32%.
Thirty-two percentage points.
That's the most recent polling deficit Barbara Buono faces against the electoral juggernaut of incumbent Chris Christie in the Quinnipiac University poll released on April 24. Quinnipiac is a good pollster and its numbers line up with other recent polls from the Garden State.
We could behave like the rest of the media and political class, say "Next!" and merely chalk this survey up as another harbinger of Barbara Buono's "inevitable" defeat.
We could do that. The Media (both local and national) has done that. The armchair pundits have done it. Chris Christie has almost certainly done it. And there are mutterings that the New Jersey Democratic Party is itself on the verge of quietly conceding the race.
However, we SHOULD NOT.
We shouldn't write off this race because we owe the people of New Jersey a frank and deep discussion of the economic and social failures of the Christie Administration.
But, most importantly, we shouldn't write off this race because of math and common sense. There is plenty of evidence (in the Quinnipiac poll and elsewhere) that this race should and could be closer than it is currently.
First, let's start with the party ID of the poll: 23% Republican, 35% Democrat, 37% Independent, 5% other. I'm not going to question the party ID of this poll and say that it should be something different. If you were worried, I'm not going to "unskew" it. However, I will say that the electorate in this poll is much less Democratic than that which voted on November 6 of last year. That is to be expected, mid-midterm elections (2013 is between a mid-term and a presidential election cycle) have lower voter participation and the voters that tend to participate are often whiter and less Democratic. Democratic candidates do well in these off-year elections when they turn out their voters in an effort to mimic their presidential year numbers. For reference: in the last presidential election, 26% of New Jersey voters identified as Republicans, 44% as Democrats, and 30% as Independents. The comparison of these Party ID numbers alone would suggest that there is a big "enthusiasm gap" among NJ voters. Independents are planning to turn out at a much higher rate than in 2012, while Democrats are way down and Republicans are about at where they were in November. Buono operatives in the state should take this as a warning sign that they need to do something either to energize Democratic base voters, or create an organization that can turn these voters out (more later). Case in point: if the electorate resembled November's, Christie's lead would be 27 points (57%-29%) instead of 32 - a modest change, but a real one.
The rest of Christie's lead can be attributed to good showings with Independents and Democrats and to Buono's lack of name recognition. Let's remember that most of the undecided voters in the race are Democrats and Independents at 15% and 14%, respectively. These are likely to be voters who overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama in November and who would be likely to come back to Senator Buono once she becomes better known to them. Fortunately (or unfortunately depending on how you want to look at it) Buono is not well know to these voters: 73% of Democrats and 82% of Independents don't know enough about Ms Buono to give a positive or negative verdict on her. Consequently, Ms Buono's second goal must be to increase her name identitification so that these undecided voters who are demographically likely to support her do so come November. If Ms Buono can corral the overwhelming majority of the undecideds she can probably come to within 20 points of Christie.
20 points is still a HUGE deficit; however, Buono has the potential to win over many people who are currently supporting Christie. The Governor is still enjoying a post-Sandy bounce, his approval numbers shot up to stratospheric levels after Sandy and they are only slowly coming down. It is worth noting that while Christie's approval is at 67%, his support is at 58% which suggests that there are voters who approve of the governor but don't plan on supporting him. With his approvals coming down further after a vigorous campaign, where non-Sandy issues are discussed, they may reach a tipping point where his defeat is possible. In fact, many more voters say jobs, the minimum wage, schools, and property taxes will be more important than Sandy to their vote which suggests that if Buono pivots to those issues (instead of gay marriage on which she is currently focusing) she has a good chance of being rewarded by voters who overwhelmingly embraced the Democratic policies of Barack Obama over those of Christie/Romney last November. If she sticks to these winning issues she should be able to win back some of Christie's "soft support", including the overwhelming majority of the 30% of Democrats who say they are currently supporting Christie.
In this way, Buono can wage a battle of ideas with Governor Christie rather than dancing around his single-issue incumbency.
But the truth is you won't beat Chris Christie by running a conventional campaign. He's going to have more money than he'll know what to do with and his team will saturate the airwaves with ads and smears. Our only hope to beat him is to forget the standard political playbook and to organize a grassroots house-by-house, bloc-by-bloc, town-by-town colation that will replace him. The votes are there, it's our job to get them.
In 2009, Jon Corzine lost by 86,714 votes while only winning 49.1% of the total number of votes won by Barack Obama the previous November. On the other hand, Christie won 72.8% of the total won by John McCain. While there were of course individual voters that switched allegiances between those elections, the fact remains that the Obama coalition didn't show up for Corzine. In minority urban precincts especially, turnout was precipitously down from 2008. We can't afford for the same to happen this go-around. Democratic players in the state must replicate the house-to-house Obama play book from 2012 if they hope to boost minority turnout in a way that benefits Democratic candidates up and down the ballot.
This race is winnable and - with the right legwork and ground game - it will be won.
