Menendez Looks to His Base

• By David M. Drucker
• Roll Call Staff
• Oct. 31, 2006, Midnight

EWING TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) dropped by a senior center here on Friday in an attempt to rally his base, as he’ll need a big turnout from liberal-leaning seniors as he attempts to hold off insurgent state Sen. Tom Kean Jr. (R).

It was emblematic of Menendez’s strategy for re-election in the closing days of the campaign. Menendez’s appearance at the senior center followed a rally with students at Rider University earlier in the day. The day before, he appeared with black mayors outside of Newark.

“I’m so proud to have the support of all of these mayors today,” Menendez said on the steps of East Orange City Hall. “Together, on Nov. 7, we’re going to lead the country in a much different direction, and we’re going to move America to much greater heights.”

But while Menendez works the base hard, it is suburban voters who could be the key to the outcome of the election. They tend to vote Democratic in New Jersey — but many are fond of Kean’s father, Tom Kean (R), a popular former governor and chairman of the 9/11 commission.

In a rare departure from his scripted appearances, Menendez chided reporters after the Rider rally for focusing on public opinion polls that have this race in a dead heat. He insisted that his internal campaign tracking has him up 9 points.

But at least a few New Jersey Democrats with their ears to the ground acknowledged that the race is tighter than they’d prefer — and say a Menendez victory depends in large part on a voter turnout machine that they say will be tougher to oil this year, absent the personal largess of Gov. Jon Corzine (D).

“I think that the race is closer than it should be,” state Assembly Majority Leader Bonnie Watson Coleman (D) said in an interview, while appearing with Menendez at the senior center in Ewing Township, near Trenton. “At the end of the day, I believe Bob Menendez wins — I know he’s going to win. But he’s got to work very hard to do that.”

Still Shaking the Cup

With Kean’s significant resource disadvantage wiped out last week courtesy of the National Republican Senatorial Committee decision to allocate an additional $3.5 million to the race, Democrats appear to recognize the final week of the campaign could be tough. On Saturday, the Menendez campaign held a conference call urging large Democratic donors and other supporters to max out to the Democrat’s campaign.

The call’s special guest was actor Alec Baldwin, with Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairman Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and Democratic Sens. Edward Kennedy (Mass.), Ken Salazar (Colo.), Tom Carper (Del.) and Jack Reed (R.I.) joining in.

New Jersey leans Democratic, and if Democrats and like-minded independents turn out in force on Nov. 7 — Garden State voters have a history of breaking late for the Democratic candidate — Kean is in trouble.

But in beginning this race with solid, statewide, favorable name identification, courtesy of his father, Kean the younger could ride the lower and unpredictable turnout that often accompanies midterm elections into one of the most unlikely Senate victories of 2006.

Mercer County Executive Brian Hughes (D), who like Watson Coleman and most Democrats attributed Kean’s position in the race to the goodwill engendered by his father (and little else), said Democratic leaders have been preparing for months to counter the possibility of low turnout in traditional party strongholds. In that vein, Menendez appeared Thursday with black mayors, who promised to turn out voters in their communities.

“We have worked very hard on making sure we have the street operations in place that you’re going to need on Election Day,” Hughes said Friday at the senior center, after urging seniors in Ewing Township to support Menendez. “It takes a little bit of extra effort. And, quite frankly, there have not been the kind of resources that we have seen in the Corzine election and some of the elections before that.”

“But we’re making up for that with shoe leather,” Hughes continued, “and making sure we do our basic operations of get-out-the-vote.”

Menendez, appointed to the Senate by Corzine to fill the unexpired term the now-governor vacated to set up shop in Trenton, has led Kean in most polls taken this month, after trailing in several conducted in September.

But the Republican was buoyed Thursday by a New York Times/CBS survey that showed the candidates neck-and-neck, with Menendez at 40 percent and Kean at 39 percent. Additionally, a few other polls released in the last 10 days had Kean within 5 points or less of Menendez, who is making his first run for statewide office and was mostly unknown in New Jersey after spending 13 years representing the 13th district.

This being Menendez’s first statewide bid, and considering the fact that there are no state offices on the ballot — state elections in New Jersey occur in off years — it is unclear how “well-oiled” the Democratic turnout machine will be, said David Rebovich, the managing director of the Rider University Institute for New Jersey Politics.

One indicator will be how well the Democratic machine functions in the less affluent, urban counties of Camden, Essex and Hudson (Menendez’s home turf), which are home to a large number of black voters and where Democrats tend to accumulate large majorities.

Suburbs Are Key

The key to who wins, however, could lay with voters in the suburban counties of Bergen and Monmouth, and in particular those voters in the suburban swing county of Burlington. If they follow recent precedent and break for the Democrat, Menendez will win.

“The question is: Will the Kean name, and the Kean brand of politics, one that’s based on a sense of civility, bipartisanship, and moderate positions on policies — will enough of those suburbanites see Tom Kean Jr. as being in the same mold as his extremely popular father?” Rebovich said.

To win those voters, the candidates are following distinctly different paths.

Menendez is painting his opponent as wrong on key issues like the Iraq War; Menendez voted against authorizing it while in the House, while Kean said he would have voted for it. But more than that, Menendez’s strategy has been to make the election about President Bush, and portray Kean as a Bush ally on as many issues as possible while offering himself up as a way to stop the White House and change the direction of the country.

In fact, signs visible on telephone poles and lampposts throughout the state say simply: “Stop Bush, Vote Nov. 7.” The signs makes no mention of Kean or Menendez, but the message is clear.

It might be working.

Joe Regan, 43, who described herself as “pretty liberal” and likely to vote for Menendez, discussed her vote almost entirely in terms of voting against Bush, as opposed to voting for Menendez, although she acknowledged that she tends to agree with the Senator on the issues.

“I don’t like Bush’s politics, I have problems with the fact that we’re still in Iraq,” Regan, of Longport, said Thursday evening, while taking in the annual Ocean City Halloween Parade. “Do we need to be there? Do we need to spend our tax dollars in Iraq? I disagree with a lot of that. So you kind of hope that by leaning in this direction — liberal and staying with Democrats —” that the country’s Iraq policy will change.

By contrast, Kean is trying to make the election about Menendez, simultaneously touting his moderate views and where he differs with Bush, including his call for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

Corruption Issue Dogs Incumbent

In the last two weeks, Kean has taken to hammering Menendez on taxes to try to capitalize on New Jerseyans’ distaste with their high level of taxation. But Kean’s ads and rhetoric have mostly played up the Senator’s connection to individuals with shady pasts and as well as supposed instances of his ethically questionable behavior.

“We’ve got an opponent who’s under federal criminal investigation, we’ve got a population in the state of New Jersey that knows that they’re over-taxed, and that corruption has a role to play in the level of the tax burden, so I feel very, very good,” is how Kean put it in an interview on Thursday, just before walking the six block-long Halloween parade in Ocean City.

And that was Kean being nice. After offering a lengthy and detailed dispute to the charge that a vote for Kean is a vote for Bush, Kean got back to the subject of Menendez and corruption, which when it broke in the New Jersey media just after Labor Day helped vault the Republican into, or close, to the lead in many polls.

“Bob Menendez has not only embraced the broken system down in Washington, D.C., he has been a part of the broken system in New Jersey, including being a political boss in his home county of Hudson, steering contracts, as reported by The New York Times, to former aides and lobbyists, steering taxpayer monies to the tune of $320,000 into his own pocket, personally enriching himself off of public service,” Kean said.

The Menendez campaign disputes Kean’s characterization of the federal probe, which is examining the Senator’s connection to a nonprofit that received federal funds while renting space in a building he used to own. Still, its likely the allegations hurt the Democrat, as he makes it a point to mention in many speeches that he once wore a bulletproof vest after testifying against his former political mentor in a corruption trial.

So Menendez has a bevy of Democratic heavyweights on his campaign schedule, all in an attempt to make sure the base turns out on Election Day. Former President Bill Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are on the schedule for the final week, with former Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.) set to appear with Menendez today at a breakfast with veterans in Cherry Hill.

It is also likely that he’ll find himself rallying with the local Democrats who help run the Democratic turnout machine on the ground, as he did last week when he was joined by the black mayors in East Orange, just outside of Newark.

Menendez hints that he is considering taking legal action against Kean for slander following the campaign, saying during his his speech on Thursday at Rider, and again to reporters after his remarks, that he would address the corruption charges being leveled by Kean after the election.

“We’re considering a wide range of options,” Menendez said. “But we’ll pursue them after the election.”