Stomping Grounds: Primary takeaways, fate of organizations; and November

New Jerseyans aren’t always civil, but it’s still possible for a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican to have a rational and pleasant conversation about politics in the state. Dan Bryan is a former senior advisor to Gov. Phil Murphy and is now the owner of his own public affairs firm, and Alex Wilkes is an attorney and former executive director of America Rising PAC who advises Republican candidates in New Jersey and across the nation, including the New Jersey GOP. Dan and Alex are both experienced strategists who are currently in the room where high-level decisions are made. They get together weekly with New Jersey Globe editor David Wildstein to discuss politics and issues.

Okay, it’s over.  What are your biggest takeaways from the gubernatorial primary?

Alex Wilkes: The biggest takeaway for me was that the Democratic “line” – even a shadow one – still has a few cycles left in it in the big counties before it gives out. For Republicans, however, it was already mostly dead coming into Election Day (more on all of this below).

In practical terms, though, what does that mean? Going into the general election, I think it means that a superior process produced Jack Ciattarelli than Mikie Sherrill.

I can hear the shouting now: Mikie Sherrill is the most battle-tested nominee ever! All of that competition! All of that money!

First, to the extent that the line held, it was all money and organization, so I think when you think about the money spent for and against Sherrill, you need to factor in the vast number of resources counties expended to back her in key and expensive places. That’s a ridiculously big leg up she got just from a couple of guys making a decision in the proverbial smoke-filled backroom – not really the result of some exhaustive vetting process.

Second, in the giant food fight that was this Democratic primary, she kept it pretty vanilla on the substance and let her opponents all go after each other. I don’t know that you can say definitively that one candidate or effort stood apart from the rest in taking a single, well-funded swing at her.

Jack, on the other hand: man, between online trolls and Phil Murphy’s money, he has lived in a constant knife fight—and it’s made him a bolder, more confident candidate, who built the organization to match. Our candidate goes into November with the resounding support of his party, while Sherrill walks away from a process where more Democrats voted against her than for her.

Mikie Sherrill will be a formidable candidate for us to beat, but it won’t be because she emerged from a competitive process with battle scars to prove it.

Dan Bryan: Let me start here – New Jersey Democrats had six fantastic candidates run in this primary cycle. In any other cycle, any of the six could have been the nominee. Everyone working on those campaigns deserves an enormous amount of credit for running through the tape in spite of the long odds. We are lucky to have such a deep bench of candidates, and of political operatives. 

Mikie Sherrill’s performance exceeded everyone’s expectations, even those of her biggest fans. To win this election by 13 points, with over $120 million spent and multiple SuperPACs going negative against her, is nothing less than an amazing achievement. 

She’s now up against perennial gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli, who shares the same top career achievement as Lisa McCormick, having lost by less than expected last time around. I thought the best line in Congresswoman Sherrill’s acceptance speech was when she called Ciattarelli “the ghost of elections past” – it reminded me of Jim Carville’s famous line, “George Bush is yesterday’s newspaper.” (By the way, if we all took a shot every time Jack Ciattarelli proposed a drinking game to try to get out of an issue he didn’t want to talk about, we’d be dead.)

If Congresswoman Sherrill can build on the coalition she put together on Tuesday and continue to play offense against Ciattarelli, she’ll be successful in November.

Which one result in the state surprised you the most?

Dan: At 8:09 pm on election night, Matt Friedman posted the Camden County VBM results. We could have called the election right then. 

Congresswoman winning Camden County is stunning, and a good sign for her broad appeal to a wide swath of voters going into November.

Alex: Jack taking close to 70% of the vote in Ocean County. A big, beautiful win—many people have told me!

A close second, $500+ per vote for Sean Spiller. What a disgusting and indefensible use of teachers’ union dues>

What is the state of county party organizations in New Jersey after the election?  Did they do what they needed to do to remain powerful and relevant in the post-line era?

Alex:  For Republicans, I think the picture is largely unchanged from where it had been before Andy Kim’s lawsuit. After years under one-party rule, it’s not surprising that the influence of most of our county organizations has waned as the power and money have gone elsewhere. We have a couple of stand-out counties with incredible organization and fundraising, but even they are dwarfed by the scale at which most Democratic county organizations are able to wield their power. As I’ve been saying all along, the campaigns that are built from the ground up to win will be successful in a way that the campaigns that rely on a schtick, a social media account, or a four-leaf clover will not. You may not like those terms, but our playing field is completely even – adjust and plan accordingly.

For the Democrats, while I acknowledge that I was among those who was dubious about the organizations’ abilities to hold the line (puns always intended), I think it’s reasonable to conclude that their commanding influence will fade in future cycles for the simple reason that time marches on. Leadership will turn over, new voters will come into the fold, and – I hope – eight years of Republicans in Trenton will really cramp their style. In the meantime, I think candidates who represent different ideological or geographic wings of the party will need to decide if and how they want to consolidate to advance their interests. On both the left and right of the Democratic primary, we see now in the results opportunities where opposing campaigns may have backed one another to have greater influence.

Dan: Democratic party organizations are relevant when they are responsive to the needs of their constituents, and show they can fight for working families against the harm Republicans are trying to do in this state. If they continue to follow that playbook, they will continue the success they saw on Tuesday, when 94% of their Assembly incumbents won reelection.

What happens now?  What do Mikie Sherrill and Jack Ciattarelli need to be doing now to win?

Dan: Mikie and her team should keep their foot on the gas pedal, and not back down from the fight Jack Ciattarelli and National Republicans are about to bring.

Voters know what they’re getting with Jack Ciattarelli. He spent four years in Trenton rubber-stamping Christie budgets that gutted public education, decimated NJ TRANSIT, underfunded our pension obligation, cut taxes for the rich, and made lives worse for working families in New Jersey. Those budgets were so bad, we’re *still* cleaning up the mess 12 years later. He’s a creature of Trenton, a vestige of the bad old days when nothing worked and nobody cared.

And now Ciattarelli is making a risky bet that President Trump is more popular in 2025 than he was in 2017, when he helped drag the Republican ticket down to a 14-point loss. That may be true (it also may not – let’s see what the first few general election polls say), but it misses a fundamental flaw in his candidacy: by sucking up to Trump, he’s showing New Jersey voters he’ll never be able to stand up for them. When you worship at the altar of Trump, you tell all 9.5 million New Jerseyans that you’ll always put Trump’s politics first, not what’s best for New Jersey. 

And to anyone saying that’s how Republicans have to run in 2025, tell that to Phil Scott and Brian Kemp, two popular and successful Republican Governors who have maintained their dignity, and their backbone. Ciattarelli could have learned a lot from them, but instead he’ll take his marching orders from the President. Bedminster will run New Jersey under Ciattarelli, not Trenton.

Alex: For Jack, the race against the clock to get matching funds is on, so that means going after every donor on our side who hid behind the primary as an excuse not to give, existing donors to renew or fully max out their commitments, and the donors who play both sides to make the case that they can and should hedge their bets this time around. Full stop. We will not outraise Democrats, and we may not need to, but we can’t get blown out of the water.

While the candidate is out raising money, I would expect the campaign to put together a strong communications team that will keep the earned media going and surrogates informed. I think I would also use the summer to dust off the old oppo books on Mikie (and start generating some new ones) to see what is now inconsistent or looks bad in a new light. After forcing a New Jersey legend to retire in a bad year for Republicans, Mikie’s district got considerably better after redistricting, so tracking her record, speeches, etc. has likely not been a priority for some time (and God knows our legacy media wasn’t asking any hard questions!). Maybe she is just a garden variety liberal by Washington or Montclair standards, but to a bigger audience back home, I think it’s going to get very uncomfortable very fast to explain things like the atmospheric growth of personal wealth while IN congress at a time when people can’t pay the property taxes to stay in their own homes.

For the last 10 years, Republicans have been asked by the media to own every move of President Trump’s. Let’s return the favor and demand her response to rioters burning cars and looting in Los Angeles, for example, or support for LaMonica McIver after she charged a federal immigration facility. Make her own every Phil Murphy policy, every Biden policy. I noticed she had a little birdie slip into Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s sensational book Original Sin about President Biden’s decline that she was among the first concerned after Biden’s disastrous June debate. Track every White House visit she ever made before that: was she concerned then? If so, why not? Did she not get face time with the President when her office said she did? If the press won’t cover it, use social media to call out their silence, while spreading the word. Let our candidate be the agent of economic change and relief for the voters, while the campaign relentlessly makes. Mikie. own. it.