(Via Libertarian Republican, who also has a mug shot) Remember: the Corzine campaign has no idea who this Jason Shih is.  The quote is “…the campaign doesn’t know who he is.”  So he has no connection at all with the campaign, right?

No connection whatsoever.

Shih also reportedly had 10 paychecks from the Middlesex County Democratic Committee in his possession. One paycheck for $1,500 was payable to Shih from the MCDC, according to reports.

“Mr. Shih stated the vehicle he was operating was rented for him by the ‘Corzine for Governor’ camp to distribute tickets and paychecks for the Middlesex County Democratic Committee,” stated Cece.

[snip]

Calls to Corzine’s campaign office and MCDC were not returned as of press time.

No. Really. Do tell.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The Corzine campaign wants it made CLEAR that Jason Shih is in no way, shape, or form involved with the releection campaign; that Mr. Shih is certainly not an assistant campaign director or staffer for the campaign; that they have no idea who Mr. Shih would even be, let alone why he would claim such a status; or why he would claim that the car that he was driving at the time of his drug bust was rented by the campaign, or why there were tickets to an Obama rally and other campaign paraphernalia mixed in with the drug paraphernalia.

Understand?  They want it made CLEAR.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Thursday, New York Times:

The Democratic governor, Jon S. Corzine, says he may revisit his plan to lease the New Jersey Turnpike to raise cash — a proposal that he abandoned last year in the face of intense opposition from lawmakers and voters.

Friday, Philly.com:

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine says he has no plans to increase tolls or lease toll roads.

(The New York Times is sticking with their version.)

Via Jim Geraghty, who also pointed out this report that Christie spent the day hammering this.  Which is smart of Christie: speaking as somebody who grew up in NJ, looking like you want to muck around with the toll roads situation is contraindicated.

Contraindicated.

Moe Lane

PS:  Chris Christie for Governor.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty has a tremendously important story. Jon Corzine is trying to build an absentee ballot slush fund to win a recount in the New Jersey Governor’s race. Basically, the Democratic Party has asked the Secretary of State to send provisional absentee ballots out to people whose signatures on their absentee ballot requests don’t match:

In a development that is depressingly predictable, the New Jersey Democratic party is asking the state to provide provisional ballots for all these voters. Those ballots could, presumably, be used to overcome any narrow lead by Republican Chris Christie over Democrat Jon Corzine on Election Day.

Now, let’s be clear how the absentee process works in New Jersey. Third parties can pick up and return absentee ballots.  A couple of weeks ago, a Democratic operative in Atlantic City plead guilty to a lesser charge of tampering with ballots. One practice mentioned in the indictment was the person picking up ballots from people and throwing them out if they weren’t for his candidate.  Another example was:

They allegedly solicited applications for messenger absentee ballots from individuals not qualified to receive them and had the voters not fill in the name of the messenger, so they could fraudulently designate themselves as the authorized messengers or bearers.

And:

They allegedly obtained messenger ballots from the county clerk and submitted them to the board of elections as vote s on behalf of voters who, in fact, never received or voted the ballots or, in some cases, were given only the security envelope for the ballot and were told to sign it. Those voters were not given the opportunity to vote in most instances.

So when ballots are getting into the hands of people who didn’t even ask for them, you have to wonder what is going on.

And if you thought that yesterday’s semi-cryptic blog post from the former was just some prepare-the-Democrats-for-some-bad-news, and not an attempt to raise Republican hopes… well, you were right.

Chris Christie now leads Jon Corzine 42-38 in the race to be New Jersey’s next Governor, a slight increase from our poll two weeks that showed his advantage at 40-39.

In other words, the partisan Democratic polling firm is reporting that the race has shifted in Christie’s direction by three points, and now has a lead barely out of the MoE. Rasmussen likewise reports that Christie has increased his lead to 46/43, with Daggett at 7%, which is down four from last week.  But here’s what may be the important part of that report:

Christie leads by eight points among those who are certain they will show up and vote. A week ago, he was up by five among that group. Christie’s supporters are also less likely to say they might consider voting for someone else.

A week to go. Word is that Quinnipiac will have out something later this week; in the meantime, expect New Jersey to get inundated with even more campaign advertising and national scrutiny .

Moe Lane

PS: Christie for Governor.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Suffolk University’s Political Research Center released its latest survey in the New Jersey Governor’s race today, showing Governor Jon Corzine holding a commanding 9-point lead over Republican challenger Christopher Christie, 42-33 percent. Independent Chris Daggett received 7 percent in the poll.

The result caused a minor stir on the Internet. A very minor stir, as even a cursory examination of the internals of this poll shows that it is deeply flawed, internally contradictory, and not at all reflective of the state of the race in the Garden State.

All polls produce outliers, and polling outfits occasionally get a bad sample. But a result this bad this late should never have been released, if Suffolk University wanted to maintain any semblance of credibility. The fact that it was released leads one to believe that the purpose of the survey was not to predict the outcome in the governor’s race, but to influence it.

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Republican Christopher Christie has been hammering Governor Jon Corzine on the issue of taxes in the New Jersey governor’s race of late.  But the New York and Philadelphia media which has deigned to cover the race has wanted to talk about mammograms, traffic tickets, and Christie’s weight.  Chritsie has been relentless in driving the message of lower taxes and slashing state spending as medicine to get New Jersey’s worst-in-the-region economy moving again.

There was another recent candidate for governor in the Garden State who rode the message of lower taxes to victory in November:  Jon Corzine.  Back in 2005, Corzine promised property tax relief for New Jersey’s over-burdened citizens.  Things have not exactly worked out according to plan.

With a little help from the Wayback Machine, Jon Corzine’s 2005 tax promises have been recovered.  And his betrayal of New Jersey taxpayers exposed.

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…may make for an interesting headline; but I have a possibly more accurate one.

Supporters face off

An hour before the debate, crowds of Christie and Daggett supporters faced off in front of the studios, yelling taunts from opposite sides of the street and separated by cars.

“Sinking ship! Sinking ship!” chanted the Daggett fans, a reference to Christie’s slippage in the polls.

“We can’t hear you! We can’t hear you!” answered the Christie squad, which outnumbered Daggett’s group about 4-to-1.

It’s “Jon Corzine can’t draw a crowd.”

Moe Lane

PS: Christie for Governor.

PPS: A comment from Democratic Christie supporter Councilwoman Tana Raymond, on Corzine’s ties to convicted Bergen County Democratic chair Joseph Ferriero:

“For years, Jon Corzine facilitated the corrupt leadership of Joseph Ferriero at the Bergen County Democratic Organization with hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial contributions. Even as Corzine preached ethics reform in public, his actions enabled the corrupt status quo and completely contradicted his words. It’s ridiculous for the governor to attempt to play off his financial contributions to Ferriero as something other than what they actually were - Corzine looking the other way in the face of corruption for his own political benefit.”

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

I mean, I know that the Governor’s rich, thanks to Goldman-Sachs - so donating a mere $440,000 or so to former Bergen County chair Joe Ferriero (and yet another convicted Democratic politician) over the years may have been a mere lark. A minor duty. He just did what they told him to. Still, you’d have thought that Corzine might have noticed all the dirty dealing going on. Or cared.

Because the legal system did b0th:

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Jim Geraghty wonders how the state of New Jersey can so consistently produce a rosy assessment of the state’s unemployment situation, only to be forced to correct themselves later:

As noted for much of the year, the Garden State’s economy is in rough, rough shape, with unemployment high and climbing. But the state has found some surprisingly good data on private-sector job creation, and those numbers were the centerpiece of campaign ads by incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine, particularly July’s estimate of 13,000 new private-sector jobs.

And then, a month later, the state said, “Whoops, private-sector employment didn’t increase by 13,000 jobs, it increased by 5,600,” a fairly significant revision. That prompted me to look back to the previous releases, where I found that the intial number was revised downward in June, and May, and April, some months by a few hundred, one month by as much as 4,300…

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Two new polls in the New Jersey governor’s race show Republican challenger Christopher Christie maintaining his lead over incumbent Governor Jon Corzine (D). The Quinnipiac poll shows Christie holding a ten point lead over Corzine, 47-37 percent; while the Fairleigh Dickinson-PublicMind shows a closer race, 47-42 percent in Christie’s favor.

Both margins are essentially unchanged from previous surveys by the respective polls, but there have been minor shifts in the numbers. In the July Quinnipiac poll, Christie garnered 53 percent of respondents, six points better than his showing in today’s poll. Similarly, Corzine found his support shrinking by four points from the last Quinnipiac survey. In the Fairleigh Dickinson poll, both candidates increased their share of respondents over June’s result.

Christie’s negatives have been driven up by Corzine’s slashing attacks against Christie’s ethics and smears of his service as U.S. Attorney for Newark. For most of the past month, Christie has been beset by attacks on everything from phone calls with the White House, to his personal finances, to a four-year old traffic ticket.  But while Corzine’s relentless attacks have raised doubts about Christie, they have not managed to convince many more voters that Corzine deserves a second term.

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RedState colleague Mark Impomeni reports that New Jersey Democrats may be contemplating putting the Torch to Corzine’s campaign:

It could be déjà vu all over again in New Jersey, as rumors percolate that Democrats may force incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine off the November ballot if his poll numbers do not improve quickly. Corzine, a former United States Senator and first-term governor, trails Republican challenger Christopher Christie by nearly double-digits in aggregate polling in the governor’s race and has not enjoyed a lead over Christie in any poll since early January.

The Corzine campaign denies that the governor would consider dropping out, calling talk of a replacement “gossip.”

Why this is not generally considered to be enough to squash that particular rumor is because, of course, New Jersey Democrats did this back when Torricelli was ‘persuaded’ to drop out of the Senate race and replaced in a manner that I would call illegal, but unfortunately the NJ Supreme Court did not. This time around, talk centers around either Rep Pallone or Sen Menendez (although the latter may be reluctant to do so, particularly considering how many of his Bergen County Democratic friends are currently up on corruption charges). The clock’s ticking on this one, as Mark notes: the closer it gets to November, the harder it gets for the Democrats to toss Corzine.

The complicating factor here is that Corzine’s major problem is that he’s loathed by NJ voters for his job performance; unless there’s a convenient revelation of major criminal shenanigans on Corzine’s part, he is going to want to bull his way through and hope that he can narrow the race. And he did win the primary; if NJ Democrats get a name for setting aside the results of their primaries every time the winner ends up polling badly, it becomes a fair question to ask why the party even has them…

Moe Lane

PS: Chris Christie for Governor. Contribute here.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Gov. Jon Corzine’s (D) campaign is launching a new attack on Republican Christopher Christie’s ethics, heralding news that Christie spoke with former White House political strategist Karl Rove about a possible governor’s race while he was the U.S. Attorney for Newark.

Asked about Christie during a July 7 appearance before the committee, Rove said he never spoke with Christie about his investigations or other actions as the state’s top federal prosecutor. They did discuss the possibility Christie might run for governor, Rove testified.

“I talked to him twice in the last couple of years, perhaps one time while I was at the White House and once or twice since I left the White House, but not regarding his duties as U.S. Attorney, but regarding his interest in running for governor, and he asked me questions about who — who were good people that knew about running for Governor that he could talk to,” Rove said in the testimony.

In an act that stinks of political desperation, the Corzine campaign is attempting to use Rove’s testimony as a basis for calling Christie’s entire extremely successful seven-year stint as U.S. Attorney for Newark into question.

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It’s only July, but time is fast running out on Governor Jon Corzine (D) in the New Jersey governor’s race.  Corzine trails Republican Christopher Christie by as much as 15 points in recent polling, and has only polled within ten points of the challenger twice in the last two months.  Even a visit from President Barack Obama has been unable to buoy the Corzine campaign back into making the race competitive.  Corzine needed to do something to change the dynamic of the race, and his best opportunity should have been his selection of a lieutenant governor running mate.

But rather than make a bold choice that would have signaled a new direction for the campaign, Corzine went with the safe choice, selecting veteran State Senator Loretta Weinberg.  Weinberg is qualified, but at 74 years old she hardly brings energy to the ticket.  And her 17 years in elected state government brings “Trenton insider” baggage to the campaign, exactly the image that is dogging Corzine.  The Christie campaign wasted no time in driving home these points, releasing a mock Corzine-Weinberg movie trailer titled, “You can’t change Trenton from the inside.”

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In March, I wrote about the GOP opportunities that follow from the conviction of South Philly machine Democratic State Senator Vincent Fumo. The recent news of Democratic corruption out of New Jersey (mayors, rabbis, and body-parts, oh my!) and the emerging consensus that this fundamentally damages Jon Corzine’s already difficult re-election, when combined with outrage at farcically light sentencing creates real opportunities for Republicans.

Let’s go over the facts and see how much this helps Pennsylvania Republicans in 2010.

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What worse for a struggling incumbent governor than trailing by 15 points in the polls?  Scores of Democratic Party officials - including a member of your administration - arrested and implicated in a widespread official corruption scheme in an investigation begun by your challenger.

A two-year corruption and international money-laundering investigation stretching from the Jersey Shore to Brooklyn to Israel and Switzerland culminated in charges against 44 people on Thursday, including three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis, the authorities said. [...]

Weysan Dun, the special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Newark office…emphasized that the case was motivated by neither religion nor politics — an important point given that the New Jersey governor’s race pits a former United States attorney, Christopher J. Christie, under whom the investigation began, against the Democratic incumbent, Jon S. Corzine, whose administration was not spared in the arrests Thursday.

Agents also raided the home of Joseph V. Doria Jr., commissioner of the state’s Department of Community Affairs and a former mayor of Bayonne.

Corzine called a hasty press conference to denounce the corruption.  “Any corruption is unacceptable — anywhere, anytime, by anybody,” he said.  But if Corzine was hoping to insulate himself from and fallout from the arrests, it may already be too late.

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If he’s seriously considering Randal Pinkett (the guy from Season Four of The Apprentice, apparently) for his running mate, he might as well get a camera crew together and film Who Wants to be a Losing Candidate for Lt. Governor ?  There’s money in Reality TV, as I understand.  I also understand that he kind of needs money right now.

More from Politicker NJ, including this:

So far, there is only one certainty in the race to become Corzine’s running mate: the LG selection process - including an uncomfortable public search for an African American candidate — has become a bit too comical for the comfort of Corzine supporters.  Democrats are giving the impression of desperation; even East Orange Mayor Robert Bowser received a call asking if LG was something he would consider.  He said no.   At this point, new names are being treated with some trepidation.  A trial balloon for former Superior Court Judge Theodore Davis, the state appointed Chief Operating Officer of the City of Camden and a Republican, was viewed as too late to be serious.  Talk of Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Alexander, who ran Obama’s New Jersey campaign in the primary, had a shelf life of just a few minutes.

…and the Daily Record is reporting that insiders aren’t really happy about any of this.  Meanwhile, you can donate to Chris Christie - the guy taking this race seriously - here.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

New Jersey Republican gubernatorial candidate Christopher Christie’s campaign got a shot in the arm today when Quinnipiac released the results of its most recent polling in the governor’s race. Christie has expanded his lead to 12 points over incumbent governor Jon Corzine (D). From the poll:

Republican challenger Christopher Christie is pulling away from Democratic incumbent Gov. Jon Corzine and now holds a 53 - 41 percent lead among likely voters in the New Jersey Governor’s race, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

This compares to a 50 - 40 percent lead for the former federal prosecutor in a June 10 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University.

In a three-way matchup among likely voters, Christie leads Gov. Corzine 47 - 38 percent, with 8 percent for independent candidate Christopher Daggett.

Christie has increased his lead despite a month-long negative ad blitz by Corzine that is seeking to paint Christie as ethically challenged and tied to former president George W. Bush.  The charges are not sticking.  The poll found that only 10% of likely voters say that Corzine’s attacks on Christie’s association with Bush, who appointed him as U.S. Attorney for Newark, are fair.  By contrast, 77% say that Corzine should focus on state issues.

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We both want to link the (for-now) Governor of New Jersey to the President. Admittedly, their reasons are not ours; but that’s why we have elections. And the White House is worried about this one, to the point that they brought in Corzine to discuss it with Rahm Emanuel:

A senior Obama administration official familiar with the meeting said Emanuel did not express concern with the Corzine campaign, but rather wanted to gather intelligence on Corzine’s gameplan as the governor sought advice and help from the Obama political operation. The administration official, who requested anonymity when discussing the private meeting, said the president and national party leadership are well aware Corzine is in a tough fight, but believe he will be able to turn it around - particularly with core Democratic voters - as he begins to campaign heavily this summer.

“We’re invested in this victory and we’re confident of it,” the official said.

Asked about the discussions, Corzine campaign spokesman Sean Darcy said in a statement today: “The Vice President’s two recent visits here mere days ago entirely disproves this gossip item.”

He declined to elaborate.

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Promoted by Erick

Now the primary is over and the votes are in, it’s time we all join together to throw Jon Corzine out of New Jersey for good.

Mayor Steve Lonegan ran a hard fought race, brought in far more votes than the party leadership expected, and garnered support from an electorate that does not traditionally support staunchly conservative candidates. I’ve personally volunteered for Mayor Lonegan in a previous run for office. I know him to be a man of great leadership and for that reason, and so many more, I hope Mayor Lonegan quickly comes to the aide of Christie in his run against Corzine, and I hope those who supported Lonegan’s candidacy will do the same. If we don’t work together in this election, our party will surely fail.

Christie’s for smaller government, fiscal responsibility, high ethical standards, and he’s pro-life. But just as importantly, he’s the candidate who can win the general election in the Garden State. He can restore confidence in a state plagued with political scandal; and with a proven track record over the last eight years as U.S. Attorney, he would restore New Jerseyans’ faith in their statewide leader. But that being said, it will take any candidate awhile to restore what has been lost under the Democrats rule in my beloved home state.

Most importantly, Chris Christie is a born and bred New Jersey Republican, and let me assure you that matters in a state that is frequently the butt of jokes and unfair stereotypes. In a state like New Jersey where people are fiercely proud and loya, and the Republicans are few and far between, it’s wonderful to know a committed leader who is also a New Jersey native. (As if you need reminding, the current governor most definitely is not.)

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