Republican U.S. Senate candidate Curtis Bashaw pulled out of a debate next week to avoid uncomfortable questions about his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump.
Bashaw has a history of opposing Trump and didn’t want his rival, Mendham Mayor Christine Serrano Glassner, to question him on it, a South Jersey Republican leader involved in the Bashaw campaign told the New Jersey Globe.
“Bashaw can run, but he can’t hide,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “It is a settled matter that the GOP is the party of Trump.”
On Friday, Bashaw chickened out of a debate with Serrano Glassner sponsored by the New Jersey Globe, On New Jersey, Save Jersey, and Rider University. The debate was to have aired on C-SPAN. (The April 3 debate will continue without Bashaw, with Serrano Glassner and an empty chair.)
In 2016, Bashaw backed former Gov. Chris Christie and then Libertarian Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, over Trump. Four years later, Bashaw supported a letter calling Trump “a real threat to democracy.” He contributed $3,300 to Christie’s 2024 presidential campaign.
He’s told Republicans he voted for Trump despite personal campaign contributions and public statements opposing him.
Bashaw has not yet endorsed Trump, although he’s told some small Republican groups that he would vote for him.
Christie is involved in Bashaw’s campaign; Serrano Glassner is married to Michael Glassner, a top Trump campaign advisor since 2015.
The source, who was familiar with the discussion, said that Christie’s longtime campaign strategist, Mike DuHaime, made the call for Bashaw to back out of the debate. DuHaime has also been rabidly anti-Trump and was among those advising Christie on a possible independent bid for the presidency.
“Mike said the grief Curtis will take for not debating is better than clips of him trying to explain his position on President Trump that could hurt him the primary and again in the general,” the Bashaw-backing Republican said.
Bashaw’s plan was to score a bunch of organization lines and self-fund a primary that deftly avoided talking about Trump, who enjoys considerable popularity among Republican primary voters in New Jersey. He would then run as a moderate against the Democratic Senate nominee, likely Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown).
Rasmussen doesn’t think the strategy will work.
“Are there Trump defections within the party? Sure— the most recent presidential primaries suggest as much,” he said. “But that’s nowhere near enough to win a primary.”
If Bashaw wins the primary – on Friday, a federal judge struck down organization lines for the upcoming June primary, essentially stripping him of the 14 county organization endorsements he’d already secured – he’s become Trump’s running mate in the general election.
Rasmussen said that would make it “exponentially harder by remaining silent about whether he supports Trump.”
“In fact, with his debate dodge, he will be defined by Serrano Glassner as the candidate who’d rather not debate than support his party’s presidential nominee. And that will be accurate,” stated Rasmussen. “It’s going to get very difficult, very quickly, for Bashaw to sustain his silence— something other NJ GOP candidates have already figured out.”
Christie remains hugely unpopular with New Jersey Republicans, so it’s not clear why Bashaw has chosen to embrace him. A 2023 Fairleigh Dickinson University poll had the former governor at 3% in a GOP presidential primary poll, losing to Trump in a head-to-head contest by an 82%-12% margin. The poll put Christie’s favorables among New Jersey Republicans at an underwater 18%-55%.