Photo Credit: Mel Evans/APBy Jennifer De Pinto, Sarah Dutton and Rebecca Kaplan.
To call it a “race” is almost unfair.
Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J., was re-elected as New Jersey governor in a landslide – 60-39 percent over his Democratic challenger, state Sen. Barbara Buono – and virtually no one ever thought the outcome might be different. For months, Christie held a commanding lead in the polls as Buono failed to get her campaign off the ground.
Christie was re-elected with widespread support from men, women, independents, members of his own party, and even three in 10 Democrats, according to CBS News exit polls.
“I’m the luckiest guy in the world,” Christie said, flanked by his family, during his acceptance speech in Asbury Park, N.J.
Christie’s Democratic challenger, state Sen. Barbara Buono, won the votes of liberals, African-Americans, and young voters, but that was not nearly enough to stop Christie’s pursuit of a second term.
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Why National Democrats Rolled Over for Chris Christie
By Patricia Murphy.
If Gov. Chris Christie wins reelection Tuesday by even a fraction of the margin predicted by New Jersey pollsters, he’ll owe his easy victory to one group in particular—national Democrats, who all but ignored his race against Democratic state Sen. Barbara Buono.
From President Obama, who twice toured New Jersey with Christie after Hurricane Sandy and then failed to endorse Christie’s challenger, to the Democratic National Committee, which sent just one staffer to the state to fortify local efforts, to major donors and high-profile party leaders such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, powerful Democrats have stayed on the sidelines in the blue state contest that top brass deemed a loser from the start.
The result is a Republican governor cruising to double-digit reelection in a state where Democrats have a 700,000-voter advantage but are losing or breaking even with Christie among independents, women, Hispanics, and young voters, all groups Democrats typically dominate and which Republicans will need to win over nationally to win the White House. The script for Chris Christie 2016 writes itself, and Democrats will have helped pen the first draft.
“When we started looking at his reelect numbers, he was just above 50 percent. That meant he was formidable but movable,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “Early on, Barbara Buono could have appealed to the national electorate by saying, ‘Look, we need to bloody this guy up before 2016 because he’s the biggest challenge going into that race.’ But she never was able to articulate that…so Democrats stayed out of that race and Chris Christie basically got a free pass.”
National Democrats stand by the decision not to play seriously in New Jersey, according to several who spoke with The Daily Beast. The calculation was two-fold, they said. First, the money required just to land a punch on Christie in the pricey New York and Philadelphia media markets could fund an entire campaign somewhere or sometime else when a Democrat had a chance of winning.
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