TPM Reader DC checks in from New Jersey …
My view from Jersey City:You correctly note that NJ polls tend to underestimate Democratic turnout in the cites in statewide races—Newark, the Oranges, Hudson County—because they don’t account for the party’s stong GOTV operation.
You fail to account for the opposite.
In my (somewhat short) experience, polls in NJ tend to show a lot of support for the opposition—which is almost always a Republican—which fails to materialize as votes on election day. The main reason for this is that the NJ Republicans have a laughably bad campaign apparatus. They consistently fail to target the disaffected “blue-collar” voters who would vote in opposition but aren’t particularly motivated to vote for Republican candidates. It’s a systemic problem. Republican voter outreach basically amounts to TV ads and mailers that are always a mish-mash of anti-tax nonsense and vague attacks, so by the time it gets to be the season to start calling voters and making efforts to get them to polls, voters still have no connection to the candidate. Since the GOTV operation is lousy anyway, this combination of failures has doomed the last decade of statewide Republican campaigns.I support Corzine and I think he’s been a very good governor, but by almost any measure he should be doomed. However, in NJ, you win elections in the streets, knocking on doors, and Christie’s nosedive in the polls points to one thing: he planned to run a marketing campaign, not an election campaign.
