but Beck is not to be trifled with. The first time she won an election to the Legislature, her opponent outspent her by a factor of seven and still didn't make it that close. Better to use Gopal in a race he can win.

So who should be his ticketmate for the Assembly? I think an argument could be made for Santiago, actually. He didn't fare too well against Beck in the 2011 state Senate contest, but again, not too many candidates are likely to. It's not like he got completely pantsed. He had a respectable showing in a purple district against a very tough incumbent who might be unbeatable by all but the shiniest celebrity candidates. He got some name recognition in the district out of the whole situation, and he developed some degree of working relationship with Gopal. As a team, they could make a strong minority appeal while also appealing to the business community.

Price Tag: District 11 is a purple district and Gopal and Santiago have a better chance than anybody at flipping the Assembly seats blue. Gopal's a strong fundraiser, and I think he and his allies should be prepared to spend heavily in this low-fundraising district. $500,000, at minimum.

District 16.

The Incumbents: Donna Simon and Jack Ciaterelli.

Why they're weak: Ciaterelli is in his first term, and will actually be facing the real consequences of redistricting for the first time in 2013. The district used to be solid red, but the new map made it almost perfectly purple. In 2011, Peter Biondi (whose seat is now occupied by Simon) was aided greatly by his long incumbency, and both Republicans benefited from what essentially amounted to a completely unprepared local Democratic opposition. Although the new Sixteenth District has a decent Democratic bench, local party leaders were woefully unprepared for challenging GOP supremacy in a redrawn district. They ended up trotting out two unknowns in Marie Corfield and Joe Camarota.

The late Assemblyman's long-lived popularity was owed, in part, to his
campaign in favor of spaying and neutering pets, a subject which he
frequently made mention of on his famous game show, The Price is Right.

Despite the local party's ineffective challenge, the changing face of the Sixteenth was made readily apparent. The Democratic ticket had its constituent vote on almost total lock, with Camarota only picking up 16 more ballots than Corfield did. This shows that the party has strong control of its voting bloc in the district. Just as important, Biondi got almost 600 more votes than Ciaterelli. This demonstrates what his incumbency did for him, and also what it probably did for his ticketmate. As it was, Biondi defeated both of the Democratic challengers by 3.4%, and Ciaterelli defeated them by just 2.6%. The Republicans claimed narrow victories over weak challenges.

But Biondi died just two days after the 2011 election. Simon was selected as his replacement, and a special election was held, coinciding with the 2012 general election. Corfield, who essentially tied with her ticketmate Camarota for third place in the 2011 election, was the Democratic challenger. Simon defeated Corfield by 980 votes in a race that wasn't officially decided until November 30, 24 days after the election. I'm not 100% sure of this, but I believe it was the last general election race in the country to be called. And after conceding, Corfield made it clear that she wasn't done with politics. After all, she lost by .01% of the total vote. And guess what? Simon's going to have to turn right back around and run for re-election in 2013!

Why they're strong: They're not. They're straight-up not.

Who can beat them: If the Democrats don't gun hard for the Sixteenth District next year, they're out of their minds. They came within 2000 votes of stealing a seat in the district basically on accident in 2011. They lost by a statistically negligible figure in 2012. And the candidate who lost those two races, by an average total of 1500 votes and average percentage point differential of 1.3? She's probably going to run again! She wants it. She's hungry. She gained a hell of a lot of ground, and has proven she has the ability to perform well without much outside support (2011), in a high-profile, high-turnout election (2012, in which turnout for the special election, due to the coinciding national election, was about 150% higher than turnout for the 2011 election), as well as in New Jersey's more typical off-year settings (2011 again.) And she's proven she has the ability to improve her performance.

Even in 2011, when the Democrat ticket in the district was generally not well-known, Corfield stood out from the pack. She'd gained some national attention for asking a critical question of Chris Christie in a Youtube video that went viral. The success of that video was probably what propelled her into the 2011 race, as prior to the campaign she'd been a teacher, and a graphic designer before that. She had sudden notoriety for standing up to one of the gruffest, macho-est dudes in American politics, and holding her ground. The video was generally interpreted as Christie dismantling Corfield's arguments, but he had the advantage of a bully pulpit and a microphone, and voters in her district recognized that.

Chris Christie rudely explains the public education system. Marie Corfield remains unimpressed.

And who's the ticketmate: So it's pretty obvious that I'm all the way in the tank for Marie Corfield. I think she's awesome and I think she can do a great job in the 2013 election. So who else am I in the tank for in this district? Joe Camarota, Corfield's ticketmate in 2011? Hell no. Guy is as bland as mozzarella cheese. I want a candidate with some real oomph. And that candidate is Tom Byrne.

Tom's dad, Brendan, was a well-liked two-term governor of the state. It seems fairly clear that Tom has always wanted to follow in his father's footsteps, but he's been impatient. He hasn't tried to build a political career from the ground up. When he's run for office or considered running for office, it's always been for Governor or Senate. The New Jersey electorate has not delivered these offices to him, nor are they likely to as long as he appears to see his primary qualification as being the son of Brendan Byrne. He needs to start lower on the totem pole and build his way to the higher levels of office. The question becomes, how low should he start?

A case could be made for Byrne to run for the D16 Senate seat. Kip Bateman, the current occupant of the seat, can't exactly be described as vulnerable, having won re-election in 2011 with a margin of 11.2% of the vote, but it's worth noting that this margin is way down from his margin the first time around in 2007, when he won by 23.2%. That's a huge dropoff, largely attributable to the redrawn map of the district. And just as his ticketmates did, Bateman clearly benefited from running against a relative unknown without much outside support in attorney Maureen Vella. Tom Byrne could conceivably close the 3600-vote gap by which Bateman won in 2011, especially given that he's still sitting on a $1,000,000 war chest from his failed 2000 gubernatorial run.

On the other hand, 11.2% is a pretty comfortable margin, and the Dems might not want to waste Byrne on a race he'll have to work a lot harder to win. My instinct would be to run him for the second Assembly seat in the district. Either way, whether he's at the top of the ticket or the bottom, his very presence—and spending power—put the district's Senate seat in play to some degree. So if the ticket is comprised of Byrne, Corfield, and a third candidate, who should that third candidate be? Although I'd love to see celebrity economist Paul Krugman run for office in the Sixteenth, believability demands something more real, to borrow the words of Watto, the great Star Wars bit character and offensive anti-Semitic stereotype.

My best idea for this third ticketmate is outgoing Princeton Township Mayor Chad Goerner. He's well-liked, he's supported positions popular among his constituency, and he would command a strong voter base in the Princeton area. Goerner was also one of the 200-plus signatories of a letter calling for New Jersey legislators to pass a marriage-equality bill during former Governor Jon Corzine's lame-duck session, before Chris Christie—and his threatened veto of marriage equality—took office. The signatories were widely recognized as some of the key Democratic movers and shakers in the state. Goerner's presence on that list speaks well to his ability to advance in the New Jersey Democratic heirarchy. Assembly, or even state Senate, seems like a good move.

A possible dark horse would be former longtime New Jersey Supreme Court justice Alan Handler, but he's 81. Barbara McConnell would be a better idea, if another candidate were needed. McConnell actually served a couple terms in the Assembly ages ago, winning in a district that was predominantly Republican. However, she's also getting up there in years. The ideal ticket is some combination of Corfield, Byrne, and Goerner. With that ticket, Democrats can definitely expect to grab two of the three seats, and they'll have a good shot at all three.

Chris Christie and Marie Corfield exchange come-at-me-bros.
Get ready, District 16, for your third consecutive helping of
Marie Corfield for Assembly. Just vote for her already!

Price Tag: At least the million bucks Byrne's got sitting around from his last campaign. And please, folks, let's give Corfield some Goddamn support this time around, yeah?

District 27.

The Incumbent: Mila Jasey

Why she's weak: Of the two incumbent Democratic Assembly members in the Twenty-Seventh District, John McKeon is probably safe. He defeated his Republican challengers by 5.5% and 5.6%. While those numbers are definitely on the fringe of vulnerability, McKeon will have served 12 years in the chamber by the time of next year's election. That incumbency, combined with strong-enough showings, would be more than enough to make safe his seat even if he weren't the Assistant Majority Leader. He's been a leadership figure in the Democratic Assembly Caucus since 2004, and he has a strong base in his hometown of West Orange, where he served as mayor from 1998 to 2010, a period during which he simultaneously spent nine years on the Assembly.

Mila Jasey, on the other hand, defeated her opponents by 4.6% and 4.7%. She's in her third term, which gives her an advantage, but she's not a prominent member of the caucus and doesn't have plum committee assignments. When Ellen Steinberg challenged in the 2011 Democratic primary in the district, she was gunning for Mila Jasey's slot on the ticket. She didn't even get close to triumph, but if a local Democrat thinks Jasey is unseatable, so do the local Republicans. They didn't run a particularly strong ticket in 2011, but they should have. Democratic primary voters outnumbered Republican primary voters in the Twenty-Seventh by only a couple thousand. There's a red streak to this district, even as blue as it's tended to be.

Why she's strong: She's just not really that vulnerable. She's vulnerable enough to warrant being pretty cautious, conscious, and careful in 2013, but I'm not too worried.

Price Tag: Democrats should be prepared to approximately double their campaign spending on this race to $1.5 million. The seats aren't precarious by any means, but they need to be defended.

District 38.

The Incumbents: Connie Wagner and Tim Eustace.

Why they're weak: Connie Wagner and Tim Eustace are some vulnerable-ass Democrats in 2013. For starters, Republican primary voters actually outnumbered Democratic primary voters in the Thirty-Eighth last time around. By about a thousand voters. That doesn't necessarily say that there are more Republicans in the district, but it does tell us that there are more interested Republicans. Wagner, the only incumbent in that race, beat the third-place vote-getter by 3.9% and the fourth-place vote-getter by 4.2%. Eustace, a first-time Assembly candidate, won by even hairier margins of 2.4% and 2.7%. Wagner and Eustace better be sweating.

Also of note is that the Republican ticket was another of those botched opportunity things, where a party could have and should have run a strong slate against weak opponents, but failed. The Democrats and Republicans both missed opportunities that way in 2011, but the Republicans did it more. They won't do it a second time. Their guys in D38 last time were nobodies. They were nobodier than Marie Corfield was. And they still gave Wagner and Eustace a fight.

Why they're strong: They aren't that strong. They need BIG outside support.

Don't take it personal, guys. Nobody thought Red Squadron had a chance either.

Price Tag: Democrats in New Jersey need to be prepared to do a lot of campaign surrogacy for these two vulnerable incumbents, and spend about $2M on the race.

Why The New Jersey Assembly Matters:

As with the Senate, this is not an election that matters as much as a lot of the other ones we'll be looking at in 2013 and 2014 do. It is unlikely that the Dems lose control of either chamber, especially if the party doesn't take 2013 for granted. But the worst case scenario for the Assembly is more dire than the worst case scenario for the Senate. The Republicans could, conceivably, take control of the chamber. And regardless of who's in the Governor's chair, a Republican Assembly would be nearly impossible to work around.

Republicans in blue states like New Jersey and California are actually the architects of the intentional gridlock strategy that Mitch McConnell has employed over the last four years against President Obama. For decades, the GOP has been marginalized in blue states (New Jersey's ten-year 1990s nightmare notwithstanding.) Their response has been to pioneer strategies that deliberately sabotage the meaningful functioning of government, whether they're in the majority or the minority. Give them a majority in the Assembly and it won't matter if the Democrats hold every seat in the Senate plus the Governor's chair with a direct line to Jesus Christ.

That's not even the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario winnows the Democratic Senate majority to two seats and keeps Chris Christie as the governor. That might as well be a Republican takeover, especially because you just know there's some asshole in the Senate Democratic caucus itching to become important by switching sides. And with the GOP holding the tiebreaker in the Lt. Governor's position, that's all it would take.

But even if that doesn't happen, you still have this vexing issue of conservative Democrats in New Jersey. As noted earlier, if you already know you're going to be dealing with some occasional defectors, you want as much of a cushion as possible.

The current 48-32 advantage is strong. It's so strong that Democrats will be tempted to consider it unsinkable in 2013. They believe that at their peril. There are at least eight losable Democrat seats in the Assembly, and possibly nine or ten, depending on how much you like Burzichelli and McKeon. Holding those vulnerable seats, or at least most of them, while picking up those vulnerable GOP seats, is critical. The Democrats could achieve as strong a victory as a 54-26 lead in the Assembly. That's not just a supermajority; that's a veto-proof majority. Granted, a veto-proof majority means less if the Senate Dems can't reach the same threshold (27 seats, if you're counting, which is two more than my most optimistic projection), but that's a damned powerful caucus. That's a caucus that pretty much can't be stopped by a few occasional defectors.

Pictured: What's going to happen to the Democratic
majorities in New Jersey if they take this year for granted.

As before, godspeed to whoever wants to try for an upset in the more definitively red districts, but the party and the various progressive groups should not spend a dime in those races unless something dramatic happens. Meanwhile, there are of course still those 38 solid, dependable, bankable Democratic seats. You definitely want to hold onto these seats; it's not a given, but it is likely. $250,000 per seat should do it easily.

$16M for the competitive races. $9.5M to preserve what the Democrats have. Another $4.5M to keep in reserve in case some surprise comes up in one of the races. For the low low price of $31 million dollars, New Jersey Democrats and their allies can maintain their advantage in the state Assembly and maybe even increase it to unprecedented levels of control. By the way, that brings our grand total for campaign spending in the 2013 New Jersey legislative election to $63 million. That's a lot of cheese, but it'll be worth it. Also, keep in mind that there won't be a lot of elections in 2013, so Democratic fundraisers and spenders can feel a little more free to throw cash at the few races that are out there.

Pictured: Tim Eustace's next fundraising dinner.

Up next: A break from New Jersey...