When New Jersey Republicans go to the polls for Tuesday’s primary election, they won’t just choose their candidate for the U.S. Senate — they’ll test whether Donald Trump has more power than the traditional control of the state party establishment.
The GOP’s leading contenders are Curtis Bashaw, a Cape May County hotelier and developer who has the backing of most of his party’s establishment, and Christine Serrano Glassner, a mayor in the state’s far northeast who has the backing of the former president, as well as a personal connection to him and is competing for his MAGA base.
The winner faces a Democratic candidate in the general election who, absent a head-to-head challenge from incumbent Sen. Bob Menendez amid his ongoing corruption trial, will almost certainly be Andy Kim, the congressman from New Jersey’s 3rd district that wields the advantage of the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate.
The primaries come at a time of change for the state’s political establishment. This year, Kim and state Democrats eschewed New Jersey’s traditional “county line,” a system that allows counties to place party-endorsed candidates prominently on primary voters’ ballots, which in In some cases it increases the probability of success of an endorsed candidate by up to 40%.
But a state judge ruled in March that, at least for this primary, New Jersey Republicans must maintain the county boundary system, and Bashaw (who is backed by 13 of the state’s 21 Republican county committees) should be prepared to take advantage of the advantages of primary school. real estate ballot.
That is, unless Trump’s endorsement of Serrano Glassner can replace the county line lead that has long held.
“It’s unusual for a candidate endorsed by one line to lose,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute of Politics in New Jersey. “(Bashaw) got the organizational support… but she has this lightning in a bottle with Trump’s backing. That’s the real wild card.”
Mendham Borough Mayor Serrano Glassner has covered her campaign website with the former president’s seal of approval, including a video of the moment Trump called Serrano Glassner a “fantastic woman” during his Wildwood Beach rally in May.
Trump goes on to mention a personal connection with Serrano Glassner (her husband Michael Glassner is one of the former president’s longtime advisers) before claiming that he decided to endorse him after learning that Bashaw was a “(Chris) Christie guy,” referring to to former president New York. Governor of Jersey and former Trump ally who turned against the former president in the last primary.
Bashaw donated $3,300 to Christie’s presidential campaign last year, according to campaign finance records.
In response to Trump’s comment, a campaign spokesperson said the candidate is “a Curtis Bashaw Republican supported by thousands of Republicans across New Jersey.”
Bashaw did not mention Trump in the early months of his campaign. Then, in March, Bashaw said publicly for the first time that he supported the former president.
“Elections are binary choices and a decision has to be made,” Bashaw told The Inquirer less than a week before the primary, mentioning his disapproval of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign wars and U.S. border security.
“I believe President Trump is the right person to win this election for the country,” Bashaw continued, before adding the caveat that his “mission was different” than Trump’s. “I’m going to work for the people of New Jersey,” he said. “I think it’s time for Republicans to come together; we are not all the same.”
A Democratic stronghold
For all the talk about Trump, political scholars like Rasmussen warned that candidates who support the MAGA movement have rarely done well in New Jersey, and that the brand could do more harm than good for a Republican candidate.
“(Trump) has been exceptionally bad for New Jersey Republicans because he has done poorly in the suburbs; that’s really New Jersey,” Rasmussen said. “Because he has done poorly among more educated voters, he has done poorly in New Jersey. He has never taken off here…he has been a liability to other Republicans.”
The problem, Rasmussen said, is that MAGA-supporting Republicans tend to do well in primaries against more moderate Republican contenders, garnering enormous support from highly engaged voters within the base.
Whichever Republican wins the nomination will face an uphill battle in the Democratic stronghold.
New Jersey has not elected a Republican senator since the early 1970s, giving Garden State Democrats the longest streak of control in the U.S. Senate behind only Hawaii, according to Rasmussen, even as the state has elected three Republican governors during the same period.
As New Jersey voters approach the primary, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 934,000. For a Republican candidate to pull off an upset, Rasmussen said, he would need to perform exceptionally well with the state’s large number of unaffiliated voters.
Both Bashaw and Serrano Glassners’ campaigns focus on inflation and immigration (two of the electorate’s main concerns this cycle), blaming Washington bureaucrats for high prices and calling for stricter border control. southern United States.
Bashaw, who considers himself a political outsider, draws on his business experience as founder of Cape Resorts and his record as a job creator in the South Jersey area.
“Whatever the Biden administration wants to say about macroeconomic indicators, it doesn’t sit on the kitchen tables or in the warehouses of our small businesses,” Bashaw said. “There is a pressure point on inflation that is demoralizing people.”
Meanwhile, Serrano Glassner has taken a stand against the likely Democratic nominee, Kim, as well as “the corrupt Democratic machine that enabled Bob Menendez Gold Bar,” according to materials provided to The Inquirer by his campaign that reference Menendez’s alleged bribery. having accepted from an Egyptian national.
It’s the kind of insults that have become inextricable from Trump’s political playbook, whom Rasmussen, the political expert, said Republican candidates often emulate in primaries before taking “two steps” back to the center once secure the nomination.
“We’ll see how it goes,” Rasmussen said of a possible change in rhetoric after June 4. “New Jersey Republicans aren’t necessarily the biggest MAGA voters.”
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