NJ Republican Party

Christie returns home to a weakened NJ Republican Party 

By Matt Friedman

As Gov. Chris Christie ran for president, the New Jersey Republican Party withered.

The Republican State Committee’s state account is $354,000 in the red, thanks in large part to legal bills related to the Bridgegate investigation. Republicans lost four Assembly seats in November, giving Democrats their biggest legislative majority since 1979. And there’s a dearth of young Republicans to carry the torch when Christie exits his office in two years.

This isn’t exactly a new problem for New Jersey Republicans. Whether through demographics or state legislative redistricting, they’ve been in decline for more than a decade.

But under Christie, the party's once-moribund fundraising blossomed. The problem is that the party's good fortunes benefited him more than anyone — even paying $230,000 for his private jet flights as he traveled the country in preparation for his presidential run.

Republican gains early in Christie’s term — made in key counties like Bergen, the biggest in the state — have been reversed, with Democrats having knocked off a Republican county executive in 2014 and now seeking complete control of Bergen County's freeholder board.

That’s not to say that there are no Republicans angling to run for governor in 2017. Assembly minority leader Jon Bramnick, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, state Senate minority leader Tom Kean Jr., Assemblyman Jay Webber, Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli and several other names are frequently mentioned.

But many of those people have been put in the unenviable position of having to vote against overriding the governor’s vetoes, even on uncontroversial bills they had voted for and at times even sponsored. It doesn’t help that the governor’s approval rating is mired in the low 30s or that his favorable rating reached a record low 29 percent in the latest poll.

Those kinds of votes only hurt Republican Assembly campaigns last year, contributing to the loss of seats.

When Democrats talk privately about who will be the next governor, they focus on members of their own jockeying for their party’s nomination. The Republican the Democratic nominee will face in November 2017 is barely an afterthought.

Assemblywoman Holly Schepisi, a Bergen County Republican sometimes mentioned as one of the party’s future leading lights, acknowledged the party is in a difficult situation.

“I do believe it’s a fair assessment of where we are today, but I don’t think that means we’re out of the running,” she said.

Schepisi said Democrats might be so confident that they’re overreaching by seeking to raise the minimum wage to $15 and putting a constitutional amendment on the 2016 ballot to guarantee full pension payments.

There’s also a chance that Republicans could quietly regroup and carefully craft a message as powerful Democrats savage each other.

“As people do the political version of game of thrones to ascend to whoever the Democratic nominee will be, you’re going to see more and more policies, positions and radicalization of positions taking place in order to try to appease the outer portions of the party in order to become the nominee,” Schepisi said.

Bill Palatucci, a close political adviser to Christie, said he doesn’t see the situation as very different from that in 2008, just before Christie ran for governor, or at the end of former governor Tom Kean’s administration in the late 1980s.

“It’s nothing we hadn’t dealt in the past,” Palatucci said.

As to whether Christie’s presence has kept other New Jersey Republicans from developing a statewide profile, Palatucci said, “I chuckle at that stuff.”

“It reminds me of 1989 — people said the same thing about governor Kean. He was and is this larger-than-life figure, and people back then would quietly whisper the same thing,” Palatucci said. “It wasn’t fair to governor Kean in 1989, and it’s not fair to Gov. Christie now. Nobody needs anybody’s permission to stand up and say what they want to say.”

One potential sign of things to come could be in historically Republican Monmouth County, where Democrats recently made inroads and captured two Assembly seats in its 11th District. Now, Democrats plan to wage an aggressive campaign to capture two freeholder seats on the all-Republican board. (Democrats briefly held control of the freeholder board in 2009 and 2010, but that was largely due to backlash over a corruption scandal that mainly hit Republicans.)

“The county is traditionally Republican, and the Republicans entering the freeholder race have a huge advantage,” said Monmouth County Democratic chairman Vin Gopal.

But the fact that it could be in contention, combined with the Assembly pickups, Gopal said, is “a sign that people have fatigue of the Republican Party in New Jersey.”

“They’re recognizing that a lot of the problems that existed eight years ago have actually gotten worse,” he said.

Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray said, “Over the past few years, New Jersey has become a two-party state: The Democratic Party and the Christie Party. It’s going to take a long time for the Republicans to recover what has been significant damage to their brand by Chris Christie — not only in terms of the public view of who they are and what they stand for, but just internally. Organizationally. They’re literally bankrupt, and there is absolutely no clear bench of leaders in waiting.”