Senator Booker

In a campaign that was fraught with negativity and frightening xenophobia, mayor of Newark Cory Booker defeated Lonegan on Tuesday night. Despite coming into this fall with a huge lead in the polls, a highly destructive campaign season broke the candidate down a bit, and the narrative surrounding the campaign for the entirety of this month has been, "Cory Booker is almost certainly going to win-- but does the fact that he's going to win by less than we thought mean something..?!" This narrative, that the Booker brand is somehow compromised because of the margin of victory, is bizarre and lends itself to hyper-negative methods of campaigning.

Similarly, pundits are fighting over the upcoming re-election campaign of Chris Christie in much the same manner. That campaign is about two and a half weeks away, and Christie is the obvious favorite to win the governorship of New Jersey. However, since there is such a tremendous amount of buzz surrounding his potential 2016 presidential candidacy, the big question is by how much he will win. Many pundits are saying that if he scoops up over 60% of the vote, then he will effectively secure his front-runner status in the Republican primary. I could go into a whole diatribe about how naive this analysis is, and how the current Republican party primary would chew up and spit out a centrist candidate like Chris Christie, but that should not only be left to another day, but another blog.

There's another element of this story that is not being played up, regarding Chris Christie's decision to have a special election to elect a new New Jersey senator after the passing of the late Senator Lautenberg. Several years ago, Governor Christie was asked if he would have a special election, or allow the election to fall on the same election day as all other election (first Tuesday following the first Monday of November), should Lautenberg pass while in office. Christ Christie balked at the question, saying that he would never want to waste taxpayers' time and money with a needless special election, and would instead opt to hold it on the same day as all other elections. However, with Christ Christie's re-election vote being held this year, and the presumed massive turnout of Democratic voters to elect a political superstar such as Booker, the Christie campaign opted instead to have a special election to reduce the turnout of Democrats. I've heard this fact brought up one single time on NPR, and have never heard it addressed again since.

http://news.yahoo.com/jersey-democrat-cory-booker-wins-special-election-u-015220410.html;_ylt=A2KLOzLk.39SThoAH3PQtDMD