Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

As promised, we continue with our look back at Election Day 2005. Next up, New Jersey!

I still don't get how this race worked out. On the one hand, Doug Forrester, politically, is not much more than a failed Senate candidate with deep pockets. In a race for governor against a sitting U.S. Senator, why would anyone expect him to lose? New Jersey is a fairly closely divided state, given that it has voted Democrat four presidential elections in a row, but this was clearly Jon Corzine's race to lose all along.

And in fact, he almost did: those polls in October were pretty close, and given New Jersey's Bob Torricelli/Jim McGreevey tradition of Democratic corruption, this race could have very easily turned into a referendum on incumbent-party corruption. So did Forrester blow the Republicans' best possible chance at winning the governor's mansion, or did he have no shot all along? I really have no idea.

Oddly enough, I heard tell that the only reason Corzine ran for governor is so he can run for president. Frankly, I suspect that's a bit of only-game-in-town overanalysis of an off-off-year election. But I think Mark Warner could have pulled off the rapid switch from Senate campaign to presidential campaign better than Corzine could now pivot to a presidential run.

First off, abandoning your job in the Senate is a lot easier than abandoning your job as governor. All you really need to do in the Senate is vote, and you usually don't even have to do that. Governors, on the other hand, need not only to make decisions but to be the heavy in state government who can lean on legislators to push things through. Governors can certainly run for president, but for Jon Corzine the burden is tougher: if he runs for president in 2008, he'll have done so as a governor and former senator who hasn't completed a term in anything. Mark Warner in the Senate, on the other hand, could miss a bunch of non-essential votes, leave constituent service up to his staff and more or less be okay. I think Jon Corzine would find a rockier road.

That said, I don't think Corzine necessarily really wants to do it. Chuck Schumer in New York and personal friend Chris Dodd in Connecticut both considered leaving the Senate to run for governor. Maybe it's just the tri-state area (and Frank Murkowski in Alaska, and Dirk Kempthorne in Idaho) but a fair amount of senators seem to be more interested in going back home to be governor. All the appeal of being a powerful statewide elected official, none of the trouble of living in Washington with a bunch of dickheads. I think Corzine, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, is more interested in being an executive.

Fortunately, Corzine has quite the compelling executive decision coming up: his appointment for his successor in the U.S. Senate. Corzine's imminently open Senate seat is up for election in 2006, and presumably whoever he appoints is going to be, at the very least, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for the full term next November. The trick, though, is that the Republicans are running state Sen. Tom Kean, whose dad is a popular ex-governor (and, you'll remember, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission). So no matter who Corzine appoints, that person will have a tough race ahead of them in 2006.

Now, at first I was thrilled to hear rumors that Corzine was leading towards picking Acting Gov. Dick Codey for the Senate seat. It's only fair: Codey took over as governor when Jim McGreevey resigned, and he planned on running for a full term of his own until Corzine came in and said he wasn't leaving. Corzine has murdered primary opponents before by dropping tons of money on them, so there's no reason he couldn't have just outspent Codey into oblivion. Codey wound up taking one for the team and declined to run. So it'd only be fair to think that Corzine would pay him back by appointing him to his old Senate seat.

But then I discovered that national Democrats really want Corzine to pick Codey ahead of several of New Jersey's Democratic congressmen who have been waiting for years. The idea, basically, is that internal Democratic polling shows that Codey's the only candidate who can beat Kean in the general election next November. Fair point, until I realized why: name recognition! Codey's been the governor for over a year now, and Kean is the son of a former governor. The other potential Democrats are all congressmen, representing a small part of the state each. In other words, suggesting that Codey is the only Democrat who can beat Kean is like suggesting that John McCain is the only candidate who can beat Hillary Clinton, and vice-versa. Name recognition is valuable, but not for picking Senate winners a year out.

This doesn't reflect poorly on Codey, of course; I just can't stand inaccurate political statements. Interestingly enough though, there's a rumor that Corzine's actually considering state Sen. Nia Gill, who would be the first female or African-American senator in New Jersey history. Now that would be interesting: I have no idea her ambitions, or even if she'd run for the full term in 2006, but kudos to Corzine for thinking out of the box.