NEW JERSEY STAYS BLUE

With 83% of the vote counted, Jon Corzine was announced to be the victor in the Garden State gubernatorial race. He currently leads Doug Forrester by a margin of 11 percentage points, 54% to 43%, which is an unexpectedly comfortable win for Democrats.

So what happened? What about property taxes? What about Democratic corruption? Extra-marital affairs? Didn't the GOP have enough to nail this guy? No. The only way to counter a weak Democrat in this state is with a strong Republican.

Forrester was counting on people to be fed up with state government. However, what he found is that swing voters are more disenchanted with federal government, which is run by the GOP. Forrester is going to lose New Jersey by a significantly larger margin than Bush did, which means that this state might be considerably more liberal than we previously thought. Perhaps people who voted for Bush on the national security card voted in favor of their social and economic principles in the governor's race. Unless statistics show that voter turnout was especially low among Republicans and conservative Independents, it's impossible that a small but significant portion of Bush's supporters are also Corzine supporters.