Posted on 09/11/2008 5:37:25 PM PDT by Clintonfatigued
Former congressman Dick Zimmer, the Republican nominee for New Jerseys U.S. Senate seat, continues to have difficulty gaining electoral traction. According to the latest poll from Fairleigh Dickinson Universitys PublicMind, 41% of voters say they havent heard of Zimmer and another third (33%) say they have no opinion of him.
Frank Lautenberg, the Democratic incumbent, leads Zimmer among likely voters by 46% to 35%.
(Excerpt) Read more at publicmind.fdu.edu ...
Unless he loses
The Laut never loses ! He might be Barry’s next V.P. pick when they dump Biden ...
My motel room in Bangor, Maine. I nearly broke both beds in the room from the excitement. ;-D
I was in NYC three days after the election. All the talk then was how close Rudy was to leaving the GOP (or being read out of the party) after endorsing Cuomo. That was about his darkest hour.
Lousenberg’s victory in ‘94 was not exactly small though, was it? I don’t recall hearing of any shenanigans there. I thought that happened before the voting.
Seemed like Haytaian had a shot until the Dems came out with an ad revealing he had a very high absentee rate and missed hundreds of votes in the state legislature. That obviously hurt.
I grew to loathe the senator and started calling him LOUSE-enberg in that race because radio guy Bob Grant called him that. I was outraged when Lousenberg had an ad, or gave a speech, in which he said all Republicans are racists, or words to that effect. It was such a vicious divisive lie that Lousenberg has been on bad side ever since.
It was a close race. A swing of around 33,500 votes (out of 2 million total) could’ve turned it around. The Dems could’ve spread the fraud out to enough precincts to flip it. And I do recall of hearing shenanigans in both that race and in Feinstein’s narrow victory over Congressman Mike Huffington in California.
The most audacious theft was the Jenkins-Landrieu contest in LA, where Jenkins won virtually the entire state, until they magically counted up enough votes in Orleans Parish to put Landrieu over the top. Now, even if Mayor Morial’s LIFE machine hadn’t stolen the election for her, from what I recall, all Landrieu needed was “ONE” fraudulent vote cast in every precinct in the state by a Democrat. More than enough grounds to overturn that election. Morial and his cronies all should’ve gone to prison for that.
Maybe we are better off that Huffington lost that race.
Yes the LA loss in 1996 was bad. I really had hoped that at some point when the GOP controlled the Senate they would have 56 seats or more just so that would be their historic high, but they never made it. If they could have picked up (or held on to) just one more in ‘04 they would at least have had a majority these last 2 years, even if they lost it this year.
I checked the ‘94 results from NY and you are right. The louse won by about 70,000. It was 50-47. Repubs had high hopes since they were very united. Even pro choice Gov Whitman was strongly behind the pro life Haytaian. Didn’t work though. As I recall, Lousenberg was lucky on his previous runs too. In 1982 he was trailing Millicent Fenwick then he overtook her in the end since he had more $$. In 1988 wasn’t there some scandalous news to come out about the GOP candidate, Pete Dawkins? He too seemed like a strong challenger to Lousenberg but in the end his campaign collapsed even as Vice President Bush won NJ by a comfortable margin. What a shame.
41% haven’t heard of him yet. There’s hope here - if they can get to know him positively.
At the time, it was important we get as many seats as possible. Even a somewhat flaky (and sexually ambiguous) Huffington would've been preferable to Feinstein. With his $$, he might've been able to hold the seat for as long as he wanted, had he kept a lid on the marital stuff. Of course, if my wife was the shrill harridan Arianna, I'd have preferred sex with men, too.
"Yes the LA loss in 1996 was bad. I really had hoped that at some point when the GOP controlled the Senate they would have 56 seats or more just so that would be their historic high, but they never made it. If they could have picked up (or held on to) just one more in 04 they would at least have had a majority these last 2 years, even if they lost it this year."
We had ample opportunity throughout the '90s clear up to '04 to substantially pad our Senate majorities well into the 60s range. We never aggressively recruited as well as we should've. There ought to be no Democrat sitting in any state Dubya carried. Especially in the Dakotas, Montana, Nebraska, etc. If we were as ruthlessly aggressive as the Dems, we could've pushed as high as 70. That would've given us nearly a quarter-century of insulation.
"I checked the 94 results from NY and you are right. The louse won by about 70,000. It was 50-47. Repubs had high hopes since they were very united. Even pro choice Gov Whitman was strongly behind the pro life Haytaian. Didnt work though. As I recall, Lousenberg was lucky on his previous runs too. In 1982 he was trailing Millicent Fenwick then he overtook her in the end since he had more $$."
Yeah, he's never won by a gargantuan margin in any of his races (except perhaps in '02, but if you look at raw votes, a swing of 100k could've turned it). The race he made against Congresswoman Fenwick, herself a liberal Republican, was based on the age factor (implying that she wouldn't live to the end of her term. She was 72, and she did indeed live past 1989. At the time, he was 58. Now he's a dozen years older than Fenwick and if he's reelected this year, he'll be 20 days short of his 91st birthday at the end of his term in January 2015.
"In 1988 wasnt there some scandalous news to come out about the GOP candidate, Pete Dawkins? He too seemed like a strong challenger to Lousenberg but in the end his campaign collapsed even as Vice President Bush won NJ by a comfortable margin. What a shame."
Nothing scandalous, per se, mostly verbal gaffes and the kind of cheap shot attacks by the media against Dawkins we've come to expect against Republicans. The dumb comment from Dawkins was that he'd rather shoot himself than live in a small town. Some magazine article claimed he was a "phony." Penny-ante stuff that he should've been able to recover from.
I'm no fan of Zimmer, but he ought to dig up the old arguments against Fenwick that Lautenberg used and relentlessly go after him with it. He has nothing to lose. It's a legitimate argument that he is grossly senile and feeble for the office.
Bret Schundler was a conservative running for Governor and the whole NJ “Republican” party turned on him, they used the Dem talking points about him. This state is a happily corrupt blight on the nation. They run nothing but RINO’s and wonder why they lose, well, they don’t wonder, they don’t care, if they win by accident they vote like dems anyway.
NJ deserves to be a laughingstock. I hope NJ votes Obama during the McCain landslide so they can be mocked liked Minnesota and Mondale.
I was probably at home, busy not doing my homework. :D
I say given Lautenberg corpse-like qualities it’s a testament to GOP weakness in NJ that he he isn’t way behind!
Haytaian wasn’t a RINO was he? I assume he was a least to right of Whitman.
Chuck was very good at containing spending in the state legislature, so he was preferable to Whitman in that regard. He was a fairly mainstream northeastern Republican (so yes, a RINO).
I have honestly never seen a worse run campaign in my life than his. Murray is terrific and I have had a few chances to meet him, and happily voted for him, but the people running his campaign should be banned from politics. It was embarrassing.
The Rats say McCain’s too old, but he’s 12 years younger than Lousenberg.
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