TRENTON, NJ – Today’s early voting and vote by mail figures released by Rider University’s Rebovich Institute of New Jersey Politics is full of nothing but bad news for Republican Jack Ciattarelli.
Phil Murphy and state Democrats have launched a massive “Get Out The Vote” campaign that included registering more Democrats and making sure existing Democrats voted by mail and showed up for early voting.
The multimillion-dollar campaign appears to be working. According to the Rebovich Institute numbers released Friday night, Democrats are outvoting Republicans in early voting 60% to 22%. It is expected that most of those Democrat votes would be cast for Murphy.
Just 17.3% of independents and unaffiliated voters have cast early votes.
When it comes to voting by mail, both parties are nearly equal when it comes to the percentage of registered voters returning their mail-in ballots. 53.7% of Democrats or 290,707 have returned their vote by mail ballot. On the Republican side, 50.8% of voters have returned their ballots, but with few mail-in ballot recipients, that is just 87,366 ballots.
Early voting has been lackluster to date, but Democrats maintain their lead there too.
Between last Saturday and Thursday, 51,034 Democrats showed up for early voting. 36,934 Republicans and 23,963 unaffiliated voters took advantage of early voting.
Ciattarelli could be experiencing a voting deficit due to a claim by former President Donald Trump who said earlier this year that Republicans should stay home and not vote until his alleged election fraud in 2020 was properly addressed. Ciattarelli’s campaign also played a weak ground game with voters when it came to encouraging early voting and voting by mail, while Murphy’s campaign put extra emphasis and millions of dollars of resources into the effort.
Murphy has also been electrifying his Democrat and progressive base with visits from top national level Democrats including Bernie Sanders, President Joe Biden, and former President Barack Obama.
Ciattarelli has said he doesn’t need anyone’s help in the Republican Party, including former President Donald J. Trump to win on Tuesday, saying he can do it on his own.
On Thursday, Trump walked back his statement, “The statement that I made a few weeks ago saying that Republicans will not vote if the Election Fraud of 2020 is not fixed, was in no way meant to imply that I would tell them not to vote, but rather that they may not have the incentive to vote if the election process is not fully remedied, and quickly. It was the Crime of the Century. We are working on solving that problem every day—it will be done! People do not want to spend their time and money to have a SCAM like that happen again.”
Making the news even worse for Ciattarelli is that historically, few New Jersey voters come out for the off-year gubernatorial campaigns. In 2017, Phil Murphy defeated Kim Guadagno with 1,203,110 votes compared to the former Lt. Governor’s 899,583 votes.
Ciattarelli also blew $7,045,692 in campaign funds against his Republican primary opponent Hirsh Singh in a brutal and vicious campaign that was extremely heated and personal. Ciattarelli eventually won that three-way race between himself, Singh, and Phil Rizzo with less than half of the votes from Republican voters.
Financially, Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign is running out of money. Ciattarelli raised $13 million but has only $685,000 left in his bank account. On the other hand, Phil Murphy raised $16 million and still has $3.4 million left to spend in the final week of the election campaign.
Few Republicans are coming to Ciattarelli’s side. The only national-level GOP figure to endorse Ciattarelli is former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. The rest of Ciattarelli’s endorsements are from state and party officials.
Murphy has received nearly twice as many political endorsements as Ciattarelli including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former President Barack Obama. The governor has also received a handful of labor union and trade union endorsements as well as the endorsement of eight New Jersey newspapers.
