How a Unified Vote May Shape the Gubernatorial Race and the Frum Community

 

By Reuvain Borchardt

 

 

Rabbanim and organizations representing Lakewood and its surrounding frum communities all endorsed Jack Ciattarelli for governor in coordinated, simultaneously issued letters released Motza’ei Shabbos.

 

“Mr. Ciattarelli has been clear with our leadership that he understands and shares our community’s values and concerns—including ensuring our children continue to get busing and services, ensuring New Jersey residents can benefit from new federal tuition assistance, addressing the urgent infrastructure needs of our roads and electric power grid, and addressing state policy issues and funding priorities that affect the tax burden on our residents,” reads the endorsement from the Lakewood Vaad.

 

Similar endorsements were made by the Toms River Jewish Community Council, Howell Rabbanim, Vaad Harabonim D’Jackson, and Igud Hamosdos.

 

The unanimous endorsements and thousands of votes they could bring may affect the outcome of the race between the Republican Ciattarelli and Democrat Mikie Sherrill.

 

But a large bloc vote could also pay major dividends for the frum community regardless of the race’s outcome.

 

A Look Back to 2021

 

To gauge how the frum vote might affect this year’s elections more than previously, a look back to the last gubernatorial race, in 2021, is instructive.

 

In that election, Ciattarelli was challenging Phil Murphy, the sitting governor, and the Lakewood Vaad endorsed the incumbent.

 

While frum voters are generally conservative and their values align more with the Republicans, Murphy had a good working relationship with the community. Askanim in frum communities across the nation have long believed it’s important to show hakaras hatov and endorse incumbents who have been good to them while in office, regardless of the party. Moreover, the polls were showing Murphy cruising to victory by an average of 8 points—and those who regularly appear before government officials to advocate for the community’s needs rarely endorse against a candidate whose election is viewed as inevitable. Also, Ciattarelli, who has liberal social views, didn’t offer much over Murphy for the socially conservative voter.

 

And so, the Vaad endorsed Murphy. Most Lakewood voters cast their ballots for the Republican anyway, with Ciattarelli winning the township 12,505 to 7,820. But if the Vaad had endorsed Ciattarelli, he might have won just about every vote in the frum community.

 

When polls closed on Election Day 2021, Shlomo Schorr, a leading New Jersey political analyst who now serves as director of Agudath Israel’s New Jersey office, tweeted out Lakewood’s voting tally.

 

Dave Wasserman, elections analyst for the Cook Political report, quote-tweeted that and wrote, “Had the Lakewood Vaad endorsed Ciattarelli (R) instead of Murphy (D), we could be looking at a very different…race right now.”

 

Wasserman’s tweet was intriguing to politicos in the community. Here a major national pundit (originally from the Garden State) was mentioning the Lakewood Vaad and the effect it may have had on an election!

 

Yet Schorr cautions against overstating Lakewood’s effects on the 2021 election.

 

“Wasserman’s comment was correct at that moment in time after the polls closed, when the tally was a lot closer,” Schorr said in an interview with The Voice. “But once the mail-in ballots were counted and Murphy won by over 80,000 votes, it was clear that nothing Lakewood could have done would have made a difference.”

 

The Numbers Now

 

As the community has grown, Lakewood now has 65,130 registered voters—7,639 more than in 2021—around 49,000 of whom are Orthodox Jews. (The town’s population is nearly 90 percent Orthodox, but because the Orthodox community is so young, only about 75 percent of registered voters are Orthodox. Schorr estimates that, thanks to campaigns by community leaders, more than three-fourths of the town’s eligible voters are now registered to vote.)

 

There are about 15,000 registered frum voters in nearby towns including Jackson, Toms River, Howell, Manchester, and Brick, for a total of about 64,000 frum voters in the areas covered by these endorsements.

 

So even if every frum voter in the area had voted (and only 36.3 percent of Lakewood voted in 2021, for a total of 20,888 votes) and cast a ballot for Ciattarelli, that alone would not have made up the margin of victory for the Democrat four years ago. And though virtually the entire frum community is expected to vote for Ciattarelli this year, that alone may not be enough for him to win.

 

“Lakewood is certainly a big piece of Ciattarelli’s roadmap to victory,” Schorr says, “but the notion that Lakewood solely will decide the election is a bit of a stretch.”

 

Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, agrees.

 

“My belief is that the impact of this joint endorsement could be in the range of 30,000 or 35,000 votes, which, when you consider Ciattarelli lost the 2021 election by 84,000 votes, is a significant amount of the difference that he needs to bridge,” Rasmussen said in an interview with The Voice. “I think it makes a big difference, but it’s not the entire difference statewide.”

 

The Advantages for Jack

 

But no two elections are the same, and Ciattarelli has some things working in his favor now that he didn’t have last time around.

 

It’s been more than six decades since the same party won a New Jersey gubernatorial election three consecutive times.

 

Additionally, Schorr says, “affordability issues and high energy prices are animating voters, and the Democratic Party, as the party in power, is going to take the blame.”

 

Rasmussen says Ciattarelli also has the advantage now in that unlike last time, “he’s not running against a first-term incumbent.” By now, “there’s a certain amount of Murphy fatigue. People are ready to turn the page. And Ciattarelli has the chance to make the argument that he’s the one to turn the page with. That’s maybe the biggest difference from 2021 in his favor.”

 

The Advantages for Mikie

 

But Sherrill has a number of potential advantages of her own over what Murphy had in 2021.

 

New Jersey voters tend to cast their gubernatorial ballots for the party not in the White House. The unpopularity of the Biden administration may well have contributed to Ciattarelli’s surprisingly strong showing in 2021.

 

Now, however, with Trump in office, it’s Sherrill who can run against the sitting president.

 

Schorr says that “Democrats turned out in very low numbers in 2021, whether because they were protesting his covid policies or because they assumed he was going to win anyway because of the polls.

 

“But now, there’s a competitive mayoral election in Jersey City, which is going to bring out many Democratic voters who otherwise might have stayed home. And now everyone expects a close race. And with Trump in the White House, you can expect a surge of Democratic voters, which bodes well for Sherrill.”

 

Rasmussen also says that while Ciattarelli “wanted to grab the advantage on the tax issue,” Sherrill jumped ahead with some misleading ads on Ciattarelli’s tax record, so “she defined him first.” (To be fair, he says that Ciattarelli had misleading ads about Sherrill too. In this most expensive gubernatorial election ever, with ads blanketing the airwaves, neither Rasmussen nor I could recall a single non-negative ad run by either campaign.)

 

This Election Will Hinge On …

 

With Democrats facing an advantage of 850,000 more registered voters than Republicans statewide, Ciattarelli will have to win a large share of the independent vote. He did that in 2021, as did Trump last year.

 

But Rasmussen says he’s uncertain whether there’s an actual trend of New Jersey becoming more Republican, or just that voters oppose the party in the White House.

 

The very early returns bode well for Democrats.

 

As Rasmussen spoke with The Voice after three of the nine days of early voting, registered Democrats had returned 206,000 more mail-in ballots than had Republicans and were well ahead of even their 2021 pace, in which they crushed the GOP in mail-in ballots.

 

The Democrats had also had 4,000 more registered voters cast ballots in early in-person voting (though the first of those days was Shabbos, when frum residents could not vote).

 

“If Republicans don’t make up ground in the early vote, then they have to make it all up on Election Day,” Rasmussen says. “They’ll start with a hole for Election Day that could be as many as 275,000 voters. And that’s kind of a tall order. It’s not saying they can’t do it, but they’ve got to have a huge Election Day—bigger than either party has had in any recent Election Day.”

 

Every election ultimately depends on turnout.

 

Rasmussen is expecting a turnout of 2.75 million voters (compared to just over 2.6 million in 2021). Schorr predicts 2.9 million.

 

But that’s as far as either will go with predictions.

 

Schorr declined to give a prediction on the race. Rasmussen also declined but offered, “I certainly think that Ciattarelli is still viable, but with every day that goes by that he’s not making up the ground, it puts more pressure on the remaining days for him to perform.”

 

The Effect on the Community

 

Askanim are hoping that a renewed get-out-the-vote effort—including a letter signed by the four BMG roshei yeshivah urging people to cast their ballots—will mean an increased participation rate for the community.

 

And, they stress, regardless of which candidate is victorious, a strong and united vote will mean the community ultimately wins.

 

New Square is one prominent example of an area that has strong turnout united behind a particular candidate, which can result in the small village being a regular stop for major political candidates, including those vying for the White House.

 

The Lakewood area is far larger than New Square and many of the other chassidish groups in New York that vote as a bloc and get outsized attention from those in elected office.

 

“Politicians at all levels of government, be it federal, state, county, or local, pay extremely close attention to the results,” says Schorr, who spends much of his days in the halls of Trenton and Washington and on the phone with these officials and their staffers. “They monitor exactly who is voting and who is not. And the more a particular community votes, the more a politician is encouraged to prioritize the needs and concerns of those specific communities.

 

“So the vote is not only making the difference in a close race, it’s also sending a strong message: Our community matters.”

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