Blue New Jersey Seeing Red, If GOP Doesn’t ‘Screw Things Up’

A conservative activist looking to get a ballot harvesting initiative up and running in New Jersey tells The Federalist that the state GOP is more interested in helping their preferred Republican gubernatorial candidate — marked as a “Never Trumper” — win in 2025 than helping the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee take back the White House in November.

Deep Blue New Jersey has a chance to turn red this election year, some very enthusiastic Republicans insist. But a local GOP chair tells me that a state party “drowning in factionalism” could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

‘Not Their Priority’

As The Federalist first reported in March, New Jersey conservative icon Dominick “Mick” Spadea and his political action committee, Fix Jersey Now, have proposed a  targeted — and legal —  ballot collection program backed by “research, analysis, strategies and coordination for identifying voters.” The initiative, according to documents obtained by The Federalist, would use “proprietary analysis” to reach out to “those who do not vote, then develop a targeted message that will engage and speak to those specific register[ed] but non-voting residents.”

The conservative group for months has been trying to get the New Jersey Republican Party and the Republican National Committee to buy in and beat Democrats at a ballot harvesting game they’ve been winning for years.

But Spadea claims state party leaders aren’t all that interested in helping former President Donald Trump beat President Joe Biden — or whoever ends up being the Democrats’ candidate come November. They’ve got their minds fixed on next year’s gubernatorial prize, Spadea told me. The grassroots-establishment battle was reported earlier this week by the Gateway Pundit.

Spadea and Fix Jersey Now’s numbers guy, Fred Bartlett Jr., on June 24 met with Christina Bobb, Republican National Committee senior counsel for election integrity, and Mike Ambrosini, director of the RNC’s State Party Strategies, to discuss the ballot harvesting plan. The leaders of the political organization were making a pitch for funding from the RNC.

“Mike Ambrosini stated that the NJ GOP is focused on getting Jack Ciattarelli, elected Governor,” states Fix Jersey Now’s After-Action Report prepared by Fix Jersey Now and obtained by The Federalist. “The 2024 Presidential Election, a Trump victory and a GOP win in New Jersey is not their priority or focus.”

An RNC official told The Federalist the conversation didn’t go quite as Spadea painted it. Ambrosini, the official said, told Spadea that the Jersey GOP’s resources would be spread pretty thin as it prepares for next year’s gubernatorial clash. The conservative activist is seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars from the party for the ballot-harvesting initiative.

State party officials did not return The Federalist’s requests for comment.

Internal Politics

Ciattarelli, a former member of the Jersey General Assembly, is among a crowded field of Republicans running for governor in next year’s election, including state Sen. Jon Bramnick, real estate broker Robert Canfield, and Bill Spadea. The latter is a popular conservative talk show host and just happens to be the son of Mick Spadea. As you might imagine, that fact is not lost on a GOP establishment that the younger Spadea has routinely criticized on New Jersey’s airwaves. Two of his primary opponents have complained that his weekday radio show on New Jersey 101.5 is essentially a massive — and “impermissible” — “in-kind contribution to his campaign,” the New Jersey Monitor reported.

Mick Spadea asserts party officials backing Ciattarelli, who has twice unsuccessfully run for governor, are locking out funding for his plan to harvest ballots from Republicans, Independents, and — particularly — disaffected voters who have had enough of Biden and the Democrats. He insists his son’s gubernatorial run has nothing to do with Fix Jersey Now’s zeal to elect Republicans. The organization requested at least $300,000 to pay ground troops to collect ballots in a dozen Jersey counties or $525,000 to reach all 21 counties, according to the After-Action Report. Garden State law limits the number of voters a harvester may deliver mail-in ballots for to three, so it’s a very labor-intensive effort.

Ciattarelli has run afoul of many supporters of former President Donald Trump, who next week is expected to receive his third consecutive GOP presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Ciattarelli, who finished less than 3 points behind Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy in 2021, once called Trump a “charlatan.” He “softened his rhetoric” during Trump’s tenure in the White House, walking a “tightrope,” as Politico reported, during the 2021 election — “neither too anti-Trump for the primary nor too pro-Trump for the general election in a deeply blue state.”

Red Potential

But the blue state is seeing red in the Biden era. The Democrat’s general unpopularity, his unpopular policies, as well as his age and clear cognitive decline have made liberal citadels a lot more competitive than they have been in the past.

“Trump can win New York just like Ronald Reagan did in 1980,” New York State Republican Party Chairman Ed Cox, recently told the New York Post.

In a Siena College poll conducted last month, the former president trailed Biden by single digits (47 percent to 39 percent) among voters in the Empire State, which has effectively been a one-party state for the better part of the last two decades. The survey was taken about two weeks before the June 27 debate.

A recent poll of likely Garden State voters, conducted by market research firm Co/Efficient found Trump edging ahead of Biden, 41 percent to 40 percent. Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. garnered 7 percent support in the poll of 810 respondents conducted June 26-27 — the day before and the day of Biden’s disastrous debate performance.

In the poll’s generic matchup, Republicans trail Democrats by just 3 percentage points.

Biden’s troubles combined with Trump’s ascent is boding well for Republicans’ chances to take a U.S. Senate seat in November, something the New Jersey GOP hasn’t done in more than a half-century. Hotelier Curtis Bashaw, who beat the Trump-endorsed candidate in last month’s GOP primary, is trailing Democrat Rep. Andrew Kim by just 2 percentage points (35 percent to 33 percent) in the increasingly competitive Senate race, according to a GOP super PAC poll reported on by the New Jersey Globe.  Incumbent Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez, who is running an independent campaign while being tried on federal corruption charges, is polling at 6 percent.

‘Various Warlords’

“We could have a U.S. senator in 2024 if we don’t screw things up with our infighting,” said Joe Labarbera, chairman of the Sussex County Republican Party and a big fan of Fix Jersey Now’s ballot-gathering initiative.

“I did three combat tours in Afghanistan and two in Iraq. I’m seeing the same thing here that I saw over there: various warlords jockeying for power. We don’t have a unified message right now,” Labarbera told me in an interview.

The problem in the Jersey GOP is that the party chairs are picked by the lead GOP candidates, the local chairman said. Their loyalties typically lie with the candidate who selected them. At the moment, the power is spread out in the main among the major Republican gubernatorial candidates, at war with each other more than a year before the 2025 election.

Labarbera said Jose Arango, chairman of the New Jersey Republican Chairs Association, has urged unity in the state party and for the Jersey GOP to keep their eye on the big prize of 2024 — Control of the White House and Congress. New Jersey’s 14 precious electoral votes would help Trump secure the former and success in the state’s down-ballot races would assist in the latter.

But none of the combatants seems to want to play nice.

Labarbera said he’s not seeing much in the way of support from the RNC so far, but he acknowledges he’s in his own “myopic battles.”

Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, has pushed for the GOP to use the same tools Democrats have to their advantage — early voting and “legal” ballot harvesting.

“We’ve got to start putting some points on the board early and not wait for Election Day,” Mick Spadea told me.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.