Free Republic

President Trump has an approval rating of 38 percent. That’s not good. And when a president’s polls are not good, members of his party tend to suffer when elections roll around. That is what happened Tuesday night in Virginia, New Jersey and in the suburbs of New York City. Do not fall for efforts made by people on all sides obsessed with slicing and dicing raw voting data to complicate this whole 2017 elections business. You’ll be reading about how maybe it wasn’t all so bad or maybe it was far worse than it looks. Mostly, it’s exactly how it...

Republican leaders seeking to overhaul the federal tax code faced new challenges Wednesday, including a new $74 billion hole in the House’s plan and a drubbing in Tuesday’s state and local elections that will be on members’ minds as they prepare for difficult tax votes. Democrats won gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia on Tuesday and also stood on the cusp of winning control of the Virginia House of Delegates — a setback that many are calling a wake-up call to the GOP. But top Republican tax writers split Wednesday over whether that would make it harder for them...

Backed by a coalition of gun control groups, Phil Murphy won his race in New Jersey while Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam came out ahead in Virginia’s gubernatorial race. Murphy, who will replace Republican Gov. Chris Christie in the Garden State and has pledged to get “tough on gun violence,” beat out his Republican rival, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno. In Virginia, Northam, who had President Obama talk gun politics on his behalf, bested Republican Ed Gillespie in a narrow finish. “Make no mistake: Gun violence prevention was on the ballot today and, despite the NRA spending millions, voters in Virginia and...

ABERDEEN -- Shortly before 9:40 p.m., Republican Kim Guadagno appeared on stage to concede the New Jersey governor's race to Democrat Phil Murphy, saying she made "the best possible case" to voters in her efforts to succeed Gov. Chris Christie. "We left no stone unturned," Guadagno, Christie's lieutenant governor, said, quickly arresting the lusty boos that sprang up at the mention of Murphy's name.

Essex County Clerk Chris Durkin looked across the city of Newark on election Day and told InsiderNJ that he sees “brisk turnout” in the county with the largest raw rolls of Democratic voters among all counties. Durkin said he believes this gubernatorial election will likely reflect the largest numbers in recent gubernatorial election history. Reports out of Maplewood and Montclair reflect solid numbers. ” I see it bigger than all those elections,” Durkin said. “I think we could see the highest turnout for governor in the last 40 years in Essex, but it won’t show by percentage.” That’s because in...

The beauty of Election Day is that no one has any idea what’s happening, Sure, people are voting, but for whom? As much as political pros analyze the electorate, they are basically clueless until voting stops at 8 p.m. So, small signs are important, or at least they seem to be. One such sign is turnout. And as voting began in Morris County this morning, turnout was surprisingly strong. “It almost seems like a presidential election,” is how one worker described the scene at a polling place in the Roxbury Township Library. Across town, a poll worker said the morning...

TRENTON -- On the eve of the election that will determine who will replace him, Republican Gov. Chris Christie wasn't lobbing any political bombs at the Democratic candidate. Instead, he took aim at his own mentor. Christie accused former Gov. Tom Kean of revisionist history when talking about his own state budget while defending Republican candidate for governor Kim Guadagno at a campaign event on Saturday. He suggested that Kean's state budgets weren't as frugal as the former governor let on.

As the state staggers toward Election Day on Tuesday, Assemblyman Michael Patrick Carroll (R-25) opined on the state’s broken condition, the prospects of the next chief executive, and what he insists is the jarring disconnect of a liberal message in New Jersey contributing to a suburban chilling effect. The veteran movement conservative lawmaker acknowledged that he thinks the race between Democrat Phil Murphy and Republican Kim Guadagno is tightening, and as Democrats brace for what one source said will undoubtedly be a late Republican Governors Association (RGA) Willie Horton Hail Mary on sanctuary cities, Carroll said the cycle’s enduring issue...

In an otherwise predictable New Jersey election season, the state’s largest public sector union has come out behind a Trump-supporting Republican facing an incumbent Democrat. The New Jersey Education Association, which is New Jersey’s top political spender, is backing Republican Fran Grenier against Steve Sweeney, the Democratic state Senate president and New Jersey’s second most-powerful elected official. The controversial endorsement has angered liberal allies, but the union remains unapologetic in its message: Democrats cannot take teachers for granted. It’s a contentious move, but one that is unlikely to change the ultimate outcome of the election. Democrats are expected to control...

With the Rev. Al Sharpton at his side, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Phil Murphy made a campaign stop today at a hi-tech education center in Newark's South Ward, saying the state needed to support urban youth to succeed in a globalized and digitized economy. "We've got to be here, backing up these kids, to make sure that they can achieve all that they can achieve," said Murphy, flanked by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Newark native Sheila Oliver, the Democratic lieutenant gubernatorial candidate. "Centers like this are at the very center of our economy. This is the future of our economy."

TRENTON -- Phil Murphy, the Democratic nominee for New Jersey governor, will announce he has chosen former state Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver to join his ticket as candidate for lieutenant governor, a source with knowledge of the selection process told NJ Advance Media. Murphy, a retired Wall Street executive and former U.S. ambassador to Germany under President Barack Obama, is expected to formally announce the pick as early as Wednesday, according to the source, who is not authorized to publicly discuss the choice and requested anonymity.

TRENTON -- Transgender students at New Jersey's public schools were given new layers of protection under a bill that Gov. Chris Christie signed into law Friday. The legislation (S3067/A4652) -- which takes effect immediately -- requires the state education commissioner to draft specific guidelines to help schools address "the needs" of transgender students and establish policies that "ensure a supportive and nondiscriminatory environment" for those students. Schools will be expressly told that they cannot force transgender students to use bathrooms or locker rooms that conflict with their gender identity. Instead, schools would be be mandated to provide "reasonable alternative arrangements...

TRENTON -- Already trailing badly in the polls, Republican New Jersey governor candidate Kim Guadagno has been hit with another devastating 1-2 punch: She's lost the confidence of a pair of deep-pocketed GOP groups that spend big on governor's races, NJ Advance Media has learned. The Republican National Committee, which is controlled by President Donald Trump, views the lieutenant governor as someone who hasn't been loyal to the president and officials there see her race as a losing cause, according to two sources familiar with the RNC's plans. The sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly....

HACKETTSTOWN, N.J. — The Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey sat on a plush beige couch in the Republican mayor’s condo, surrounded by Republican county officials and politicians, and offered up her plan to stem what is perhaps the state’s most daunting challenge — its deepening property tax crisis. She adopted it, she said, from an unexpected source. “This is a page out of the Democratic playbook, it really is,” Kim Guadagno, the lieutenant governor said, noting that the plan came from a proposal in deep-blue Illinois. With Republicans controlling the White House, both chambers of Congress and having...

NEWARK -- Phil Murphy, a former banking executive and U.S. ambassador to Germany who has poured millions from his own fortune into the race for New Jersey governor and vows to reinvigorate the state's economy, fought off five rivals Tuesday night to win the Democratic nomination in the battle to succeed Chris Christie. The Associated Press called the race for Murphy about an hour after the polls closed.

WEST LONG BRANCH -- Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, who has spent the last eight years as Gov. Chris Christie's second-in-command and now vows to slash the state's notoriously high property taxes, defeated four opponents Tuesday to secure the Republican nomination to succeed Christie as New Jersey's governor. The Associated Press called it for Guadagno about an hour and 20 minutes after the polls closed. Now, Guadagno, a 58-year-old Monmouth Beach resident, will battle former U.S. ambassador to Germany Phil Murphy in the Nov. 7 general election. Murphy bested five rivals to emerge the winner of Tuesday's Democratic primary.

What happens if a state with a population roughly equal to that of Kentucky and Louisiana combined held a major election and no one noticed? That seems to be occurring in New Jersey, which is electing a new governor this year. It may be the Democrats’ biggest gubernatorial win in the state in over 40 years. A Democratic romp in a state Hillary Clinton won easily might not seem like a surprising result. But New Jersey usually features competitive governor’s races. Over the past 40 years, Democrats have won the governor’s mansion four times to Republicans’ six. New Jersey’s current...

MONMOUTH BEACH -- Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno on Tuesday sought to reassure voters who woke up to headlines that Russia executed a cyber attack on a U.S. voting software company days before the presidential election. Guadagno, the Republican front-runner to replace the term-limited Gov. Chris Christie. voted for herself in the GOP and insisted that because New Jersey's voting machines are deliberately stand-alone and not internet enabled, "the only way you could hack the actual vote in New Jersey is if you went to all 11,000 voting machines and pulled out the cartridge in the back and then tinkered with...

TRENTON -- Gov. Chris Christie is term-limited from running again, so it's now time for New Jersey Republicans to pick a new standard bearer for their party. But even with this year's GOP primary just around the corner -- it's on Tuesday, June 6, to be exact -- most Garden State voters (57 percent) say they don't know enough about any of the candidates to have an opinion about them, according to the most recent Quinnipiac University poll.

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has about eight months left in office but the Republicans running to succeed him in the primary all but bid him farewell in Thursday's second and final debate. Asked why she doesn't mention the twice-elected, term-limited Christie on her campaign website or at events, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno answered bluntly. "I'm running for governor, the governor's not."