Battle Of Trenton, 2017
Turning the NJ governorship blue this year would be a repudiation of Christie and Trump — and perhaps an indication of where the Democratic Party is heading
You more or less know the story. In August 1777, the Continental Army is crushed at the Battle of Brooklyn and, over the course of several months, the British drive the Americans back up Manhattan and Westchester County and southwest across New Jersey into Pennsylvania. By winter, people start rethinking the whole revolution thing.
This is the country’s first gut-check moment.
General Washington, realizing the need for a win, plans a literal war on Christmas. The night of the 25th, 2,400 troops begin crossing the Delaware River north of Trenton (what would become New Jersey’s state capital). On the morning of December 26, the Continental Army attacks the Hessian encampment in Trenton and cuts off their retreat, capturing or killing 1,000 of them and earning the Americans their first real victory. Because of weather-related, logistical issues, they can’t press the attack on the nearby British forces, but the momentum starts to shift in the war.
The lesson: sometimes a layup can get you out of a shooting slump.
February 2017.
The Democrats are having a gut-check moment.
The ragtag coalition of centrists, liberals, and leftists comprising the Democratic voting bloc are reeling. They were whipped in recent elections and the Trump regime has delivered on its promises to launch an assault on civil rights, human rights, separation of powers, and political norms, despite the prayers or naive assumptions it wouldn’t actually do so. With the revelations that the Trump campaign was in talks and possibly coordinating treason with the Putin regime, it’s been more of a dystopian tragedy and tar-black farce than anyone expected — and people’s expectations were a Willis Tower-high bar to get over.
Protesters have taken to the streets in cities across the country. Callers have jammed up congressional voicemails. Consumers have boycotted companies that play along with Trump. And it’s had a mitigating effect on the new regime. Executive incompetence thus far hasn’t hurt, either.
Yet ultimately, these are stop-gap measures; victory will necessarily need to come at the ballotbox. Naturally, Dems (loosely defined) are looking to the 2018 elections, both in terms of winning and determining what kind of party they want to be. They can take back the Senate and regain some ground in Congress, as well as try to make inroads in governorships and statehouses, where they’ve been getting crushed for decades in spite of neoliberal triangulation aimed at winning conservative votes. They need a new strategy and they need to figure it out soon.
But there are two important elections coming up even sooner than that. Election-year outliers New Jersey and Virginia have gubernatorial elections in 2017 — and New Jersey is an opportunity to win back a governor’s seat currently creaking under the weight of Trump’s once and maybe future pageboy Chris Christie. (Though Trump may be too toxic even for Governor Egg at this point.) Putting a Democrat in Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion in Princeton, would be a symbolic, morale-boosting victory.
As 25 states with GOP monopolies on governors and state legislatures move to railroad retrograde policy (e.g. right-to-work laws, felony upgrades for protestors) and the government is engaging in its ethnoreligious assault on immigrants and Muslims, the broader left and, by association, the Democrats are already pits deep against the current in river rapids of orange shit.
In the war for the soul of the country, Trenton is the first electoral battle.
Why New Jersey matters in 2017
New Jersey could become just the sixth state in the US to have a Democratic trifecta, i.e. control of the governorship, state senate, and state assembly.
New Jersey has joint control of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that runs, among other things, the airports, seaports, bridges, and tunnels around New York City — this includes the Port Authority Police Department, which New York and New Jersey Democrats are trying to prevent from being used by the federal government to enforce the immigration ban.
From an economic perspective, New Jersey carries outsized weight — with the eighth-highest state GDP despite being fourth-smallest in size. It still has a decently strong union presence despite Chris Christie’s efforts (6th in the nation by number of workers represented and 5th in terms of membership), as well as a diversified economy resting on robust telco, pharma, and finance sectors in addition to the more traditionally industrial food processing and manufacturing jobs.
In short, New Jersey is an economic powerhouse that proves you can be pro-labor and still have a strong, wealth-producing business sector.
That said, under Christie’s watch, post-financial crisis recovery in New Jersey has lagged behind the nation, with unemployment slightly above the national average and a continued spate of credit downgrades setting a state record. This despite a Christie-led GOP strategy of massive spending cuts and corporate tax breaks, which history shows time and again simply don’t work to improve a stalled economy.
As much as Christie is a fiscal ideologue, he won two elections through aggressive self-branding as a straight-shooter who does what it takes to find common sense, bipartisan solutions. Which goes to show: New Jersey voters are not above voting red, evidenced by the state’s being seduced into supporting austerity and anti-labor rhetoric.
Nearly 60 percent of state voters chose Obama over Romney, and then a year later, Christie crushed Democrat Barbara Buono with 60 percent of the vote — though turnout was historically low and may have contributed heavily to that dynamic. (As 2016 showed, Dems find a way to run terminally uninspiring candidates against beatable Republicans.) While urban areas stayed reliably blue, the swing voters in the state are the kind of people who put Trump in office — white people. And in New Jersey, according to pre-election polls in 2016, more white people may have voted Trump than Clinton.
So this is a place where the Dems can fix what clearly wasn’t working in 2016 and find a way to resolve their Clintonian corporatism with the growing call for a more egalitarian populism — and speak to people who are legitimately concerned about the state of New Jersey’s economy and fiscal malfeasance at the hands of a conservative ideologue. If they can find a way to reach New Jersey’s wealth-disparate voters, maybe there’s a lesson there to carry forward.
And that’s the symbolic value of New Jersey going blue again in Drumthwacket. A Democratic victory would mark a repudiation of Christie, who won on the appeal of his brash personality and his bullying disguised as a supposed ability to “tell it like it is.” (Sound like anyone else?)
He’s now lost all of his political capital. His ass-polishing of Donald Trump hasn’t endeared him to the electorate. Nor has his absenteeism during and after his laughably woeful presidential run and subsequent lapdogging for a Cabinet position.
Nor did the $25 million tax break he gave Trump’s casino while continuing to preach fiscal accountability and railing against teachers’ unions for their greed, nor has his suspected misappropriation of pension funds and his illegal vendettas against politicians and municipal governments that don’t support his agenda.
Nor has the lagging New Jersey economy he claims to have saved from ruin (what?), nor has his pilfering of state pension funds to cover revenue losses from his tax cuts, nor has his unwillingness to fund critical infrastructure projects.
As a result, his approval rating is on the bottom shelf of the cheese cellar, somewhere around 20 percent.
Lucky for Christie, he can’t run again. But a strong victory for the Dems after getting less than 40% of the vote in 2013 would send a message, as would getting voters to turn up to support an inspiring candidate who speaks to people’s concerns. The most recent Democratic governor and first Christie electoral victim, former Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine, surprisingly didn’t inspire fervor, leaving a vacuum for viral videos of Christie berating teachers to control the narrative for nearly two terms before people finally soured on him. That was as much the Dems’ fault as anyone else.
So who’s running in the primaries?
It’s early days yet. While some luminaries like former SNL comedian Joe Piscopo are considering a run at the Republican ticket, the frontrunner is current (and first-ever) Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno, while the main challenger is Assemblyman and frequent Christie critic Jack Ciattarelli. Neither is expected to win the general election, as it’s the Democrats’ to lose in the wake of Christie’s unpopularity, but the primary winner could signal a NJ GOP that’s perhaps had enough of Trump or really anyone who has the transitive stink of Trump Success Eau de Cologne (a real thing) — i.e. Guadagno. Ciattarelli has been banking his success on it, openly firing off on the waste disposal fire that is Christie’s second term.
But as the Democrats have proven, they can always find ways to lose, so what happens in the primary could be telling.
The popularity of current frontrunner Phil Murphy, former ambassador to Germany and former Goldman Sachs executive, suggests they’ve learned nothing from 2016 in pushing another centrist candidate with strong banking ties a la Jon Corzine. On the other hand, mainstream Democrats seem open to a more progressive platform — an encouraging sign for leftists, given it’s unlikely they’ll be able to get the groundswell to start primarying everyone who doesn’t pass litmus tests. Whether or not the progressivism-light is all just rhetoric is another thing entirely though. But voters seem more attuned to what goes on in the legislative bodies lately. (Just ask former golden child Cory Booker about the recent pharma bill.) Unsurprisingly, Murphy already has the upper hand on funding and endorsements.
The leftist challenger to Murphy is Assemblyman — and New Jersey campaign chairman for Bernie Sanders — John Wisniewski. Though some have called his support of Sanders more driven by opportunism than progressivism, he’s become the de facto resistance to what many see in Murphy as yet another neoliberal Democrat anointed by the party without thinking about the voters.
As this is New Jersey, both Murphy and Wisniewski are accusing each other of fiscal shadiness.
All of which is to say, if you’re a part of that aforementioned coalition of potential Democratic voters and you’re worried about empowering government officials to resist the Trump regime and its enablers, it’s time to start getting concerned about the future of the Democratic party.
And it starts right now with the Battle of Trenton.
Dane A. Wisher is based in Brooklyn.
