Murphy's Law of Polls

Democratic New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Phil Murphy is leading by eighteen points over his Republican opponent, Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno, in a recently released poll, and he's benefiting from Guadagno's association with lame-duck incumbent Governor Chris Christie.  So it looks like the Democrats are going to score their first major electoral victory in the age of Trump, right?

Not so fast.  

At the first debate between the two candidates, Murphy may have had his own "basket of deplorables" moment when he said he would declare New Jersey a "sanctuary state" for undocumented immigrants, shielding them from federal authorities.  Guadagno immediately responded by suggesting that Murphy would give sanctuary to undocumented immigrants like a Peruvian national who murdered children in a Newark schoolyard in 2014.  Murphy has come back hard and strong on that charge, saying that no state or city offering sanctuary for undocumented immigrants extends its protections to criminal suspects.  But since Guadagno is a Republican, that hardly matters.  She's been hammering the issue home, misleading potential voters with a deceitful misrepresentation of the truth - that is, a lie - and appealing to same bigoted set of voters Trump won in 2016.

To respond to the inevitable point that Donald Trump lost New Jersey to Hillary Clinton by nine points, it's worth noting that voters in New Jersey have acted differently in the past when choosing a governor.  New Jersey Democrats have lost four out of the last seven gubernatorial elections since the state last went Republican in a presidential election, and no Democrat has served two full terms since Brendan Byrne from 1974 to 1982.  New Jerseyans have been partial to Republicans when it comes to running the state, trying to keep taxes under control, and helping suburban areas (mostly white) over the cities (mainly non-white).  Guadagno's latest trick - in place of her attempt to capitalize on New Jersey's astronomically high property taxes, which hasn't helped - may bring out enough Republican voters in the exurban and rural areas to counter Democratic strength in urban areas and in older, more established suburbs that are in greater proximity to the cities.

In other words, Guadagno could find a way to pull an upset.  If that sounds unthinkable, look at the 1993 gubernatorial election and consider that Christine Todd Whitman was expected to lose to incumbent governor Jim Florio despite his unpopularity over increasing taxes in a recession.  She won by one percentage point.  How far back do you want to go?  Brendan Byrne was just as unpopular in 1977 as Florio was in 1993 over taxes - it was Byrne who imposed New Jersey's income tax, leading Republicans to label him "One-Term Byrne."  His Republican opponent in the 1977 election, Ray Bateman, cam up with a plan to replace the state income tax but, when asked how it would work, Bateman gave an answer that revealed the plan to be more of a fantasy than a workable solution.  He ended up losing what was the one of the least loseable elections for a challenger against an incumbent in New Jersey history.

Oh yeah, Phil Murphy is pushing a very progressive - and very expensive agenda, but he hasn't come up with an explanation of how he's going to pay for it.  Sound familiar?  

Actually, the only reason it does sound familiar is because Guadagno can't explain how she's going to pay for property tax relief.  But Murphy is still leaving himself open to an upset if he doesn't respond more forcefully to his opponent's more aggressive attacks on him.  

I hope Murphy - whom I support and whose agenda I support - comes back harder still.  Maybe he will at tonight's second gubernatorial debate.  Because if he somehow manages to lose, that will effectively put an end to the Democratic Party.  Not just the party in New Jersey - the national party.  Because if the Democratic Party can't even win the governorship of an increasingly Democratic state like New Jersey in the age of Trump, it might as well go full Whig.