With Christie and the presidential candidates taking up bandwidth, down ticket races are getting short shrift. In New Jersey, one of the hottest races is in Atlantic County, where four people are fighting over two legislative seats. Chief Political Correspondent Michael Aron has a taste of the campaign to come.
Aron sat down with the four candidates today for district two in Atlantic County. “There are two incumbents in a split district,” he said. “Democrat Vince Mazzeo and Republican Chris Brown. The top issue is trying to prevent north Jersey from getting a casino and who is most vociferously against this. Here they are talking about Chris Brown trying to get a resolution passed that would stop a casino referendum from getting on the ballot.”
“He’s out campaigning so that would have stopped north Jersey casinos. A non-binding resolution would never would have stopped north Jersey casinos, and by the way, the referendum question isn’t on the ballot in 2015 and I talked to leadership that it’s a bad idea,” Mazzeo said.
“We all know that there are 80 members in the Assembly and if you have 41 votes you have enough votes to get something done or to stop something,” Brown said. “And so going through the Republican Caucus we got 24 signatures, and you know the math, you need 17 more. 17 out of 48 and 12 of them come from south Jersey. Assembly Mazzeo did absolutely nothing to get them, and in fact, his name was written on the resolution, he whited it out.”
Each incumbent is running with an Atlantic County Freeholder. Aron said, “The Democrat is Colin Bell, the Republican is Will Falls. He responds to a Republican talking point that says that Mazzeo and Bell have taken campaign contributions from Senate President Steve Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto, who support one or two north Jersey casinos.”
“We get contributions and support from the leadership of our party just like our opponents do. But if we’re talking about who’s yelling the loudest about opposing north Jersey casinos, I think Freeholder Falls is the only person in this race who has publicly said he was in favor of having the casino referendum this year. And that’s reported statewide in the media and it sends mixed messages,” Bell said.
“That’s taking out of quote. I was talking on a show. We were talking about when the Farleigh Dickinson report came out and the report said over 50 something percent of New Jerseyans were against casino gambling outside of Atlantic City. So what I was stating on the referendum was that this year, going by 56 percent of the polling, you know it wouldn’t pass,” Falls said.
“It’s going to be close,” Aron said. “The district is always close. It’s a swing district. Vince Mazzeo won by 51 votes last time. The Democrats seem to have twice or three times the amount of money of Republicans. That’s fairly common there. But it could also end up the two incumbents being reelected there because they’re so well known. Mazzeo the Democrat and Brown the Republican.”
Another race to keep an eye on is in district one, just south of district two, in Cape May and Atlantic County. “The incumbents there are also a Democrat and a Republican,” Aron said. “Bob Andrezejczak is the Democrat, Sam Fiocchi is the Republican, they also have running mates. It’s even nastier than this one. This was was pretty tame on television this weekend but I can’t even get the others to come into the studio.”