Why the GOP has a great shot of winning New Jerseys governor race this year
New Jersey stands an excellent chance of electing a Republican governor this year, and so potentially breaking from its long, slow decline.Though solidly blue for years, the Garden State has shifted red of late in response to hapless Democratic misrule under Gov.Phil Murphy and the alliance of machine and far-left Dems who dominate the legislature.Once a swing state, New Jersey moved left this last generation:But Jersey did vote for Republican Chris Christie for governor in 2009 and ’13, and for Christine Todd Whitman in 1993 and ’97.And in a 2021 Election Night shocker, former General Assemblymember Jack Ciattarelli — this year’s GOP frontrunner for gov — came within just 3.2 percentage points of knocking out Murphy.Then, last November, Jerseyans gave Donald Trump a full 45% of their votes, leaving Kamala Harris with the smallest Garden State winning margin of any Democratic presidential contender in 32 years.And now the entire Democratic Party is struggling with record-low approval ratings and a general cluelessness about how to recover.Meanwhile, political-activist GOP wunderkind Scott Presler, who worked miracles registering Republicans last year to help Trump take Pennsylvania, is vowing to do likewise now in the Garden State.Heck, there’s an outside chance the General Assembly could even flip red.Look: Garden Staters suffer all the modern blue-state woes: high taxes, massive state debt, high crime, decaying infrastructure, expensive but underperforming schools in many towns and cities — plus some special Jersey burdens like huge holes in the pension funds for retired public workers and massive corruption in Democrat-dominated areas.Christie, the last Republican gov, came in like a lion and left like a lamb, his reform drives stymied by a Democratic legislature and firmly left-leaning state courts.Then Murphy spent his eight years making everything worse, with the usual tax-and-spend, garnished with hard-left cultural warring such as imposing cor...