The 36th Legislative District SHOULD be competitive, but a major GOP recruitment f-up has more than likely doomed Republican chances of a major upset in 2023…
LD36
Biden +14
Murphy +6
Senate: Likely DEM > No Change
Assembly: Likely DEM > Safe DEM
A series of scandalous revelations about GOP Assembly candidate Joe Viso’s arrests for drugs, guns and – most disturbingly – wiping fecal matter on a children’s daycare have all but certainly scuttled the GOP’s chances of Assembly pick-ups here, forcing us to make this one of only two districts shifted “leftward” in our mid-October ratings update.
Likely gubernatorial candidate Bill Spadea is blaming NJGOP Chairman Bob Hugin. While people on the inside who are intimately involved in the process point out (correctly, I might add) that candidate recruitment largely falls on the County GOP Chairs, we’re not taking sides or assigning blame. One thing should be inarguable: the GOP must work together at all levels of its organization to address its self-defeating recruitment and vetting blindspots in order to ensure this never, ever happens again.
But is all hope truly lost?
“Safe,” in my mind, means we can’t see a reasonable prospect of a path forward.
Safe does NOT mean “impossible.”
Balloting starts with the top of the ticket and, in 2023, the State Senate contest is the marquee matchup. If we DO see some sort of massive “red wave” scenario unfold on November 7th? Perhaps the Senate seat shouldn’t be written off. Very, very unlikely, but not an impossibility.
Unfortunately for LD36 Republicans, while major waves do produce surprises, most upsets are born of hard work and enough money (what “enough” means depends upon the race in question). The Viso scandal arose at a particularly bad time for LD36 since both inside and outside groups were determining their respective spending priorities for the home stretch, a point likely not lost on whomever leaked the details of his past indiscretions…
