New York is one thing, but I really don’t get why NJ isn’t staunchly republican. Our state motto is Liberty & Prosperity!
Still, we did get lucky with that re-districting. And, as seems plain, incumbents are ENTRENCHED here, so I guess we can count on holding what we have.
I’m very glad Christie didn’t become the veep candidate, I hope he runs for re-election and wins and I hope he can do better in building up the party state wide. He hasn’t done much so far - I don’t know why that is, but, perhaps things will improve as time goes by.
New Jersey has always been a fairly competitive state. It has also, unfortunately, produced some truly horrible political figures (going back to George McClellan in 1864). Worse yet is the corruption and the liberal statism of both state parties. The last actual Conservative Governor was Charles Edison, then a Democrat, in 1940 (and he had to go on bended knee to the corrupt Boss Hague of Jersey City to get the nod).
Go back to the 1980s and you had Governor Tom Kean who won a sweeping reelection victory in 1985 (and getting even a substantial % of the Black vote), but he did next to zilch for the state GOP (and the “Republicans” he did try to help in those days were people like Albio Sires — yes, THAT Albio Sires) and the state swiftly fell to Flim-Flam Florio.
At least one good thing you can say about Florio is that in his midterm elections, the GOP won gargantuan majorities in the legislature. The bad news is with the execrable Christie Whitman beating Florio (and only narrowly in both her runs), she proceeded to piss away all those incredible gains with her statist leadership, and by the time DiFrancesco took over, it was all wiped out for good (and the parting shot from those establishment imbeciles was to sabotage Bret Schundler, a Conservative who should’ve been a national star, from succeeding them — indeed, you can thank both Chrissie and Donnie for the pervert McGreevey and all the 8 years of rotating Governor chaos that followed).
While Christie not Whitman is perhaps a slight improvement, I’ve been wary of him going back to his days as U.S. Attorney. He doesn’t “get it” on illegals and the same threat posed by Mohammandans to our way of life. He’s more sound and fury but little else. You may get 8 years out of him, but ultimately as with Kean & Whitman/DiFrancesco, will you get much else ?