As someone who has spent years watching New Jersey Republicans devise ever more creative ways to lose elections, I did not expect to be shocked anymore. And yet, the 2025 gubernatorial and legislative cycle managed to set a new standard for political underachievement so striking it deserves to be studied, if only to prevent future generations from replicating it. What unfolded was not merely a defeat, but a masterclass in how to squander a winnable race through strategic paralysis, poor messaging, and a steadfast refusal to learn from history.
And let us establish this point at the outset: this election was winnable. Not easily, and not by accident. There were headwinds, some of them created by our own party’s miscalculations in Washington. But winnable nonetheless. Voters were frustrated with affordability, taxes, crime, schools, and the direction of the state. There was a genuine appetite for change. A disciplined campaign, with a compelling message and a strategy aimed beyond the Republican base, could have made this a competitive race, and possibly even a victorious one.
Instead, we witnessed the much ballyhooed Ciattarelli campaign suffer a thirteen-point implosion. Losing by that margin, receiving a mere forty-three percent of the vote, is what happens when you do not truly campaign at all. Forty-three percent is the Republican baseline in New Jersey; it is what a cardboard cutout with an “R” taped to its chest polls at simply for existing. In fact, the baseline is probably closer to forty-five. To fall beneath even that floor requires effort, an almost scientific precision in doing the wrong things at the wrong time, aimed at the wrong voters, with the wrong message.
It brings to mind the SAT: five choices per question—A, B, C, D, E—meaning that a monkey blindly circling random letters should achieve a 20% score by accident. To perform worse than that, one must actively talk oneself out of the right answer, or adopt a methodology so fundamentally flawed that it produces error with mechanical consistency. That is what occurred here. For all the motion, press releases, consultant invoices, donor calls, photo ops, and self-congratulation, this campaign somehow managed to underperform “generic chimp.” The strategy did not merely fail to help the candidate; it actively dragged him downward. It was as if the campaign’s operating manual had been reverse-engineered from a list of everything that should not be done.
This is a new low for New Jersey Republicans, and that is saying quite a lot.
For years, the NJGOP has labored under the delusion that the path to victory lies in “energizing the suburban base, and ignore the cities” as though squeezing a few extra drops out of an already wrung-out sponge will magically fill the bucket. It is a comforting theory because it is easy. It requires no persuasion, no outreach, no intellectual flexibility, and no courage. One simply tours friendly towns, hosts rallies for the already converted, poses for photos in diners, and then mistakes applause for progress. It creates the illusion of momentum without the burden of expanding one’s coalition. It is politics as self-affirmation rather than politics as coalition-building.
But Republicans will never win in New Jersey by maximizing the Republican turnout alone. The math will not allow it. If this state is ever to elect a Republican governor again, that candidate must do something our party refuses to attempt: turn Democratic voters, especially in the cities. Not all of them. Not half. But enough to prevent Democrats from running up the score in urban counties by Soviet-style margins while we cling to hollow supermajorities in the suburbs and exurbs as if they compensate for the electoral crater elsewhere.
A winning Republican campaign in New Jersey must be willing—no, determined—to practically live in Newark, Camden, Trenton, Jersey City, Paterson, Irvington, New Brunswick, Elizabeth, Atlantic City, and every other struggling city written off as permanently blue. Not show up for a token visit, or a drive-through photo-op, but commit to a sustained, unapologetic presence. The candidate should be a familiar face in those neighborhoods, speaking not at residents, but with them, offering real solutions to the problems that define their daily lives: the violence that keeps children indoors at night; the schools that trap students in generational disadvantage; the absence of jobs and ownership opportunities that prevent families from building wealth, stability, and pride.
School choice. Safe streets. Economic opportunity zones. Paths to homeownership that build equity instead of dependency. Debt-free college. Immigration enforcement balanced with empathy. These are not “Republican issues.” They are human issues, and the communities suffering the most under Democratic governance are crying out for alternatives. To cede these cities without a fight is not strategy, it is surrender. And a party that surrenders its moral obligation to compete for every vote does not deserve to win.
You do not need to win the cities. But you cannot allow Democrats to win them by fifty, sixty, or seventy points and then expect to make up the deficit by running up the numbers in Monmouth and Ocean. Politics is not football; one cannot win by scoring six touchdowns in one quarter and zero in the others. It is a statewide election. Every point counts. And Republicans have been forfeiting entire counties for so long that losing feels normal.
It’s well past time the same people who keep making the same mistakes were held to account. I will not list names; those responsible already know who they are, and if they do not, the election results provide an unambiguous mirror. But let this be said plainly: this was political malpractice. The kind that should end careers, not be rewarded with future roles. New Jersey Republicans are not losing because the voters are unreachable, we are losing because the strategists are unteachable.
And while we are assigning responsibility, let us address the factor that no one in Republican circles seems willing to confront: the government shutdown. More specifically, the looming cutoff of SNAP benefits for forty million Americans. There is a certain strain of Republican consultant who seems to believe that ordinary voters should think like Heritage Foundation analysts, that the public will interpret a shutdown as a principled stand for fiscal restraint, deftly apportioning political blame to the appropriate branch of government like constitutional scholars. This is fantasy. Voters respond to urgency, to self-interest, and to visible consequences. And nothing is more visible, or more frightening, than the prospect of families losing the ability to feed their children.
Did our candidate call any of this out even once? Did he demand action on the shutdown? Did he distance himself from the mess unfolding in Washington? Did he demonstrate leadership, moral clarity, or independent judgment? I heard none of it. Instead, we were treated to a safe, stale script: a few barbs about his opponent’s net worth increasing during her time in Congress, and a relic of a thirty-year-old college cheating scandal, as though such trivia would eclipse the anxieties keeping families awake at night. It was the political equivalent of showing up to a house fire with a pamphlet about proper candle maintenance.
This is the fatal flaw of modern Republican campaigning in blue states: a compulsive retreat into talking points that feel comfortable to consultants but irrelevant to voters. We speak to ourselves, about ourselves, in language meant to impress ourselves, and then we marvel when the electorate declines to join in our self-regard. It is as though the party has forgotten the basic truth that elections are not awarded for ideological purity or clever oppo research, but for relevance. Voters respond to those who recognize their world, not those who lecture from a distance.
If this party wishes to win again in New Jersey—not merely compete respectably, but win—it must undergo a philosophical reorientation. It must rediscover the courage to persuade, the humility to listen, and the imagination to attempt what has never been tried here in our lifetimes: to compete for the hearts and minds of voters who have never once been asked for their support by a Republican. It must abandon the comfort of moral victories and embrace the discomfort of actual ones.
Let me be unequivocal: New Jersey is not unwinnable. Democrats are not invincible. Cities are not lost causes. The voters are not the problem. We are. Our strategies are stale, our assumptions flawed, and our political imagination atrophied. If the NJGOP is willing to change, willing to build a coalition that reflects not the state we wish we lived in, but the one we actually do, then we can win. But if we continue down this path of insularity, complacency, and self-congratulation, then we should expect our future to resemble our past: occasional flashes of false hope, followed by ritualistic concession speeches and the dignified surrender of a party that refuses to fight where the battle is.
New Jersey deserves a real opposition party, one that competes in every community, speaks to every voter, and offers solutions grounded in reality rather than nostalgic fantasy. If we cannot be that party, then we should stop pretending we are trying to win and simply admit we prefer the comfort of losing honorably to the discomfort of winning unconventionally.
The voters are not the ones who have given up on us. We are the ones who gave up on them. It is well past time for that to change.
