Bob Menendez trounced veteran Republican state legislator Joe
Kyrillos on Tuesday to win a second full term, extending New
Jersey's streak of electing Democrats to the U.S. Senate now to 40
years.
The win puts Menendez, as a member of the powerful Senate Finance
Committee who has earned the trust of Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid of Nevada, in position to play a role in major policy fights
ahead over taxes and Medicare.
The 58-year-old North Bergen resident strongly supported
President Obama's health insurance overhaul, and vowed never to
support a voucher-like system for Medicare. He also wants tax cuts
to expire for people in the top two brackets making more than
$200,000.
Final results may not be known for the days, when paper and
electronic ballots cast by people victims of Hurricane Sandy are
counted. But with 68 percent of the vote in, Menendez led 58 percent
to 40 percent.
"I couldn't be more grateful for this extraordinary victory,"
Menendez told cheering supporters in New Brunswick shortly after
10:30 p.m. "We are outperforming in every county what we intended to
do."
Kyrillos a 52-year-old state senator from Middletown, said he
raised nearly $5 million, but it wasn't enough.
"It's made me a bigger fan of campaign finance reform," he said
at a banquet hall in Belleville.
He also lamented the media "didn't pay nearly enough attention to
our efforts. Perhaps they didn't understand what our campaign was
all about."
Menendez started his reelection campaign with a lead in statewide
polls but with weak public approval, showing he could be vulnerable,
especially in a state that threw out a Democratic governor in 2009
and now has one of the nation's Republican powerhouses running
Trenton.
But the last public polls taken before Hurricane Sandy showed
Menendez had increased both his lead and public approval rating, in
part because he ran exclusively positive and biographical
commercials on television.
Kyrillos, 52, was able to increase the share of voters who
recognized his name only to 40 percent, from 25 percent. Kyrillos
said Governor Christie, a close friend, never turned down a request
for help even when Christie's schedule was jammed with out-of-state
fundraisers and campaign rallies for Mitt Romney and other
candidates. But Kyrillos also lamented, half-jokingly, that he
wished the governor was not such a "rock star," a sign the candidate
had hoped Christie could help raise Kyrillos' own visibility.
"Kyrillos was banking on the fact most people don't love Bob
Menendez, but he was discounting the fact that most people don't
hate Bob Menendez," said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth
University Polling Institute.
"Most people have no opinion of Bob Menendez. But he's the
incumbent, and the challenger had shown no reason why the incumbent
should be fired, so they voted for Bob Menendez," Murray said.
Tom Wilson, a former Republican State Committee chairman now
working as a lobbyist, said Kyrillos also battled a perennial
attitude among New Jersey voters that the Senate was distant and
unconnected from their everyday lives.
"New Jersey voters look at the U.S. Senate race as being less
important than our mayor's race, no matter how little power the
mayor may have," Wilson said.
Republicans' chances of defeating Menendez were hobbled, Wilson
said, by the absence of a candidate already well known to the
public.
"Had he [Kyrillos] won Powerball and been able to bring $40
million to the table to create interest and issues, it might have
been different," Wilson said. "But a good number of people always
thought Joe would do his best to try to win and also do his best to
make a good run around the track, meet folks, get his name
identification up, and put himself in good position to take a run,
perhaps, in 2014."
Fundraising was also an issue, especially since Menendez's career
has been propelled by his prowess in raising large sums.
Through Oct. 17, Menendez had raised $11.9 million, and had $5.6
million remaining for the final three weeks. By comparison, Kyrillos
had $1.7 million on Sept. 30 after raising $4.7 million. His
disclosure report for the first half of October, due Oct. 25, had
not been filed in Washington by Friday.
Issues in the race generally tracked the presidential campaign,
but Kyrillos also argued he was more open to compromise than some of
his fellow Republicans in Washington.
Like Romney, whose New Jersey presidential campaign he chaired in
2008, Kyrillos argued the primary reason to defeat Menendez and
President Obama was that the policies they supported did not produce
economic recovery quickly enough, and added to federal debt.
He said economic growth would come from cutting spending and
regulations, but he broke with many in his party by saying he was
open to a deficit-trimming deal that would include new revenues --
even while he also advocated bigger tax cuts.
The math would work, he said, if loopholes in the tax code were
closed. But he never said which loopholes, spending programs or
regulations he would eliminate.
Menendez countered with the same argument Obama was delivering:
Policies he'd supported brought the country back from the brink of
collapse; full recovery needed more time and less Republican
obstruction; and the policies Kyrillos supported would take the
country backward.
Menendez also was vague on key details. He said he believed
Congress would reach a deal in its lame-duck session to prevent the
so-called fiscal cliff, the tax increases and across-the-board
spending cuts due to trigger on Jan. 1. But beyond supporting higher
tax rates on those making more than $200,000 and ending tax
subsidies for oil companies, Menendez never described what spending
cuts, changes to Medicare and Social Security, and tax increases he
would agree to in order to avoid the cliff.
