In theory, New Jersey Democrats shouldn’t have to worry about this year’s U.S. Senate race; they have a battle-tested nominee in Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown), and disgraced former Senator Bob Menendez isn’t around to cause headaches anymore. But Curtis Bashaw, a hotel developer and the Republican nominee for Senate, is out with a new internal poll that shows a close race, one that he says he can win.
The poll, conducted by the GOP pollster National Research Inc., finds Kim with a five-point lead over Bashaw, 38% to 33%, with 22% undecided.
Per the poll, Kim is also far better known by New Jersey voters than Bashaw, who won a competitive Republican primary in June but who had never run for office before this year. Kim has a solid favorability rating of 39% favorable to 20% unfavorable, while Bashaw’s ratio is just 12% favorable to 10% unfavorable, with lots of voters yet to learn about him.
“Curtis Bashaw’s unique profile as a political outsider and job creator contrasts well against Kim’s career as a government bureaucrat and politician collecting government paychecks,” the polling memo states. “Bashaw’s common-sense centrism also contrasts well against Kim’s embrace of far left ideology. With a subpar image, Kim could very well be vulnerable in the home-stretch post Labor Day.”
The poll’s generic ballot test gives Democrats a 45%-41% lead over Republicans – which, if it came to pass, would be a disaster for state Democrats, given that they won the House popular vote by 10 points in the relatively Republican-leaning 2022 cycle. The memo did not include numbers for the presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, or for any other election in New Jersey this cycle.
Despite the unusually high-profile nature of this year’s Senate race given Menendez’s trial on federal corruption charges, there has been a dearth of high-quality polling, especially in recent months.
Bashaw’s poll is the first publicly available data released on the race since early this summer, before Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and before Menendez was convicted by a New York jury. A July poll from a GOP super PAC gave Kim a 41%-39% lead over Bashaw without Menendez on the ballot, and a June poll from the Republican-leaning pollster co/efficient put Kim up 41%-34%.
The last truly independent poll was conducted all the way back in April, when Fairleigh Dickinson University gave Kim a 47%-38% lead over Bashaw, who had not yet emerged as the Republican nominee at that point.
The National Research Inc. poll was conducted from August 13-15 on behalf of the Curtis Bashaw campaign, with a sample size of 600 likely New Jersey voters and a margin of error of +/- 4.0%.