Forrester Not Losing With Class
I would have prefered something along the lines of the classic post election analysis, “The people have spoken — the bastards”. Instead, it looks like Doug Forrester is trying to spin his Election Day flop as the fault of George Bush [Forrester says Bush troubles became his own]. Sorry, Doug. I’m not buying that.
Just as a reminder, the last NJ governor’s election took place in 2001, two months after the terrorist attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, when Bush had approval ratings over 80%. Even then democrats did the same as they did last week, winning the Virginia and New Jersey governor’s race. Forrester certainly had a tough chore, starting the race twenty points behind Corzine, and the democrats having a huge fundraising advantage in a state where democrats and independents outnumber republicans 2 to 1.
But Forrester did nothing to inspire republican voters, who in my opinion decided to sit this one out. As I wrote last week, Bush got 1.6 million votes last November, while Forrester got a bit over 900,000. Where did those extra Bush voters go?? They didn’t vote for Corzine and only a handful may have voted third party. The rest stayed home. Get out the vote efforts are difficult, they take a lot of organization and a lot of energy. Forrester took the easy route, running lots of ads late in the race and relying on those annoying pre-recorded phone messages during the week before the election.
US News & World Report columnist Michael Barone took a pretty thorough look at all the NJ election results and felt that Corzine and Forrester pretty much did as expected [The New Jersey results]. In 2001, McGreevey got the same vote percentage as Gore in 2000, and Corzine got the same vote percentage as Kerry in 2004. Barone does note that turnout was lower in 2005 than in 2001 in the strong democrat counties of Essex, Camden and Middlesex counties, but Corzine still did well indicating that the union fueled get out the vote efforts succeeded.