Ornery New Jersey Voters Stay Home in Droves to Send Shock
Waves Through Trenton
Last Tuesday’s Election Day saw gubernatorial races in
Mississippi and Kentucky with legislative races in New Jersey. Although the Governors got their 15 nanoseconds
of coverage, with the incumbent Republican Mississippi Governor winning
re-election, and the corruption plagued Republican Kentucky Governor losing,
the New Jersey legislative races were almost completely ignored, even in New
Jersey. For good reason, the voters were
in an ornery mood. The professional politicians,
pundits and media got. slapped.
The One Party System
First, a little background is necessary. In New Jersey, as in the rest of the country,
there is a one party system. The leadership
of both parties collude in arranging political campaigns that are mostly
theater and charade. They agree, in
advance, which seats will be contested and which are “safe” for the other
party. They do this because with every
passing year, keeping their monopoly on political offices is becoming harder as
the numbers go more and more against them.
New Jersey has almost 5
million voters, 4,797,345. Almost
one-quarter (24.27%) are registered Democrats and 18.23% are registered
Republicans. That leaves 2,758,384 or
57.5% as unaffiliated or minor party voters.
That means that the top priority in any election is to keep the
unaffiliated candidates out of the race, out of the debates, out of the media,
and the unaffiliated voters away from the polls so they don’t mess up the two
party fix.
New Jersey’s Governor, Jon Corzine, was elected to the
United States Senate in 2000. To
accomplish this feat, he spent over $60 million of his own money. Jon Corzine is retired from the investment
firm of Goldman, Sachs where he was chairman.
Corzine wants to be president.
After a few years in the Senate, he came to the logical conclusion that
Governor (Governor Carter, Governor Reagan, Governor Clinton, Governor Bush) is
the path to the White House, not the Senate.
So, in 2005, Corzine ran for Governor and won.
Last April, Governor
Corzine’s State Trooper driven SUV was speeding up the Garden State Parkway on
its way back to Trenton to meet with the Rutger’s woman’s basketball team that
had been dissed on the air by radio shlock jock Don Imus, when it got into an
accident in which the Governor, who was not wearing his seat belt, was almost
killed.
Still, Corzine was pretty messed up and has spent the past
seven months virtually out of sight recuperating. It is significant to note that although
Corzine is a Democrat, former Goldman, Sachs executives include Hank Paulsen,
the current Secretary of the Treasury and Josh Bolton, the current White House
Chief of Staff. George Bush’s own
inherited fortune comes from the Wall Street investment firm of Brown Brothers,
Harriman. So, it is more appropriate to
think of the United States as being run by Wall Street investment bankers
rather than by Republicans and Democrats.
Selling the New Jersey
Turnpike
New Jersey, like most of
the public and private entities in the United States, is broke. State spending has skyrocketed over 50% in
the past six years, while state aid to school districts has stayed the same. Consequently, real estate taxes, currently
the highest in the nation (which is somewhat misleading because other states
tax things like cars that New Jersey does not) have risen accordingly.
In addition to a massive $32 billion debt, fourth highest
per capita in the nation, New Jersey faces huge unfunded pension
obligations. Corzine, the investment
banker, floated a plan to sell the New Jersey Turnpike as a solution to the
state’s financial problems. Not
surprisingly, selling the New Jersey Turnpike would generate huge fees for the
Wall Street investment banks that would arrange the sale and probably float the
bonds of the successful bidder. Needless
to say, the voters saw this as the rip off that it is and poll after poll
revealed its unpopularity. Backing down,
Corzine came up with a different plan, one to turn the operation of the
turnpike over to a public benefit corporation that will float bonds backed by
Turnpike toll revenues.
Keeping Control of the Legislature
Going into Tuesday’s election, the Democrats held a 50-30
edge in the Assembly and a 22-18 advantage in the State Senate. Seeing as the Senate was the most likely body
to switch sides, the Republicans obligingly declined to offer candidates in 4
or 10% of the districts. That meant that
the Republicans needed to win 58% of the contested seats to win control of the
Senate while the Democrats needed to win 47% in order to retain control. Not surprisingly, the Democrats did gain one
seat, which was an astonishingly poor performance given that half the incumbent
Republican Senators declined to seek re-election. The democrats picked up two seats in South
Jersey that hadn’t elected Republicans in 70 years, but lost Ellen Karcher, the
daughter of a former speaker of the Assembly.
Ellen’s mother sits on the Princeton Borough Council.
In the Assembly, the Republicans gained two seats, but, here
again, the Republicans failed to field candidates in 7 of the 80 districts,
giving the Democrats a considerable head start.
The Ballot Questions
Having fixed the legislative races to ensure continued
Democratic control, all that was left was to have some ballot questions to
create the appearance of action and to put more money in the public
coffers. The Democrats took a page out
of Karl Rove’s play book and devised a hot button question on stem cell
research, designed to get the Democratic voters to the polls in a year when
there would be no interest in the legislative races. In New Jersey, ballot questions are put on
the ballot by the legislature without the signature of the Governor being
necessary.
The first question,
addressing the number one poll topic of real estate taxes, was to dedicate 1%
of the sales tax to real estate tax “reform”.
Last year, New Jersey increased its sales tax from 6% to 7%. Half of 1% was used this year to vastly
increase the real estate tax rebate program that the state instituted to try
and take the sting out of soaring real estate taxes. Of course, saying “reform” rather than real
estate tax “reduction” left many voters suspicious of the real intent of the
question, so, in a stunning surprise, it was defeated 592,968 yes to 670,805
no.
The second shocker of the evening was that the proposal for
a $450 million bond to support stem cell research, touted as the key a prosperous
bio-tech future (New Jersey is home to much of the pharmaceutical industry)
also went down to defeat 606,271 yes to 683,861 no. The anti-abortion lobby, of course, opposed
the measure on moral grounds; but polls show New Jersey voters overwhelmingly
in favor of stem cell research. What the
polls did not show is that the voters, knowing the state is broke, did not feel
like borrowing millions of dollars that would ultimately redound to the benefit
of the pharmaceutical industry was either in the public interest or the job of
the state. Furthermore, even those in
favor of stem cell research, and even in favor of government support, had
doubts about whether the government was honest and competent enough to get any
value out of such a huge expenditure.
Governor Corzine’s accident shows that he is nothing if not reckless and
every proposal to solve the budget problem to emerge from his administration
has a huge lollypop for his former associates, the investment bankers on Wall
Street.
Turnout
How could this happen in
New Jersey, the bluest of the blue states, that Al Gore carried by his biggest
percentage in 2000? Simple. The voters stayed home, allowing the
professional nay sayers and curmudgeons to carry the day. Only 1,452,344 people cast ballots in New
Jersey this year, 30% of the electorate.
Remember, the Republicans and Democrats combined are 42.5%. This means that not even the two party base
went to the polls this year.
In 2004, 72% of the electorate, or3,638,153 voters cast
ballots. That means that this year’s
turnout was 40% of the presidential vote.
For every five people who voted for president in 2004, three stayed home
last Tuesday. What this shows is that
when the voters are feeling negative toward the executive and legislative, they
do not choose the lesser of two evils, they say a plague on both your houses
and vote with their feet. If all the
choices are too unpalatable, the voters do not choose the less bad choice, they
refuse to make a choice at all. That is
what happened in New Jersey on Tuesday, November 6, 2007; and that is what is
going to happen, over and over again, across the entire nation in 2008.
The real danger is that this kind of election produces an
impotent government. This kind of
government has no mandate from the voters, not when 70% of the voters boycott
the election. Even in nations with
organized boycotts, more voters cast ballots than they did in New Jersey last
Tuesday. So, people who are holding their
breaths, waiting for the presidential election next year to produce a solution
to the war in Iraq, the plummeting dollar, high energy costs, and employment
insecurity are likely to be disappointed.
In order to change direction and priorities, the tradeoffs need to be
discussed before the ballots are cast, not after. That is what elections are for, to give the
voters a chance to tell the government what tradeoffs they are willing to make
to achieve what ends. In races where the
only issues are: who raises the most money and who can win, the voters are
excluded from the process and they do not participate, yielding an impotent
government.
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