Listen, people, what's happening in New Jersey right now is absolutely BANANAS! We've got a gubernatorial election that's basically turned into a carnival game where politicians are walking around with giant butterfly nets trying to catch as much public funding as they possibly can!

The New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission just handed out $2.6 MILLION in matching funds to SEVEN candidates. SEVEN! That's more candidates than New Jersey has uncontaminated water sources!

Let me break this down for you: Jack Ciattarelli, the leading Republican guy, just hit the MAXIMUM amount of public matching funds at $5.5 MILLION! He's like that kid at the arcade who's somehow mastered the claw machine and is walking out with ALL the stuffed animals!

Then we've got Newark Mayor Ras Baraka who just got his FIRST payment of $841,913. Almost a MILLION dollars! For comparison, that's approximately what the New York Jets spend on counseling  therapy for their fans each season!

And don't get me started on Steve Fulop and Steve Sweeney. TWO STEVES! Both hovering around $4 MILLION in public funds! I haven't seen this many Steves getting rich since Steve Jobs invented a phone that breaks every time Apple releases a new one!

Then there's Josh Gottheimer and Mikie Sherrill —-two members of Congress—-who each got around half a million dollars THIS WEEK ALONE! They're sitting at $4.6 MILLION and $4.2 MILLION total! That's not campaign funding—that's a small nation's GDP!

Meanwhile, rightwing radio host Bill Spadea hasn't received any matching funds yet. He's probably standing outside the ELEC offices with a tin cup going, "Please sir, may I have some campaign cash?"

And poor Sean Spiller, head of the New Jersey Education Association, couldn't even raise the minimum $580,000 to qualify for matching funds. You know you're in trouble when the head of the teachers' union can't pass his own funding test!

In total, they've handed out over $25.8 MILLION in matching funds this primary cycle! TWENTY-FIVE POINT EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS! That's more money than most people will see in their lifetime, and it's being spent on CAMPAIGN ADS! You know, those things you frantically try to skip after 5 seconds on YouTube!

New Jersey's public financing plan gives candidates $2 for every $1 they raise. TWO FOR ONE! That's a better deal than any Black Friday sale I've ever seen! It's like that episode of Friends where Joey finds out about the "buy one, get one free" deal at the pizza place and ends up with seventeen pizzas in his apartment!

So the next time you're driving through New Jersey, paying those obscene tolls, just remember—your money isn't fixing those potholes. It's paying for some politician's face to be plastered on a billboard with a slogan like "Committed to New Jersey's Future" or whatever focus-grouped nonsense they're peddling this year!

And the worst part? All nine candidates combined have raised $15.6 million as of the end of 2024. Do you know what that means? It means we taxpayers are paying MORE for these campaigns than the actual donors! We're subsidizing a political popularity contest that makes high school student council elections look like models of fiscal responsibility!

This isn't democracy—this is financial MADNESS with a New Jersey accent!