Steve Lonegan’s Bold Colors
By Jeffrey Lord on 10.1.13 @ 6:09AM
Opposing Obamacare, NJ Senate nominee surges.
Is New Jersey’s Steve Lonegan the next Scott Brown?
A one-time sure-GOP-loser turned winner in a blue state special Senate election?
Made a winner over “sure-thing” Democrat and Newark Mayor Cory Booker by popular revulsion with ObamaCare? And a truly riveting personal story that is turning heads all over the state of New Jersey? (Here is Lonegan telling the story of his blindness that has captured so much attention.)
The question is suddenly being asked as a 35-point Booker lead in a September 11 Rutgers-Eagleton poll eroded by 9 points in just 12 days to a 26-point Booker lead in a September 23 Stockton College poll and has now been eaten away to an astonishing 12-point gap in this Quinnipiac poll released on September 24.
The headline in New Jersey.com?
Poll shows Booker vs. Lonegan race for U.S. Senate is tighter than expected
The story opens with this new information on the special election to replace the late Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg:
A new poll on the U.S. Senate race suggests Cory Booker’s expected blowout over Steve Lonegan may not be in the bag.
What’s going on here? How does an “expected blowout” for a liberal shining star in an overwhelmingly blue state suddenly and so dramatically become “tighter than expected”?
Some New Jersey analysts are suggesting that Lonegan’s charges that Booker’s record on crime in Newark isn’t all Booker makes it out to be, that Booker is a “show-horse” celebrity candidate.
But what tracks with these polls is another factor altogether — and is in fact the exact same element that resulted in the upset victory of Republican Scott Brown in another special Senate election, that one to replace Democrat Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts. Notably, Lonegan is now doing better in the polls three weeks out than Brown was at the same point in his famous 2010 upset race against the supposedly unbeatable Democrat state attorney general Martha Coakley.
That same fact that the Brown and Lonegan elections appear to have increasingly in common?
Obamacare.
https://spectator.org/archives/2013/10/01/steve-lonegans-bold-colors/
Anything less than 20 points is a surge.