Who owns the NJGOP and its candidates?

Jersey Conservative is now read by thought leaders in key 2024 primary states.

By Rubashov

Politics was once a lot less corporate than it is today. The message a candidate brought to a campaign was a collaboration of core values, local advice, and a campaign manager who often remained with the candidate throughout his or her career. If you want to read about what it was like at the very beginning of the process that led to what we have now, find a copy of Sidney Blumenthal’s The Permanent Campaign (1980).
 
Money changed politics and political campaigning. The sheer cost of campaigning made securing resources more important than anything else. Appealing to the values of those writing the checks became more important than the candidate’s values or those of the local community the candidate was hoping to represent.
 
For most candidates today, personal values and beliefs, and the platform and policies of the party, no longer matter. Promises that impact policies are made in exchange for checks. How a candidate votes once in office, how he or she governs, is determined by who pays for the campaign.
 
That’s not a problem if the values of those paying for the campaign are in sync with those of the party the candidate wants to represent and the voters the candidate is trying to appeal to. But what if they’re not?  
 
In a democracy worthy of the name, candidates take their values into a party with them. Those values are tempered by the party’s platform and what emerges is a set of policy-based principles on which the candidate’s campaign is based.
 
The job of the campaign is to figure out a message that convinces enough of the electorate that those principles are worthy of their votes. Policy is present in advance of the campaign. Polling is used to help convince voters that those policies are best.
 
If the candidate is elected, he or she governs based on the promises made to the electorate – the people who voted for them – reflecting the values and policies they agreed to. This is governing based on principles.
 
With principled candidates, how they vote and how they govern is a continuum of the language of their campaign. This is how it should be.
 
But it's not how it is. The current trend in political consulting argues that the message used to win doesn’t matter, because it has no bearing on how the winning candidate intends to vote or govern. That’s already been settled by who the candidate took checks from.
 
The modern political campaign is a short-term marketing campaign. Polling is used to determine the words the campaign will use to sell its product – the candidate. Policies don’t matter, because they will be forgotten as soon as the campaign is over – and the language of the next campaign might be completely different. Politicians brought up this way flip-flop and ping-pong as a matter of course. It is built into their careers from the start.
 
The modern campaign doesn’t believe in words, it degrades them. Instead of serving as a means to a long-term negotiation between voters and candidate – a democratic contract based on a promise of delivery – language is pimped out for a short-term fix. Voters are deluded, for the briefest moment, into believing the words are true, that their vote means something. Morning comes, and in the clear light of governing those words are found to have meant nothing. The results are voter frustration, disillusionment, and apathy.
 
What damage is this doing to the ideal of democracy and to the Republic?
 
Recent polling reports that only 25% of voters believe government today has the consent of the governed, while 59% think it does not. 16% say they are not sure. 74% of Republicans, 47% of Democrats and 58% of unaffiliated voters say the government today does not have the consent of the governed.
 
Why do Republicans report more disillusionment than Democrats? Is it because GOP candidates are more pimped out than Democrats? Is the letdown greater for Republican voters?
 
For Democrats in New Jersey, the values of those who underwrite campaigns is more in sync with those of core Democrat voters. And so, by happenstance, the campaigns are more likely to reflect those values. So too, the policies a candidate governs with once elected are more likely to agree with the values of the average Democrat. Because of this, Democrat voters are more likely to believe they know what they are getting in exchange for their votes.
 
But not Republican voters. According to the latest ACU/CPAC scoring, in New Jersey, Democrat voters have a 100% chance that the Democrat candidate they vote for will vote ideologically at least 90% of the time. Republican voters have only a 12% chance that the Republican candidate they vote for will vote ideologically even 80% of the time.
 
Maybe this is why 70% of self-identified conservative voters say the government today doesn’t have the consent of the governed, an opinion shared by 55% of moderates and 45% of liberals. Does this level of disillusion impact voter turnout? And, if it does, which party is hurting more?
 
So, the question of who owns the NJGOP and its candidates is an important one. Because who writes the checks matters. Because it seems to have a negative impact on core Republican turnout. Not getting what you believe you are voting for doesn't make for repeat customers.
 
Those writing the checks get the joke. The NJEA is perfectly fine with a Republican legislator saying he supports parental rights – knowing that it will never amount to more than lip service. A GOP Senator can beat his chest and claim to be a “conservative” – but the union underwriting his campaign knows that he will, in the end, support higher gas taxes to fund projects the union desires. The joke is on the voters who buy that he’s a “conservative”.
 
New Jersey’s 24th legislative district is one of the state’s most conservative – anchored by a county that gave Donald Trump 60% of the vote in 2020. In the recently concluded legislative primary every GOP candidate ran as a “conservative”. But who was the district’s biggest donor? Who will call the tune when it comes time to govern?
 
In addition to the candidates’ own warchests, hundreds of thousands in dark money flowed into the primary – all of it going to support GOP establishment candidate Dawn Fantasia and her running mate. A chunk of that dark money came from something called Women for a Stronger New Jersey – an independent expenditure PAC run by NJGOP Chairman Bob Hugin’s 2018 U.S. Senate campaign manager. It was founded by Hugin’s spouse and Laura Overdeck, a name often mentioned as a future candidate for statewide office.  
 
Women for a Stronger New Jersey’s website is very clear as to the ideology of the candidates they support:
 
“We're working to grow the number of women serving in elected office at the state and local level by building a diverse network of moderate Republican and Independent women throughout the state and expanding the pool of women considering public office.”
 
Conservative Republican women need not apply. It might be helpful to note that, despite running as a “conservative”, the independent national conservative rating organization, iVoterguide, rated Dawn Fantasia as “Moderate” on the issues.
 
In 2020, Women for a Stronger New Jersey spent $30,000 trying to elect the first transgender GOP State Committeeperson. They targeted an incumbent State Committeewoman simply because she’s a biological woman – and stood in the way of “making history”. In 2021, when the state’s senior Pro-Life Senator decided to run for re-election, Women for a Stronger New Jersey urged a pro-abortion woman to primary him.
 
Laura Overdeck made a contribution of $80,000 on May 1, 2023. There has been only one other contribution made to the PAC this cycle. It was for $50. The PAC spent $103,552.10 – mainly on attack ads targeting Fantasia opponent Josh Aikens, a school board president and one of the state’s most prominent parental rights advocates. The PAC is currently $17,161.82 in debt.
 
It should be remembered that Laura Overdeck was a featured speaker at the 2017 March for Science – organized to protest the Trump administration’s position on climate ideology and government subsidized “green” energy. The New Jersey protest was organized by the far-Left group Action Together NJ. Other organizers included Environment NJ, NOW Northern NJ Chapter, and the Sierra Club-New Jersey.
 
Does anyone doubt what Dawn Fantasia will do when she gets a call from Laura Overdeck? Despite running as a “conservative”, how Fantasia votes in the Legislature will inevitably follow the values of the people who paid to get her there. Of course, her consultants will tell her to “talk” conservative, to pay the party and the voters lip service, but Dawn Fantasia will always be constrained by those who paid for her ticket into the Legislature. 

Donations like Laura Overdeck’s hurt democracy.
 
The United States Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech. If so, then Laura Overdeck is talking over the average voters of the 24th District. She doesn’t even live in the district and she is shouting them down!
 
It takes hundreds of little donations to match Laura Overdeck’s $80,000 check – and thousands of small donors to match all the other dark money that poured in and special interest money that went directly to the candidates. Average people can’t compete over the rude shouting done by the big checks of Laura Overdeck and others.
 
Two Princeton University researchers published a study on this in 2014. Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page gathered data on a large, diverse set of policy cases between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the public asked questions about proposed policy. A total of 1,923 cases met four criteria: dichotomous pro/con responses, specificity about policy, relevance to federal government decisions, and categorical rather than conditional phrasing. Of those 1,923 cases, 1,779 cases also met the criteria of providing income breakdowns for respondents. What they discovered was this:
 

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

 
The Gilens & Page study indicates that while establishment elites obtain legitimacy by operating under the claim that America is a democracy, America does not function as a democracy. More and more average voters recognize this (which likely impacts voter frustration and voter participation).
 
This video by the reform group, RepresentUs illustrates the harm done by big doners like Laura Overdeck and organizations like Women for a Stronger New Jersey:
 

Corruption is Legal in America – YouTube

“It was a thoughtless, mindless action… It’s really disturbing to think that the kids were targeted.”
 
Dr. Paul Saxton, Fort Lee School District

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

George Orwell

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