No Jersey Gimme

Since Republican Chris Christie's landslide re-election as governor of New Jersey in November 2013 - buyers' remorse over which set in as early as December 2013 - New Jersey has been a gimme for Democrats in one election after another.  Cory Booker was handily elected to a full U.S. Senate term in 2014.  New Jersey Democrats expanded their majority in the state Assembly midterms in 2015.  Hillary Clinton was guaranteed the state's fourteen electoral votes in 2016, allowing normally reliable Democratic and Democratic-leaning independent voters to go third-party without handing New Jersey to Donald Trump.  And Phil Murphy's gubernatorial election victory in 2017 was such a foregone conclusion, political pundits wouldn't even talk about the election in advance.

In 2018, it's different.  Incumbent Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Menendez is up for re-election, and he faces the stigma of corruption charges that a jury couldn't decide on.  Though Menendez wasn't re-tried, he could be tried in the court of public opinion and lose in an upset to Republican challenger Bob Hugin, a pharmaceutical executive running as a Dudley Do-Right whose company has helped saved lives with its cancer-fighting drugs.  National Democrats are so afraid that they could lose this seat that they are helping to shore up Menendez's seat at the expense of help for Democratic Senate candidates and incumbents elsewhere.   

Menendez (above,left, with Hugin) is counting on Hugin's company's own misdeeds, such as price gouging, and the fact that he (Hugin) would be another vote for Trump in the Senate to save his own sorry hide.  Hugin is counting on the lingering stigma of the corruption charges against Menendez as well as, no doubt, the promise of increased leverage for New Jersey in a Senate that will likely stay Republican.  And Menendez is definitely in trouble, not just with all voters but with his own base; he won renomination in June with 60 percent of the vote.  Sixty percent sounds like a landslide, and it is, but considering that his opponent, Lisa McCormick, was a candidate few voters had ever heard of and a candidate who did little if any advertising, it's an embarrassment to get only three out of five votes.  So, yes, New Jersey could send a Republican to the Senate for the first time since the debut of Bob Newhart's sitcom - not the one with Mary Frann, the earlier one with Suzanne Pleshette.  (That is, 1972.)

I'm not saying Hugin will win.  I'm only saying he can win.  Substitute "Trump" for "Hugin," and you will see that I said the same thing in 2016.   

Oh yeah, both Menendez and Hugin are from Union City, a small urban enclave just west of Manhattan.  Both of them were born in 1954, and, according to my computer, both of them have spell-checker-unfriendly surnames.  So, we in New Jersey know that our next U.S. Senator will be an ethically dubious 64-year-old guy from Union City named Bob.  We just don't know yet which one.