Quinnipiac: New Jersey Voters Approve of Christie and His Tax Cut

82% Don’t Know Enough About Kyrillos To Form An Opinion On His U.S. Senate Candidacy

New Jersey voters continue to approve of the job Governor Chris Christie is doing, according to a Quinnipiac poll released this morning.

Christie’s job approval is 55-38%, with a significant gender gap.  Men approve of the governor 62-32% while woman approve 49-44%.

New Jersey voters approved of Christie’s proposed income tax cut by a 55-31% margin.

If Christie were selected as the vice presidential nominee,  his presence on the ballot as Mitt Romney’s running mate would close the gap between Romney and President Obama, but not by enough to carry the state.  Obama beats Romney 49-39% in New Jersey.  The gap closes to 49-43% if Christie in Romney’s VP choice.

In the U.S. Senate race, incumbent Democrat Bob Menendez bests Republican Joe Kyrillos by 49-34% with Independents favoring the Democrat 44-32%.

82% of the respondents did not know enough about Kyrillos to form and opinion.

“Sen. Robert Menendez’s numbers are only so-so, but nobody has heard of State Sen. Joe Kyrillos.  He gets only the generic Republican vote,”  said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

In the Republican presidential primary, Romney leads former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum 38-24%, with Texas Congressman Ron Paul coming in third with 12%. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich gets 9%.  The Republican primary survey has a margin of error of +/- 4.6%.

Obama beats all Republican contenders in New Jersey.  Santorum by 52-34%, Gingrich by 55-30% .  If Quinnipiac polled Paul against Obama, they did not report the results.

Quinnipiac surveyed 1396 registered voters, 446 (32%) of them Republicans, between February 21-27.  The poll has a margin of error of +/- 2.6%

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2012 Predictions

Serena DiMaso will be elected Monmouth County Freeholder at the Title 19 convention of the Monmouth GOP Committee on January 14.   Bob Walsh will withdraw during his speech before the convention.

Bill Spadea defeats Donna Simon and John Saccenti at a Title 19 convention of the 16th legislative district to fill the assembly seat vacated by the death of Peter Biondi.  After recounts and law suits, the November special election for the seat is declared a tie between Spadea and Democratic Princeton Committeewoman Sue Nemeth.  Another special election is scheduled for January of 2013.

Joe Oxley will be named Township Administrator and In House Attorney for Wall Township.  The appointment will forward a statewide trend of municipalities hiring either attorneys or engineers as their administrators as a cost saving measure.   Oxley is reelected GOP County Chairman by acclamation.  Senator Jennifer Beck will give the nominating speech.  Christine Hanlon will be Vice Chair.

Middletown will get a new Parks and Recreation Director.  It won’t be Linda Baum or Pam Brightbill.

Jim McGreevey is ordained an Episcopal priest.

Jon Corzine remembers where he put the $1.2 billion.

Senator Joe Kyrillos will be the GOP nominee for U.S. Senator, defeating Anna Little and Joseph Rudy Rullo in the primary. 

Congressman Steve Rothman defeats Congressman Bill Pascrell in the Democratic primary for the 9th Congressional District nomination.  In the only surprise of the primary, former Bergen County GOP Freeholder Anthony Cassano, who had agreed to take one for the team in the 9th, was defeated when the Bergen County Tea Party Group organized a write-in campaign for Anna Little.  Little was on the ballot as a U.S. Senate candidate.  Having lost the Senate nomination to Joe Kyrillos, Little accepts the nomination, asks Kyrillos to host a fundraiser for her, and promises to move into the district if she wins.   She doesn’t.

Maggie Moran defeats Vin Gopal and Frank “LaHornica” LaRocca in a close election for the Monmouth County Democratic Chairmanship.

James Hogan of Long Branch is the GOP nominee for Congress in New Jersey’s 6th Congressional District.  Frank Pallone is reelected by 8%.

Jordan Rickards of North Brunswick  is the GOP nominee for Congress in New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District.  Rush Holt is reelected by 15%.

On August 28, the second day of the Republican National Convention, the National Weather Service warns that Hurricane Chris is heading towards the Jersey Shore.  Acting Governor Kim Guadagno gets on TV and says, “Get the heck off of the beach please.”

Mitt Romney will be the GOP nominee for President of the United States.  New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will be the Vice Presidential nominee.

President Obama nominates Vice President Joe Biden to be Secretary of State.  Biden submits his resignation as VP effective upon both houses of congress confirming his successor.  President Obama nominates Hillary Clinton as Vice President.   Speaker of the House John Boehner refuses to schedule confirmation hearings for the VP nomination on the constitutional grounds that their is no vacancy in the office.   Obama makes them both recess appointments.  Clinton is nominated for VP at the Democratic National Convention and Secretary of State Biden spends October in China.

Despite losing their home states of Massachusetts and New Jersey, the Romney-Christie ticket wins the electoral college by one vote, 270-269.   The winning vote comes from Maine, one of two states that awards electoral votes by congressional district.  Romney-Christie lose Maine 3-1 but win the election.  Obama-Clinton file suit to challenge Maine’s method of awarding electoral votes.  Romney-Christie counter with a suit in Nebraska, which they won 4 electoral votes to 1, using the same arguments that Obama-Clinton use in Maine.  The U.S. Supreme Court decides both cases for the plaintiffs, 5-4, and determined that in all future presidential elections that electoral votes are awarded on a winner take all basis nationally.  Tea Party leader Dwight Kehoe calls for the impeachment of the Justices who voted affirmatively, claiming that they don’t understand the 10th Amendment.

Robert Menendez defeats Joe Kyrillos for U.S. Senate by 1%.

U. S. Senator Frank Lautenberg resigns.   In one of his last acts as Governor before ascending to the Vice Presidency, Chris Christie appoints Kyrillos to Lautenberg’s Senate seat.

What do you think will happen?

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MMM Year In Review – January

Tony Fiore was sworn in as Mayor of Middletown.  Shaun Golden was sworn in as Monmouth County Sheriff.  Tom Arnone was sworn in to his first term as Freeholder.  Rob Clifton took the Freeholder Oath of Office for the third time.

Despite the hullabaloo New Jersey’s mainstream media and the Democrats made of Governor Christie and Lt. Governor Guadagno being on vacation at the same time during the December 2010 blizzard, Governor Christie’s approval ratings were very strong, 53% favorable, in the first FDU poll of the year.

A severely mentally ill 22 year old man, Jared Loughner, opened fire on a crowd in Tucson, Arizonia.   He killed 6 and injured 14, including Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.  The national mainstream media and Democrats in Congress blamed the massacre on the Tea Party and Sarah Palin.    President Obama was presidential in calming the rhetoric and healing the nation.

Fair Haven Mayor Mike Halfacre used the digital pages of MoreMonmouthMusings to knock the wheels off a bill sponsored by Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker that would have required New Jersey residents register their bicycles with MVC at a cost of $10 per bike, per year.

At a meeting of the Highlands Republican Club, former Mayor Anna Little declared the New Jersey Supreme Court is unconstitutional.   The the club banned MMM blogger Art Gallagher for reporting what Little said. 

Governor Christie held a Town Hall meeting in Middletown.  During the meeting Christie criticized President Obama’s leadership, a theme that became a staple for Christie throughout the year, causing a draft Christie for President movement among  GOP leaders and donors nationally.

triCityNews publisher Dan Jacobson put MMM blogger Art Gallagher on the front page of his paper.

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Neptune Nudniks: Pass the American Jobs Act. Now.

The Asbury Park Press Editorial Board opined to its declining readership that President Obama’s American Jobs Act should be passed now.

The problem with that is that is that the bill  hasn’t been written yet.  Obama launched his reelection campaign in earnest Thursday night in an address to a joint session of congress that proposed a 1/2 trillion in spending.  He said it would be paid for, but didn’t say how.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich, hardly a Tea Party radical “determined to dismantle government and its vital programs piece by piece”  said he would have to see the bill before deciding whether to vote for or against it.

I never would have thought that I’d be writing that Kucinich exhibits more sanity than my hometown newspaper.

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Mr. President

By Art Gallagher

Yesterday, for the first time in his presidency, in my biased point of view, Barack Obama was presidential as he addressed a memorial service at the University of Arizonia.   As Jonathan Freedland wrote at The Guardian, Obama rose to the moment and transcended it.  Governor Chris Christie said the president’s speech was “excellent…just what a leader should do at a moment like this,” on ABC’s Good Morning America this morning.

As I listened to Obama refer to scripture and invoke the G word last night as he sought to heal the emotional wounds of a city and nation shocked by the Tucson shootings, and to bring people together, I imagined Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former spiritual advisor who uses scripture to divide, having a stroke and the ACLU trying to come up with a legal strategy to suppress the president’s first amendment rights.

Obama told the truth about the Tucson shootings.  We don’t know what caused a troubled mentally ill 22 year old man to go on a shooting rampage.  We know it was not political rhetoric, as has been alleged by the Pima County Sheriff trying to deflect attention from his department’s own failures and by far too many of the left who crassly attempted to use the tragedy to advance their agenda and silence their opponents. “It’s not,” Obama ad libbed from his prepared text, referring to the allegations that vitriolic rhetoric caused the shootings.

Obama was civil in calling for civility in our political discourse, as we strive to become a more perfect union.

Time will tell if President Obama has had a breakthrough in his ability to lead.  If the Barack Obama who showed up in Tucson last night keeps showing up, his speech last night will go down in history as one of the great presidential addresses.

If you missed the speech or wish to study it, it can be viewed here.

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