The midterm elections are just over a year away. To advance the Trump agenda, Republicans must maintain control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Democrats want to turn the midterm elections into a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency. The Republican Party should instead hold an election about the continued need to roll back former President Joe Biden’s disastrous excessive spending, open borders, climate obsession and soft-on-crime policies. It will take two years to drain the swamp; The Republicans need two more to replant the land.
In the race for governor of New Jersey, Republican Jack Ciatarelli is doing just that, closing the gap with Democrat U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill. The “Jersey Guy” could be the template for a Republican Party victory next November.
NJ SHOWDOWN: CIATTARELLI STACKS ON DEM RIVAL AFTER HEATED DEBATE WITH DESTRUCTIVE NEW ADS
Ciatarelli is running on a platform that promises to oppose sanctuary cities, reject cashless bail for violent and repeat offenders, limit property taxes (New Jersey has the highest in the country), create a “Parents Bill of Rights,” ban offshore wind farms on New Jersey’s beautiful coastline and create a state DOGE to reduce excess expenditure.
In other words, Ciatarelli is taking over one of the worst Democratic policies left behind by Biden. His approach is working with voters in New Jersey.
Panicked Democrats are pumping money into the Garden State to defeat Ciatarelli. The race has tightened, with Democratic U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill now holding a 4-point lead, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls. A few months ago, Sherrill was up double digits.
Sherill’s vanishing lead comes despite big-money donors throwing fourteen times as much money at the New Jersey representative as they do at Ciatarelli and despite a super PAC backed by the Democratic Governors Association that is spending $20 million on TV and digital ads. That’s more than all groups spent on incumbent Governor Phil Murphy’s campaign in 2021, according to NBC.
The Democrats are right to be nervous. Trump lost New Jersey last year by just 6 percentage points; in 2020 he lost the state by 16 points. New Jersey’s swing toward the president was the second largest of any state. And when Ciatarelli ran against Governor Phil Murphy in 2021, he lost by just 3 points.
A Rutgers-Eagleton poll last summer found that 85% of New Jerseyans were dissatisfied with the state’s high cost of living, while 80% were angry about taxes.
Who is surprised? New Jersey is the fourth highest taxed state in the US and is also in the top ten most expensive places to live. The Garden State is ranked the 38th state by cost of doing business and second to last in “business friendliness”, beaten only by New York. If businesses can’t thrive, communities can’t either.
A major voter issue looming large in the current race is New Jersey’s electricity costs, which have risen 22% this year; for the US as a whole the increase is only 5%. The average residential electricity rate in New Jersey is 25.31¢/kWh, a shocking 44% above the national average. Companies are not much better off; the average commercial electricity rate in New Jersey is 18.38¢/kWh, 29% higher than the national average.
Ciatarelli blames Democrats, who have controlled the governor’s mansion for the past eight years and the state legislature for more than two decades. He reminds voters that when Phil Murphy became governor, New Jersey was a net energy exporter; Today it’s an import, thanks to the Democrats’ obsession with climate change.
In recent years, New Jersey has shuttered all of its coal-fired power plants and a nuclear power plant, in part to meet the ambitions of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the nation’s first cap-and-trade agreement in the U.S. designed to limit carbon emissions from the energy sector. Ciatarelli calls the RGGI a “carbon tax policy that has cost New Jersey $300 to $500 million a year.” He’s right.
New Jersey was one of the original members of the RGGI, joining in 2005 under a Democratic governor. In 2012, Republican Governor Chris Christie, concerned about rising energy costs, pulled the state out of the agreement, saying the program was ineffective. He noted that New Jersey’s carbon production fell not because of the RGGI, but because the state, like elsewhere in the U.S., had replaced coal-burning plants with natural gas. “RGGI does nothing but tax electricity, tax our citizens, tax our businesses, with no observable or measurable impact on our environment,” Mr. Christie said at the time.
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Murphy, whose campaigns received significant support from environmental groups and who embraced the climate follies of Joe Biden’s White House, rejoined the RGGI only to see electricity costs skyrocket. This was inevitable; the cap-and-trade agreement imposes additional costs on electric utilities, which are then passed on to customers.
Not only has Murphy subjected New Jerseyans to the cap-and-trade burden, he has also prevented natural gas pipelines from carrying abundant and cheap fuel into the state, just as New York has done.
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Ciatarelli is educating voters not only about the costs of the RGGI, but also about the long-term costs of relying on the kind of intermittent and unreliable renewable energy favored by Joe Biden. Electricity prices matter not only because power is an essential product for every household, but because today’s new technologies require enormous amounts of electricity. States that have driven up electricity prices through bad policies will be forced to provide tax incentives and subsidies to attract AI data centers. New Jersey does so, diluting the benefits of such investments and further increasing electricity costs.
The New Jersey match will tell us a lot about what to expect next year. Will voters in the Garden State throw out the politicians who have pushed businesses and citizens to leave the state for greener pastures, or settle for second-hand Joe Biden policies that drive taxes and costs even higher?
