New Jerseyans Prefer a ‘Non-entity’ as Governor Right Now, Says Murray
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Governor Phil Murphy is a non-entity for most New Jerseyans, according to Monmouth University Pollster Patrick Murray, and after eight years of Governor Chris Christie, “they actually prefer it that way,” Murray told Dr. Brigid Harrison of Montclair State University on the week before Election Day.
Director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute for the last fourteen years, Murray on Tuesday joined Harrison to address students and discuss the science of polling, which plays a crucial role in political science. He started off by discussing his upbringing and emphasizing that growing up, his was not “a house that had any allegiance to partisan politics” which influenced his perspective on American government. They discussed the changes which have taken place over the years, when small-level polling was done at random by going through phone books, to more sophisticated approaches, where telephone companies could provide all the telephone numbers and their geographic areas to pollsters. Murray said that, at the time, before caller ID existed, pollsters had a very high response rate from people who picked up. Today, however, with the advent of cell phones and caller ID, people do not pick up from numbers they do not recognize. This changed the game tremendously. “The response rate went from 80-85% down to 5%,” Murray said. “Some of the online polls actually do a decent job, not as good as the phone polls yet.”
He said that while internet polling was still not providing the same level of accuracy and in acquiring as representative an audience, it was catching up.
When asked what Governor Murphy’s perceived absence in the assembly races meant for the assembly elections and what should be watched, as regards the governor, Murray described the matter clearly. “Governor Murphy is a non-entity for most New Jerseyans,” Murray said, “and they actually prefer it that way. It’s ‘Christie fatigue’… and it was always in your face. This was before Donald Trump. What’s interesting about Chris Christie is that it’s very hard to be in your face if you’re a New Jersey politician, because that means you need the media to pay attention to you. And where are the media based? In New York and Philadelphia, covering those politicians more than a New Jersey one.”
Murray said that Christie was able to harness social media and brand himself as a national figure, bypassing the local media and using the NJ GOP as his “personal piggy bank” to finance his political aspirations. In the end, however, it harmed him because pollsters were finding that people were getting “tired” of having the governor in their faces. “Murphy is not in your face, they find it easy to ignore him,” Murray said, mentioning, too, that it would be hard for him to overcome the overwhelming attention at the national level.
“He’s not an entity in this election, it’s not a mid-term, but what I’m looking for in Assembly races is what the underlying dynamics will be. This is expected to be the lowest turn out election of the past few cycles,” Murray said. “This shows how the base has shifted.”
A combination of Christie Fatigue and “the Trump Phenomenon” harmed the GOP brand image among critical suburban voters. “Suburban Republicans tend to be more moderate in their social views, much more about compromise and finding common ground,” Murray noted, and said that suburban women with a college education are a particular bellwether. Since Christie, the GOP in New Jersey has also been on on “its back foot”, further being harmed by the Democrats taking advantage of promoting votes by mail. In the past, he explained, VBMs did not account for much in a polling sense, since those people would normally vote anyway, but now more people who had not been previously engaged in voting were taking advantage of votes by mail, partially for the convenience factor, and that was working to the benefit of the Democrats.
During the discussion, Murray and Harrison discussed changes in exit polling data during the 2016 election. “It wasn’t until 9 o’clock that the exit polls flipped, but they weren’t as strong as we expected at 5 o’clock… there was a polling miss across the board…. The national polls were essentially right, it was the state polls that were off by 4 or 5%.”
Regarding matters of electability, Murray said he asks if it is more important to voters to choose a candidate they agree with who was less likely to beat President Trump, or one who they did not agree with on everything, but was more likely to beat President Trump. “A majority of Democrats say that it’s the candidate who would be more electable.” Then he started to hear people discussing Elizabeth Warren, saying if she had more exposure, she’d be more electable. “What I found was… she has a core group… as her appeal is expanding, people show up not just for the person they’re interested in, they show up for people they think they might be interested in… she’s starting to get more moderate voters who show up there… both liberals and moderates walk out of there feeling as though she spoke to them.” This prompted Murray to change the way he formulated his electability questions. “Instead of asking what would you do hypothetically, I ask who is your top choice, is that person the most electable, or do you think another candidate is the most electable? Then I ask, is this candidate the one you have the greatest affinity on the issues with, or is there another candidate you agree with more you’re not picking at this time?” The result was more people claiming their candidate was both electable and in agreement on the issues.
As the seminar wound down, Dr. Harrison and Mr. Murray took questions from the students. Among the questions was one regarding the divide between the parties and Murray cited while Americans still generally have faith in America as “the best place” but said that the divide between people was bigger than ever. On scoring how conservative or liberal elected officials are, he said, “When President Nixon was going through the impeachment process… one third of the Republicans on that committee voted in favor of the articles of impeachment. Every single one of those members is more liberal than any sitting Republican member of Congress today. Everything has changed, there’s no longer an overlap and that’s reflected in the public as well. There’s no overlap of ideas. I might consider myself a Republican and I share some of these values with some Democrats on some issues. We don’t see that anymore, it has actually gotten worse.”
This seminar was co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science and Law, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Center for Student Involvement, the Political Science Club, College Republicans, College Democrats at Montclair State University, and InsiderNJ.
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