Peter Woolley is a professor of Comparative Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and Executive Director of PublicMind, the University’s independent polling and research center. Here, he shares his insight into the 2011 election and the key issues driving votes this year.
Q: What kind of voter turnout are you expecting this year? (A Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that 44 percent of the 800 registered voters expressed a strong interest).
A: A majority of voters don’t have any strong interest in these legislative elections. Even many who do have some interest find it difficult to express their political views by voting for or against their incumbents. So I expect turnout to be low.
Most of the districts are not competitive. In most of the districts, the candidates and the races, in their entirety, are below the radar of most systems. So I think the turnout will likely be abysmal. I think you’ll have pockets of strong turnout where people are churned up. For example, members of public employee unions, who might make an effort to organize a showing. You may also have pockets of strong turnout where there are strong partisans, where they are in heavily Republican or heavily Democratic areas, and you can have a surge in turnout in races that are contested. For example, in Bergen County and Atlantic County, both of their party organizations have been doing their best to stir interest in those races, so I imagine that turnout in those places will be significantly higher than in many other places. Maybe in the 27th, where Dick Cody is running, because he is making an effort to run, where he’s traditionally been in a district where it was quite competitive between Republicans and Democrats. And his friends in the Democratic legislature pushed him a little west into the Republican confines of Morris County. So he’s actually been campaigning pretty hard out there.
Q: What are the issues that many of the races will turn on? Will the vote on pension reform earlier this year affect any of the races?
A: I think in all the tight races, the challengers tend to want to focus on statewide issues, whether it’s for or against pension and benefit reform. But, a lot of these issues tend to turn on much more mundane things. You wish that people would be going to the polls in a referendum on Chris Christie’s reforms, one way or the other. But, in fact, a lot of people view their local legislature as a personality. Many of these people have built a personal constituency, so the campaign doesn’t tend to be strictly about statewide policy, but about how people conduct themselves personally, how many salaries they are drawing, and not entirely statewide policy. Certainly there might be an exception to that in Bergen County, where part of the campaign debate is over the future of Xanadu and whether or not the County of Bergen should be spending money or bonding money on behalf of the developers of Xanadu to push that project along. So, there is certainly interest to want that to happen, arguing that it’s going to bring jobs and prosperity to the county, and many others who say they shouldn’t be bonding $400 million in order to help private developers.
Q: Everyone is focused on the 2nd and 38th districts; which one has more lasting implications for the state?
A: It’s hard to choose between those. I would say the 2nd is very interesting because you have a reasonably popular incumbent Democrat who in some ways is the poster boy for Chris Christie’s reform, in the sense that he draws several state salaries. That’s something that of course has been criticized pretty widely by the public. The Republicans managed to get themselves a well-financed challenger in any case, although I’m not sure he’s the ideal candidate to go against Whelan because he derives some significant portion of his income directly or indirectly from state contracts. I think if the Republicans win that one, they’re really going to claim the right to a victory lap.
Q: Are the results going to tell us anything about how New Jerseyans will vote next year as it relates to the presidential election and key races in the state?
A: No, I don’t think you can draw any straight line or dotted line, or even a crooked line from these elections to next year. It will be an entirely different ball game in 2012. It will depend on how people think the economy is faring in 2012 and it will depend, in part, on who the Republicans manage to nominate and whether people perceive that person as credible or not.
Q: Can you explain the role of the PublicMind poll at Farleigh Dickinson University?
A: We’re primarily a group of political scientists whose role is to research public opinion on a large range of issues, but including campaigns and elections. We certainly spend a lot of time with campaigns and elections, but we very much like to go beyond those things to check on the public voice between elections on important issues. One of those recently is Xanadu and what the state’s policy should be towards that. We’ve done other policy checks too, as in the case of the Rival Casino Corporation, which in 2010 was similarly seeking tax breaks from the Economic Development Authority. We also look into such things as the effect the TV show Jersey Shore has on the image of New Jersey. People widely agree that somehow the show hurts the image of New Jersey, but that makes a good test case for us – we did two national studies and from our research design and our results, concluded the opposite. Not only did it not hurt New Jersey, the TV show actually helps New Jersey’s image.
Q: Between Hurricane Irene and last week’s snowstorm, New Jersey residents have been hit with a lot of damage and inconveniences in recent months. Do you think these events, and the way that they were handled, will play any role in votes this year?
A: I don’t think it will have an effect on this election. There are unhappy people who will blame their discomfort on one or another of the power companies, and I think there are a lot of local municipalities that are in a financial jam, needing to clean up this mess. That will be a problem in the coming months, but it’s certainly not going to have any effect on this election on Tuesday.
Q: What else should we watch for on Tuesday?
A: What I’m watching is something around the election and not the election itself. And that is the question of whether or not Sheila Oliver will remain speaker, or whether there is going to be a shakeup in the rest of the leadership. So, for a lot of legislators, this election is irrelevant, because they’re in uncompetitive districts and they know they’re a shoo-in. So they’ve already begun this debate and the horse trading about who’s going to have a key post in the Assembly.