And Corzine's round the corner

New Jersey's primary for governor

Jun 2nd 2005 WEST LONG BRANCH
From The Economist print edition

A battle the Republicans should win this year—but probably won't

IT HAS been a rough year for New Jersey Democrats. Governor Jim McGreevey resigned last summer after the revelation of a gay affair. There has been no end of corruption circles: one of their main moneymen was charged with hiring prostitutes to silence a witness in a criminal investigation. The budget is bust, property taxes are the highest in the nation, and, as the party that controls the governorship, both houses of the legislature, both Senate seats and seven out of the 13 congressional seats, they can hardly blame anybody else.

So you would imagine that the Republicans' spirits would be up. Yet as they approach next week's primary on June 7th for the governor's race, the local party suffers from a lack of funds, organisation and morale. This has something to do with the weaknesses of the Republican candidates; and a lot more to do with Jon Corzine—and his money.

The popular senator (and former chairman of Goldman Sachs) is all but certain to become the Democratic nominee: his only rivals in the primary are a schoolteacher and an unemployed former congressional candidate. Having never served in the state party, Mr Corzine is hard to link to the current scandals (though Republicans point out that he has given $5m to the party bosses). And he has promised to do whatever it takes to become governor—a powerful threat coming from a man who spent $60m, much of it his own cash, on his successful 2000 Senate campaign.

The two Republican frontrunners, Bret Schundler and Doug Forrester, have both gone down to big defeats in previous state-wide elections; and the current contest, which also includes another five candidates, has made it hard for either man to get his message across. In principle, Mr Schundler, a hard-nosed former mayor of Jersey City, looks more up to the job. He won national acclaim for turning round New Jersey's second-biggest city, and he is the tougher debater. The carefully-coiffed Mr Forrester, a millionaire businessman and former small-town mayor, looks less of a bruiser.

Mr Schundler's problem—rare for a Republican in a primary these days—is that he is too conservative. In his last race against Mr McGreevey, he lost by talking about his opposition to abortion and gun-control; in New Jersey, many Republicans favour such things and even some of the ones who don't worry that Mr Corzine will exploit them. Mr Schundler has tried to steer the debate away from abortion this time round, but Mr Forrester has cleverly fashioned himself as a centrist problem-solver (“I'm a businessman,” he chirped in a recent debate, “I can do this.”) And, like Mr Corzine, he has deep pockets: so far, he has poured nearly $9m of his own money into the race.

Much of the campaign has been spent discussing property taxes. Mr Forrester is peddling a 30% property tax-cut over the next three years; he will pay for this supposedly by chopping $3 billion of “waste, fraud and abuse” out of the budget. Mr Schundler predicts, probably correctly, that his opponent's inventive mathematics will be torn to shreds by Mr Corzine. Yet Mr Schundler's own solution—capping state spending and sending the money to local government to reduce the hated property taxes—rests on getting the Democratic legislature to put two constitutional amendments on the ballot in November.

Mr Forrester had a 40%-29% lead among likely Republican voters, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, released on June 1st. But a lot will depend on turnout. Mr Schundler has a core of conservative supporters who will make it to the polls, come rain or shine. Whoever wins, most Republicans must be cursing their luck that Mr Corzine is the Democrat they have to fight this year.

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