In the Right

First, to the Quinnipiac survey. The fact that the survey shows Christie's lead widening is fascinating, because the same survey shows that Christie's favorable-to-unfavorable opinion rating has continued to decline, as Corzine's attack ads have continued to take their toll: Christie's favorable/unfavorable rating is now 41/30 percent, as against 42/26 percent three weeks ago, and 46/20 percent on July 14. That is, over the last six weeks, Christie's favorable rating has dropped five points, and his unfavorable rating has inched up by ten points.

So the Corzine attack ads are working, precisely as they're supposed to -- they are reducing Christie's positives, while driving up Christie's negatives.

Yet Christie's lead on the ballot has widened to a solid 10 points, at 47-37 percent, with 9 percent for Independent candidate Chris Daggett.

That's up from a 46-40 percent lead three weeks ago, when Daggett showed support from 7 percent on the ballot test.

How to explain this?

This may -- repeat, may -- be one of those very, very rare instances where a candidate's image is just so bad that no matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries, no matter how badly he smears his opponent, the overwhelming bulk of the electorate just cannot wait to pull the lever for somebody else on Election Day.

In such circumstances, there's literally no connection between the opposing candidate's favorable/unfavorable rating and his performance on the ballot test -- as long as he's running against the hated candidate, he's in like Flynn.

With a 34 percent favorable rating against a 57 percent unfavorable rating, and with a 34 percent job approval against a 60 percent job disapproval rating, Corzine may have reached that very, very rare instance.

It does not help Corzine that by 40-51 percent, voters do not find him honest and trustworthy.

Making matters worse for him is the environment surrounding the race -- New Jersey, by the luck of the draw, happens to be holding its gubernatorial contest in a year when the right track/wrong direction is still off the charts in negative territory (always a danger sign for incumbents), and, because of growing voter disenchantment with Barack Obama, the dreaded Republican "(R)" is, for the first time since 2002 in New Jersey, not a scarlet letter, but a badge of honor.

That is, Republicans candidates running in New Jersey for the last six years have been running into gale-force headwinds; now, for the first time since the middle of the first George W. Bush Administration, Republicans have the advantage of a tailwind.

Some might think that now would be the perfect time for the Christie campaign to let loose the kill shot, a devastating attack spot that so encapsulates all that is disliked about Corzine that it would put the finishing touches on the race.

But with 63 days to go, there's far too much time left in the campaign for anyone to remember an ad that runs in the first week of September.

Instead, the Christie campaign has made exactly the opposite play -- by rolling out Tom Kean, the post-partisan former Governor and 9/11 Commission Chairman whose favorability ratings are still the best of any political leader in the state, despite the fact (or maybe because of the fact?) that he's not been on a ballot in 24 years.

In fact, one pollster who's recently been in the field throughout New Jersey shared with me his findings on Kean's popularity, and they're still stunning -- he's got a +41 favorable rating among all voters (that is, the difference between his favorable and his unfavorable rating is 41 points to the favorable side), and even among Democrats, he's still at +32.

But Kean didn't do the regular endorsement thing.

Instead, speaking on a telephone press conference organized by the Christie campaign earlier today, Kean called on Gov. Corzine to pull his attack ads against Christie, and change the tone of the race.

This, New Jersey insiders and campaign operatives know, is farther than Kean regularly goes when he chooses to involve himself in GOP campaigns. Typically, he will stand next to his chosen candidate and say a few nice words about him, and let photographers snap their picture together, and allow the candidate's campaign to put out a "Kean and Fill-in-the-Blank: Perfect Together" kind of press release that never mentions the opponent.

(Mentioning an opponent would require saying something negative, and saying something negative is something Gov. Kean doesn't like to do.)

So for Kean to call on the Governor to start talking positively about the serious issues before New Jersey voters is a significant break from past practice for him. And it will play well among Independent and unaffiliated voters.

Will Corzine's team pull down their attack ads? Yes. But only so they can put up other attack ads, attack ads that they hope will work even better to drive Christie's negatives higher, faster.

Because Corzine's team comes from the school that believes the way to the top (sorry, all you civics teachers) is to hit hard, hit low, and keep on hitting until your opponent folds -- or you die trying.

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