Patrick Murray: Mark Magyar mischaracterized his analysis

Magyar admits mistake, promises to fix it but doesn’t

By Art Gallagher, [email protected]

Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray responded to my post this morning, Patrick Murray is emphatic that his next poll will be negative for Christie, about his quote in Mark Magyar’s anti-Chistie spin piece on NJSpotlight with an email asserting that his analysis was mischaracteriszed.

Patrick Murray

Murray provided an email exchange between himself and Magyar wherein Magyar admits his mistake and promises to fix it.

Murray said:

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Patrick Murray is emphatic that his next poll will be negative for Christie

By Art Gallagher, [email protected]

UPDATE 4:15PM:  Murray says Magyar/NJSpotlight mischaracterised his analysis.  Read the next chapter here.

Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray already knows that his next poll about Bridgegate and the Mastro Report, will have an negative outcome for Governor Chris Christie.

Murray is quoted by Mark Magyar in a NJSpotlight piece posted this morning saying emphatically that his next poll will have negative results.

“The Mastro report raised more questions than it answered about what is going on in the Christie administration,” Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, noted. “Now, the release of the memos has raised even more questions, including questions about the credibility of the Mastro report itself.”

Murray said he could not imagine what Christie and his top advisers were thinking when they settled on their current legal and political strategy. “Every time they put something out, they undercut their credibility,” he said. “Everything they do provides fodder that keeps this investigation alive and keeps this story alive. The report was overly protective of the governor, and now everyone is looking through the memos to see what the report left out. Nothing gets settled, everything looks worse.”

A Quinnipiac Poll released last week showed that 56 percent of New Jerseyans regarded the report as a “whitewash” and only 36 percent believed it to be a “legitimate investigation.” Even more ominously, 65 percent of voters knew of the Hoboken case, and 57 percent of that group believe Zimmer’s allegation that the Christie administration improperly withheld Sandy aid from her city because she refused to support the Rockefeller Group development.

Murray said he expected to see similar results in his next Monmouth Poll. “It will be negative. This is not going to be positive,” Murray stated emphatically, asserting that the controversy over the Mastro report clearly resonated with voters. “The question now with Christie is, ‘Have we hit a floor where a certain percentage of people will defend him no matter what, and everyone else will attack him?’”  (emphasis added)

 

Murray enjoys a well-earned reputation for producing polls that most accurately match the results of elections in New Jersey.  However, his declaration of a poll’s results before he’s asked a question raises serious questions about his credibility as a political scientist and the perceived “independence” of his analysis.

In fairness I should point out that it is possible that Murray already conducted his survey and hasn’t reported the results yet.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Higher Education Restructuring

Last month Governor Chris Christie announce a complex restructuring of New Jersey’s medical schools.

Under the proposal,  Newark’s UMDNJ would be replaced by New Jersey Health Sciences University, University Hospital would be placed under non-profit management and Rutgers-Camden and its law school would become part of Rowan University.  Cooper Medical School in Camden would become part of Rowan.

Mark Magyar has an excellent piece on the proposed restructuring at NJSpotlight.

Alarmed by the prospect of losing the prestige that comes with the Rutgers name, many at Rutgers Camden, including our friend Brian McGovern of Save Jersey are fighting the move to Rowan.  Save Jersey has become Save Rutgers Camden today with a lengthy post about how to legally block the merger.

Magyar in his NJSpotlight piece noted that the name of the South Jersey institution is important to advocates of the merger as well:

The absorption of Rutgers-Camden, with its 6,000-plus students, into Rowan, with more than 11,000 students, was not so much a matter of numbers as of name. Sources said that the family of Henry Rowan, who donated $100 million to expand his alma mater, Glassboro State College, into Rowan University, balked at the idea of the Rutgers name displacing Rowan.

Furthermore, Norcross, as head of Cooper University Medical Center, had been heavily involved in the creation of the new Cooper Medical School at Rowan University, and both he and Sweeney have talked about the importance of a South Jersey university that would not be a stepchild to the much larger Rutgers University in New Brunswick, as the Camden campus was sometimes perceived to be.

The South Jersey merger with Rowan has also gotten some push back from Rutgers-Camden faculty,  Rutgers retiring president Richard McCormick.  Colleen O’Dea outlines reports both sides of the controversy in a  NJSpotlight piece today.

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Republicans’ map favors minorities

John Farmer, the tie breaking member of the congressional redistricting commission, chose the Republicans’ map because, in his view, it created the possibility of two more minority districts than they Democratic map did, according to a report by Mark Magyar at NJSpotlight.

The new 9th district’s population is 53.1% minority.  Leaders of the minority community were pleased with the map, counting on it becoming a minority represented district once Bill Pascrell, who turns 75 this month, retires.  But Steve Rothman, 59, challenging Pascrell in the Democratic primary makes eventual minority representation less likely, which could lead to a minority challenger entering the 9th district Democratic primary.  That’s the point of Magyar’s piece.

The addition of all of Trenton and Plainfield in Rush Holt’s district, presumably makes the 12th the other potential minority district.

The NJGOP should identify and agressively recruit high quality minority candidates to run in these districts.   A Hispanic in 9 and an African American in 12.  Then the GOP should  raise the money to make those campaigns competive.

The GOP should recruit and fund an Asian American to challenge Frank Pallone in the 6th, while they are at it, unless Diane Gooch decides to run.

If running competively in the 9th, 12th and 6th is considered a pipedream, than it is also a pipedream that Joe Kyrillos can beat Robert Menendez for U.S. Senate or that the GOP presidential nominee can win New Jersey.

If the NJ GOP uses the same old playbook it will get the same old result.

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Will Christie’s Reforms Reduce Property Taxes?

By Art Gallagher

In a column published in The Star Ledger and at NJ Spotlight, Mark Magyar says no.  Magyar says that like all the governors before him, except Florio, Christie is simply tinkering at the margins and that whether Christie serves one term or two, New Jersey’s property taxes will still be the highest in the nation.

Magyar, who was a policy advisor to Chris Daggett’s Independent gubernatorial campaign against Christie and Jon Corzine, makes the case that unless New Jersey increases income taxes and sales taxes with the State taking over a higher burden of education funding, that property taxes will continue to be a dispropotionate and inequitable source of funding for education and government services.

A good tax system is generally considered to be one in which income, property and sales taxes are in some rough balance, with each providing somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of total revenue for these three major taxes. That is the case in most states, but it is not the case in New Jersey, where property taxes actually make up 58 percent of the income/property/sales tax pie, with income taxes accounting for just 24 percent and sales for the remaining 18 percent.

The only way to actually lower property taxes in New Jersey to a competitive level with other states is to shift billions of dollars of the cost of K-12 education or municipal or county services to another major tax or taxes — with the income and sales taxes being the most logical choices — while simultaneously making sure that an effective cap prevents any new increase in school district and local government spending.

That is what Democratic Gov. Jim Florio tried to do in 1990 when he dedicated half of his $2.8 billion tax package to property tax relief, but most of the money was quickly eaten up by school districts and municipalities for new spending, and by the second year property taxes were rising again as rapidly as ever. Voter repudiation of Florio led to the election of a Republican legislature and GOP Gov. Christie Whitman, and scared politicians in both parties away from any meaningful attempt at overall tax reform.

Magyar makes a compelling case.  Middletown Committeeman Gerry Scharfenberger made a similar case last August.

However, Magyar’s argument is a non-sequitur to the current debate happening in Trenton (and nationally).

Even if Christie and the legislature were to institute Steve Lonegan’s flat tax, increasing income taxes on the poor and middle class while reducing them on the rich, and even if they instituted Chris Daggett’s $4 billion sales tax increase, and used the new revenue to reduce property taxes, the problems that Christie is addressing would remain.  They would just be paid for differently.

New Jersey, and many other states, has too much government.  There are too many government employees making too much money and getting benefits that are too generous to sustain regardless of how the revenue is generated.

It is only by reducing the size of government on all levels, which means less government employees making less money with less generous pensions and benefits, that our overall tax burden will decrease.  That is what Christie’s reforms are designed to do.   By forcing the downsizing within the current system, rather than radically changing the way New Jersey taxes its citizens and then implementing cuts, Christie is demanding that municipal, county governments and school boards make the hard choices now.  If Christie did it Magyar’s way, government and taxes would continue to expand.

Let’s first reduce the size of our governments.  Once that is done we can address the way we pay for them.

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Redrawing the State Legislative Districts

By Art Gallagher

The US. Census Bureau will not release the data required for the State Apportionment Commission to do their work for another month.  The commission is holding its organizational meeting today in Trenton.

At NJ Spotlight, Mark Magyar takes a comprehensive look at New Jersey’s population shifts based upon the 2000 census data and the 2009 population projections published by the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development.  Magyar’s piece is likely to be the most widely read article on State Street today.  His conclusions:

Based on an analysis of population projections, when the new legislative map is drawn we can expect to see a configuration more favorable to Republicans. We could very well see one Democratic district in the urban northeast replaced by a solidly GOP district, most likely somewhere in the middle of South Jersey. That is what happened in 1991 when Republican commission members persuaded the neutral tie-breaker to take the Democratic 30th District in Essex and plop it in the middle of Burlington and Ocean counties where it immediately became a Republican bastion for Senator Bob Singer of Lakewood and Assemblyman Joseph Malone of Bordentown, each first elected in 1993.

If Democrats decide to give up an urban northeast district as part of a retrenchment strategy, it will most likely end up in South Jersey The question for both party’s strategists is whether they want to make the new district a Republican stronghold and allow the the South Jersey incumbents from both parties to consolidate their bases, or use the new district to try to create more competitive districts — an approach that presumably would give the GOP a better chance to gain the seats they need to win back the legislature.

 

 

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