Midterm Election Results

Welcome to New Jersey Now. I'm Mark Bonamo. Some are calling it a blue wave. Others are defining it as a blue nami. No matter how you look at it, Democrats overwhelmingly take control of both the U.S. Senate and House from Republicans in a historic midterm election. Here in New Jersey, Democratic congressional candidate Rebecca Bennett unseats Republican incumbent Tom Kaine Jr. to flip a pivotal House seat in District 7. But the other stunner comes in District 2, where Republican Jeff Van Drew concedes that race to Democratic challenger and Cape May Mayor Zach Mullock. What are the reasons behind this tremendous Democratic landslide? Was it affordability and gas prices? Was it immigration policy and ICE? Was it the war in Iran? Was it President Trump himself? Or was it simply all of the above? Lots to break down here with the panel. Republican State Senator Holly Schiappisi, Democratic strategist Brendan Gill, Terrence McDonald, editor for the New Jersey Monitor, and Dan Cassino, executive director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Poll. So Dan, this election, a Democratic blowout overall. We had all sorts of issues, immigration, affordability, Iran. Was this all ultimately about Donald Trump? What happened? So what happened was, at least here in New Jersey, we saw the electorate looked almost exactly like it did Last year in 2025, among Democrats, among Republicans, we saw turnout was decreased a little bit, somewhere between 5% and 6%. You put that together, and it means you're going to get an electorate that is about 9 to 10 points more Democratic than it was last year, when Mikey Sherrill won by 14 points. And that is the sort of blue tsunami that... Almost any candidate has got real trouble standing up against. The big issues were Donald Trump, but Donald Trump, I think, was less of an issue for Democrats than he was for Republicans. Among Democrats, when we looked at the issues that were motivating them, it really was affordability gas prices. That's what they cared about. And for Republicans, it was Donald Trump. Donald Trump was on their mind, and Donald Trump has a 20% approval rating, and he's got a 74% approval rating among Republicans in New Jersey. So a whole bunch of Republicans said, yeah, this election about Donald Trump, and I'm not so hot on Donald Trump right now, I'm just going to stay home. And that really ultimately is what doomed candidates. You can talk about Tom Kane being Being a flawed candidate in this cycle, you know, he made a lot of mistakes. But, you know, we go down to the second district, Jeff Van Drew. This is someone who did everything right. Everything incumbent's supposed to do, he's doing it all. Didn't matter. Still wound up losing by two points. This was a huge wave election. There's not a whole lot Republicans really could have done in the state to shield themselves from it. Is that true? True. So I was actually going to bring a flask with me today. And every time somebody said Trump, I was going to make everybody do a shot. And then I realized we'd end up. in the hospital. So I decided not to. Look, it was a blowout nationwide. And it was much different than most midterm elections where you do expect to see a swing. I think the general population hates both parties. They hate elected officials. But I think this time what we saw that we haven't seen historically is it impacted not just federal. It was state level. It was county level. It was local level. And so we saw blowouts in communities all throughout New Jersey and all throughout the nation that have never gone blue. And I think that's a wake-up call to all Republicans and the Republican Party. The past decade, it's been about one person. And when you have various... promises being made that aren't being delivered upon. When you have a focus being the reflecting pool, the ballroom, as people can't, and they're trying to determine, do I buy groceries this week or do I fill my gas tank? And how do I pay my utility bill? Those are things that we as a party need to really kind of focus on messaging, but more importantly, delivering. Brendan, what happened here? I mean, the numbers speak for themselves. I mean, they really do. Overwhelming support for our candidates, a repudiation of the president and his policies, but also a repudiation of Republicans who refuse to stand up to the president, i.e. Tom Kane Jr., i.e. Jeff Van Drew. Like, that's also what you're seeing. I don't often disagree with Dan, but I'll slightly disagree with Dan this time. I just think that he was the issue. He was the motivating factor within the base of the Democratic Party. And for those unaffiliated voters and for moderate Republicans, they also have had enough of him. He is a problem for the Republican Party. He is a, and I'm talking about the president, he is a problem for their brand. That's why you saw those numbers that you saw also down ballot. I mean, you picked up two commissioner candidates. In Monmouth County, a surrogate in Monmouth County, I could go down the list of where Democrats won, where quite frankly, to be very blunt, we weren't even running aggressive races. Right. So that says that there's a problem with the party identification. And right now, I think, you know, overall, that led to the margins that you saw across the country. Second point, just I want to make, so we also had very high quality candidates across, you know, not only in New Jersey, but across the country at the federal level. I really do think that Maine, you cannot say Maine, who we ended up with, who we ended up with and who the Democratic primary electorate chose. But I do think also you see the president's influence on the selection of candidates again and within his own party. A lot of these people who lost and who were god-awful candidates, god-awful candidates, they were his. hand-picked candidates. And you have some people, some Republicans, i.e. former Governor Chris Christie. Senator John Bramnick and others who have said like, this is a problem. Like we have no pathway forward. It's not for me to decide how the Republicans move forward. But I do think there's something to be said for not having a strategy about how you deal with the issues that come out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue every single day. So quick point on the candidate selection, right, is working on both sides. In New Jersey, we actually started having competitive primaries a couple of years ago. And it turns out the people who win the primaries are pretty good candidates. You win an election, you can win another election, even if they are much more It's more extreme than Senator Capizzi would like. Like, yes, far more extreme. And on the Republican side, honestly, there was a real difficulty recruiting high quality candidates. I mean, I think here in the 11th district where we are right now we had 15 candidates running and the Republicans managed to get one guy, you know, and it's just they if you're a high quality Republican, like, you know what, I'm going to wait till 2030 or something. I'm not going to do it. But in a normal cycle, he is a phenomenal candidate. He's actually a great candidate in 11. And what we're seeing right now, and I'd be more concerned, Brendan, for your party going into the primaries, because now you have the DSA and the far, far left of your party super emboldened in New Jersey. Like we literally just elected three congressional congresspeople out of New Jersey who are like. Part of the squad. That is not what New Jersey has historically been. And there is a reset. Do we need to build as a Republican Party unequivocally? But New Jersey is not about socialism. It's not about some of the stuff where people held their noses and just went straight down the ballot because they wanted change. They wanted their lives to get better. But. I think that we're going to see dysfunction in Congress with this new wave of people and it could really backfire. You said normal cycle? What is that? When are we going to get one of those? Is there anything normal about this election? No, nothing. I mean, it actually is pretty normal for a midterm to serve as a rebuke for the party in power. And even though this is Trump's second term, You know, because he was absent for four years, it sort of operated like a first midterm, like with Obama's first midterm, right? Or Bill Clinton's, where it was just this absolute rebuke of his policies. And I'll say that he rode a wave into the White House again two years ago, only promising to do a couple of things. Mass deportation, he's sort of done that. Bringing down prices on day one, he hasn't done that. Punishing his political enemies, he did that, and not to start any new wars, and he didn't do that. So I think what you're seeing is even some of his own voters saying, you said we were going to have lower prices two years ago, and we don't have them. So they either stayed home, or they held their noses and they voted for Democrats. And the Iran war has not helped at all. Amongst Republicans and feedback that I've been getting from some of the crazy people on my Facebook wall, that seems to be... Yeah, I know. Well, yeah, because there's this war that... is pretty unpopular, but there seems to be a disconnect between the president saying everything's going great over there. We're going to win. He says that like every two weeks, but we know that it's not happening on the ground. Right. And I think it's a hundred percent, but it's also a war that people directly connect to him. So they connect it to the Republican party that connected to decisions that he made. And that's what you also saw in some of these results as a direct connection. I think that the voters had to between those decisions and why they're paying what they're paying at the pump, whether that's, we can argue whether for sure on the merits, whether that's true or not, but as a political matter, that absolutely, you know, was the case. I will just say too, I just wanted to come back to one point the Senator made. I understand the idea that we have a big tent party, you know, in terms of the Democratic Party right now, we have folks who are coming from the various wings, but you also saw unity around a lot of the messaging. So I think that it's a lot of economic populism, which right now voters are responding to because those are real issues. So when you have the Democrats who are talking about the fact that we have a serious problem still with health care because we can't get access to it, when we're talking about the fact that we have a billionaire class and we have income inequality and people can't buy basic groceries, people are seeing and feeling that every single day. When we're talking about what they're paying at the pump, they're seeing that every single day. So the economic populism, regardless of what wing of the party you come from, is a very powerful message because it's what voters care about right now. And it's what Democrats are offering solutions to. So, Dan, as a contributor to The New York Times, I got to cover CD7, Rebecca Bennett, the Democrat defeating Tom King Jr. But then I got to go on a road trip. I got to go down to deepest South Jersey of the Cape May, where the shocker of the evening was Republican incumbent Jeff VanZee. Very closely tied to Donald Trump, loses to Cape May Mayor Zach Mullock, the Democratic challenger. What happened there? What happened was that Republican turnout was remarkably low. We saw this all throughout the week of early voting. Republicans just were not turning out in that district in numbers. Democrats turned out exactly the numbers they had hit last year, which was near presidential level, if we're being honest. And Republicans were voting the way they do normally in the midterm, which is much, much lower. And they, you know, Republicans just were not interested in turning it out. And this is actually a scary thing, not just for incumbents, but for, I think, both local parties in New Jersey, because this is all politics is national. And part of that is because they declined the local media. We have less local media. Local media was great, but we have less of it than we used to. And that means that candidates have a hard time distinguishing themselves and building a reputation. separate from the party. So Jeff Andrzej, he did everything right. He's an FDU alum. So we send good thoughts and hope he comes homecoming. He did everything right, but it didn't matter because all people were seeing is the R next to his name. Can I say something about Jeff Andrzej? When he was a Democrat, because he was a longtime state lawmaker, he was a conservative Democrat. And my guess is he got a lot of independent votes because the independent voters saw him as, you know, sometimes I agree with Democrats, sometimes I agree with Republicans. When he became a Republican, he became super Trumpy. And I think over the last couple of years, He's probably lost a lot of support from independent voters who Who used to think he was sort of middle of the road and now I've sort of seen that he was going to tie himself to the president on almost everything. And I think the independent voter is really what determined this. Yes, we had higher turnout on Democrats. The independent voters in New Jersey used to swing more centrist right. We've seen a decline in that over the past several years, and it's incumbent upon us to start talking to that population again. It was one of the biggest missteps of even Jack Ciattarelli's campaign, where they decided to just focus on Republicans in lieu of independents. We need to bring those independents back. And I do believe, notwithstanding, Brendan, what you said, the Big Tent party of the Ds. As more and more extreme Ds are being elected in New Jersey, it's a prime opportunity to bring back those independents, those unaffiliated. Back to the center with moderate, normal human beings who aren't just screaming up the sky, but are offering real solutions. And I think it's going to be difficult because a lot of promises have been made. You're not getting $25 an hour minimum wage with no exception for this nation. It's not going to happen. And so I think people have to be cautious about what they're promising. Thank you, panel. We'll be right back.