Brooklyn Joe PeNazio would have been at 28%. I voted for Sabrin, even though I realized he had ZERO chance of winning.
Lousenberg the corpse will be easily reelected.
An incumbent polling at 46% is not good. If this poll is indicative of others, I imagine the GOP is watching this one closely.
As always Clemenza, you know your NJ politics.
There was a better candidate available to the NJ republicans, but they failed to get him.
The NJ ‘pubs are as out of touch with the people as the dems are.
I think that Dick Zimmer has a chance of pulling off the upset, just as McCain/Palin has a chance of carrying NJ. Sure, it’s more likely that McCain will end up at 48% and that Zimmer will end up at 47%, but Zimmer could get to 50% by winning liberal Republican votes without his candidacy resulting in a suppressed conservative turnout (since they’ll be going out to vote for Palin, so they might as well hold their nose and vote for Zimmer over Lautenberg).
Regarding the NJ GOP’s inability to elect a Republican Senator in over 35 years, that is certainly true, but we’ve come reasonably close a few times. Had Chuck Haytaian (sp?) not refused to go negative against Lautenberg in 1994, Lautenberg would have been yet another Democrat defeated that magical November evening (a JFK-shooting-type question for our generation is “where were *you* when you heard Frank Sesno announce on CNN that exit polls showed the Republicans winning huge victories across the nation”). And had the NJ Supreme Court followed the law, Doug Forrester would have defeated Torricelli and/or a Lautenberg write-in candidacy in 2002 (although Forrester would have been a one-termer, hopefully taken out at the 2008 primary).
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.