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The New Jersey results
Tweet Share on Facebook November 9, 2005 CommentFirst, a complaint about the way New Jersey officials post election results on the Web—and a caveat about what follows. New Jersey didn't start posting election results on the Web until after I went to bed last night, and its current postings are more incomplete than the returns reported by the Associated Press. Also, New Jersey, for no good reason, posts the returns for each candidate on separate pages, which makes calculations of percentages tedious (thank goodness there are only 21 counties!), and each candidate in this case includes not only Democrat Jon Corzine and Republican Doug Forrester but all eight nuisance party candidates, who among them received about 3.5 percent of the vote. I say about because these returns are incomplete. I find that turnout in Hudson County was down 38 percent from 2001—highly unlikely—and that turnout in Atlantic and Cape May counties was down 10 percent. That probably means that most of the precincts left to report are in those counties. Since Hudson County is heavily Democratic and Atlantic County leans that way, while Cape May County is usually Republican, that means that Corzine's final percentage will probably be a little higher and Forrester's a little lower than the numbers I've used here. Also, I've calculated these percentages in tenths but report them rounded off as whole percentages. Given the fact that at least some of them will be different when the final results are in, I think that reporting percentages in tenths is an exercise in spurious precision.
With that in mind, let's go.
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The election results
Tweet Share on Facebook November 9, 2005 CommentThere's a ritual, a kind of kabuki dance, to interpreting the results of the two gubernatorial elections, in Virginia and New Jersey, that are held the year after the presidential election. If one party wins both elections, its spin doctors claim that they are a verdict on the national administration—up if the national party's candidates win, down if (as in such elections going back now to 1989) the national party's candidates lose. The spin doctors of the other party quote Tip O'Neill's adage that "all politics is local" and say that the results were due to state and local issues and have no relevance to national politics.
There's some truth on both sides. State elections are, after all, about state issues—why else would we have, as we do now, Republican governors in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont (John Kerry's three best states) and a Democratic governor in Wyoming (George W. Bush's No. 1 state in 2000 and No. 2 in 2004)? And yet the trends in national politics are sometimes echoed in the results in elections for governor. Issues that work for one party in state elections sometimes work for them in federal elections as well. I don't hold with the traditional view that governors have great power to deliver votes for their party's nominees in presidential elections. But state elections do have some implications for national politics.
