Editorial
By:
With all 120 seats in the New Jersey Legislature at stake in the November election, and an unusually large number of hotly contested primary races coming up in June, it’s no surprise that Assembly and Senate candidates are taking in campaign contributions at a record pace.
According to Election Law Enforcement Commission reports, legislative candidates have already raised $19.6 million for the 2003 election about $3.6 million more than had been raised at this point in 2001. And they have already spent about $9.1 million this year, far surpassing the amount spent last spring.
Normally, a mid-term legislative election in New Jersey is about as exciting as a paint-drying contest. Because New Jersey elects state officeholders in years that aren’t divisible by anything, voter turnout is usually abysmal. There’s no presidential race, no U.S. Senate race, no congressional race, no gubernatorial race. The top of the ticket is the state Senate, which isn’t apt to draw a whole lot of electoral enthusiasm in a state where about 90 percent of survey respondents can’t name their state senator (and even fewer can name one, let alone both, of their representatives in the Assembly).
Still, to the candidates for legislative office and the special-interest groups that pay close attention to what they have done (or promise they will do) in Trenton this is a high-stakes election. With neither party holding control of the Senate (it has been evenly divided the past two years between 20 Democrats and 20 Republicans), every seat counts this year. And in the Assembly, where Democrats hold a slim 42-37 margin, with one seat occupied by an independent, a shift of three seats could swing control to the Republicans not an unlikely outcome midway through the first term of an unpopular Democratic governor.
So the money is flowing but not necessarily where one might expect it to flow. Interestingly, the candidates who have raised the most money so far are, for the most part, veteran lawmakers from safe districts.
Topping the list is Atlantic County Republican Bill Gormley, who won re-election to the Senate in 1991 with 85 percent of the vote and has so far accumulated $605,365 for this year’s "race" (we use the term loosely). Others in the top five are Camden Democrat Wayne Bryant ($348,239), Mercer Democrat Shirley Turner ($341,225) and Middlesex Democrat Bob Smith ($318,206), all of whom won their races two years ago by better than 2-to-1 margins. Among the top five money-raisers, only freshman Sen. Stephen Sweeney, a Gloucester Democrat who unseated longtime Democrat-turned-Republican Ray Zane in a tight race two years ago, represents a district that could truly be called competitive.
Sen. Gormley, who crossed party lines to support then-Gov. Jim Florio’s assault-weapons ban in 1990, only to be targeted by the National Rifle Association and very nearly lose a primary a year later, admits he has amassed bulging campaign war chests ever since in order to discourage any serious challenge in the future. Representing a district that is home to 12 casinos and their 47,000 or so employees can be especially helpful, of course, when it comes to this kind of fund-raising, but we actually find the source of these campaign funds far less troubling than Sen. Gormley’s justification for accumulating it. It isn’t that he needs the money, any more than Sens. Bryant, Turner or Smith need it, to be re-elected; its purpose, quite simply, is to remove even the remotest threat of opposition through intimidation.
We may like to think American politics has come a long way from the days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, when the outcome of elections was ordained by obedient ward heelers and their burly thugs. But for all the reforms we’ve seen enacted to clean up the political process, it turns out very little has really changed. Elections used to be bought in smoke-filled rooms. Now, they’re bought in public.