Ben Dworkin, Director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, introduces U.S. Senate candidate Steve Lonegan. September 24, 2013
I don’t think Steve Lonegan and Rick Shaftan are stupid.
I don’t think they believed their own bs over the years that a “true conservative” could win a statewide election in New Jersey, if only given a chance.
Surprisingly to many, Lonegan’s campaign since August was working. He substantially narrowed the gap between himself and Cory Booker. He unquestionably weakened the electorate’s perception of Booker. Lonegan never moderated his message, but he significantly moderated his delivery and demeanor. He was not a scary angry conservative.
The Lonegan I witnessed at Rider University’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics last month was not a flame thrower. He was an honest and concerned adult sharing his wisdom with college students.
I never got to the point where I thought Lonegan would win next week. I did think that if he got into single digits, he would be the front runner for a rematch with Booker in 2014. I thought, if he kept doing what he was doing, in the style he was doing it, his best shot at beating Booker was in November of 2014.
I don’t think that anymore. With tonight’s debate performance, combined with scheduled appearances with Sarah Palin and Mark Levin this weekend, I think Lonegan and Shaftan concluded they aren’t going to win, so they might as well have fun for the last week of Lonegan’s political career.
Cory Booker came to the second and final Senatorial debate prepared to portray Steve Lonegan as a Tea Party extremist, and Lonegan cooperated.
Lonegan came prepared with facts and punchlines. Booker turned nearly every question into an opportunity to portray himself as a compromiser who will go to Washington to get things done and Lonegan as an extremist.
Early on in this campaign, Lonegan acknowledged he “lacked a filter” between what he really thinks and what he says. He seems to have developed a filter over the last several weeks, but he left it at home tonight.
Lonegan’s hardest punchlines are likely to be used against him over the the final week of the campaign. “You might not be able to swim in that river, but its probably because of all the bodies in it from shooting victims” and “you’ll abort a baby in its 8th month of delivery,” will very likely be used relentlessly by the Booker campaign and they ramp up their Get Out The Vote machine in the coming week.
With more substantive answers, Lonegan probably won on debating points. But debating points don’t win elections. Both candidates were on message and their message was the same…Steve Lonegan is an antagonistic extremist. At least he was tonight.
If the Lonegan/Shaftan strategy was to gin up their base, I’m sure it worked. But it probably turned off moderate voters who were leaning towards coming out for Lonegan. Booker’s money will make sure Lonegan rhetoric gins up his base in the coming week.
Sarah Palin and Mark Levin are coming to New Jersey to campaign for Lonegan at a Tea Party event in New Egypt on Saturday. If you’re willing to bet on that as a winning strategy for a New Jersey election, you’re probably also willing to bet that the 0-5 Giants will have home field advantage at the Super Bowl in February.
If I were betting on the next Wednesday’s election, I’d take Booker and give 18 points.
The second and final debate between Newark Mayor Steve Lonegan and former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan, the major party candidates to complete the term of the late U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg, will take place this evening at 7PM.
The debate will be broadcast on NBC-TV, channel 4 in the New York market, channel 10 in the Philadelphia market, and livestreamed at nbcphiladelphia.com
Cory Booker is famous for having 1,423,000 twitter followers. Turns out over half, 57%, of Booker’s followers are fakes or inactive, according to Fake Follower Check:
Kevin Griffis, Booker’s spokesperson, still hasn’t called me back about his candidate’s extreme discrepancies on where he stands on abortion. If Griffis calls back, I’ll ask him about Booker’s fake followers as well.
The man who outlawed the Big Gulp and french fries in New York City is spending $1 million to rescue Cory Booker from his burning campaign.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Independence USA PAC’s ad touting Booker as a senator who can get things done will start airing on television today, according to a New York Times piece, Anxious Allies Aiding Booker in Senate Bid.
Mr. Booker’s bumpy campaign and shrinking lead in the polls are all the more unsettling to Democratic Party officials because Mr. Lonegan is a political anomaly in the blue-hued state: a Tea Party conservative who describes himself as a “radical,” opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, cheers the current shutdown of the federal government and has relied on polarizing right-wing figures like Sarah Palin and Rick Perry as campaign surrogates.
Mr. Lonegan, despite his ideological alignment, appears to have tapped into lingering doubts about whether Mr. Booker can translate his outsize, self-promotional persona, so popular with the Democratic base, into the rigors of a highly disciplined campaign.
Check in at SaveJersey or tune into How I Met Your Mothertonight if you want to see the ad. I’m not running it unless Bloomberg pays me.
During the U.S. Senatorial debate on Friday when Cory Booker and Steve Lonegan were calling each other extremists, Lonegan charged that Booker supports late term and partial birth abortions.
Booker countered, “I support, when it comes to a woman’s right to choose, the law of the land as it is right now.”
However, Booker told a different story to Planned Parenthood and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) a different story while seeking their endorsements to be New Jersey’s next U.S. Senator.
MMM has obtained an endorsement memo that Booker provided to Planned Parenthood and a completed questionnaire he provided NARAL. The documents were leaked a Google Group which has since been closed to public view.
TRENTON — Democrat Cory Booker and Republican Steve Lonegan repeatedly pegged each other as “extreme” during a heated U.S. Senate debate this afternoon. In the first of two televised debate between the candidates — who are running in New Jersey’…
In a column on RollCall yesterday, Washington pundit Stu Rothenberg chastised conservative websites that are excited about Steve Lonegan’s internal poll numbers suggesting his race to replace the late Senator Frank Lautenberg is in single digits.
“Watch the people who matter, not the folks who don’t,” Rothenberg wrote.
In New Jersey, Patrick Murray matters. The Executive Director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, Murray told Capitol Quickies’ Bob Jordon that the debates could be decisive.
If Cory Booker tries to give the impression he’s above all this, he might up end up being on the short end of the debate because that would play into the impression that people are starting to get, which is that Booker is not fully engaged in this campaign and that he’s looking ahead to his national career.’’
Lonegan and Booker debate first this afternoon at 1PM at ABC’s Trenton Bureau. The debate will be live streamed here and broadcast on 6ABC (Philadelphia market) on Sunday, October 6 at 9:30 am and on 7ABC in the New York market at 11am. Noticias Univision 41 will air the debate in Spanish on Friday, October 11 at 11pm.
The second and final debate between Booker and Lonegan will be on Wednesday, October 9 at Rowan University in Glassboro.
How many politicians does it take to screw in a light bulb? I’m sorry, I meant screw the citizens! Just a little levity to take the sting away from the pesky political bug bite.
We’re just a few weeks away from Election Day and the politicians are playing naughty again. The result, a government shutdown which is just their way of throwing a tantrum until things are done their way. They’ve been kicking and screaming for a few days now and apparently “Obamacare” is the target. But why would the plutarchy ever want to reject an idea which would bring some relief to the poor and poverty stricken? The Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act (or ACA for short) goal is simple: Give more Americans access to affordable, quality health insurance and to reduce the growth in health care spending in the U.S. Sounds fair enough so why the tantrums? I, personally believe that it mostly stems from the plutarchy thinking that they will have to pay for lazy people who don’t want to work. If we were to ask many of them their opinions about the welfare program, you would probably hear the same thing. Unfortunately, their statistics are a bit off as it has been known for quite a while that the majority that are receiving Medicaid and food stamps are in a southern state called Mississippi where the largest population gets some type of assistance.. I also believe that there is major profiting by investors via the pharmaceutical companies and medical supply companies and the new plan will cause the distinct possibility that someone making 500 million per year will now make 449 million instead. Yes, the numbers are extreme but so are the wealth averages in comparison to the poverty level average.
President Obama made the following statement: “One faction of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government shut down major parts of the government all because they didn’t like one law,” Mr. Obama said. “This Republican shut down did not have to happen, but I want every American to understand why it did happen. Republicans in the House of Representatives refused to fund the government unless we defunded or dismantled the Affordable Care Act. They’ve shut down the government over an ideological crusade to deny affordable health insurance to millions of Americans. In other words, they demanded ransom just for doing their job.”
Yeah, Yeah, yada yada…they are holding their breath until the POTUS does what they want…who does this hurt? The citizens of the United States who are more than just poor, but more like destitute.
Last week the Quinnipiac poll had Cory Booker up in the U.S. Senate race by 12 points and the Monmouth poll had Booker up by 13.
Steve Lonegan’s strategist and pollster Rick Shaftan told SaveJersey that their campaign’s 4 day tracking internal poll has Lonegan down only 3 points, 47%-43%, with two weeks to go before the special election on Wednesday October 16.
In my years observing and participating in New Jersey politics, it’s been rare that an internal poll has proved more accurate than the normally reliable Monmouth or Quinnipiac polls. Adam Geller is the only partisan pollster who I would give more credence to than the best of the independents.
This time could be different. There is no historical model for predicting how voters will behave on the third Wednesday in October. There is also no model for predicting how voters still displaced by Superstorm Sandy will behave in the first non-primary election since their homes were destroyed. More then usual, the pollster’s assumptions and weighting impact the results.
Shaftan admits that his Democratic turnout assumptions are lower than what many others expect. He told MMM that he expects African-Americans will only be 8% of the vote in the senate elections compared to 12% in last year’s presidential election in New Jersey.
Releasing internal numbers that are substantially better than those produced by independent polls is a double edged sword. The release is intended to excite voters and to convince potential donors that their money won’t be wasted on a lost cause. On the downside, after the opposition scoffs at the numbers, they can react to them with their own ads or GOTV efforts.
