Voters prefer Corzine on issues, survey finds

New Jersey Governor-elect Jon Corzine (D) triumphed in last week's election because state voters share his preference for increased government spending and taxes on the rich, according to a Wilson School survey released on Friday.

The school's Policy Research Institute for the Region, which surveyed 1,600 New Jersey voters over a six-month period, also found that Republican Doug Forrester's last-minute negative ads may have backfired.

"Forrester's ad campaign caused Forrester's support to drop by over nine points and to stay at that low level until election day," said Larry Bartels, a Wilson School professor who presented the survey results in Dodds Auditorium. "[The tactic] shifted people who were going to vote for Forrester into nonvoters."

Forrester released an ad in the final days of the campaign featuring a critical remark from Corzine's ex-wife, who said Corzine "let his family down, and he'll probably let New Jersey down, too."

One major conclusion of the survey was that voters' issue preferences, rather than television ads, determined the outcome of the race.

More than 40 percent of respondents said they wanted to balance the budget by raising taxes, not by cutting government programs, and more than 70 percent said they supported tax increases for individuals making more than $200,000 a year.

Not everyone accepted those findings, however. John Samerjan, a panelist on Friday who served as press secretary for former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean '57, said he thought the survey's policy questions were "a little loaded."

"Who would say, 'I want to take money away from a poor school?'" Samerjan asked.

When asked how they wanted to balance the budget, survey respondents were asked to choose between funding cuts to "poor schools," "social services," "public colleges" and "the environment" or tax increases.

The survey also focused on the effect of New Jersey's lack of an independent media market. With no major television stations in the state, and some of the biggest markets in the nation in close proximity, many New Jersey residents rely on newspapers and television broadcasts from New York and Philadelphia.

The Wilson School survey found that voters who get their news from out-of-state sources knew as much about the campaign as those who use local sources. But voters who watched television news instead of reading newspapers were significantly less well-informed.

John Shure, a self-described liberal who writes columns for NJBiz, called New Jersey "a newspaper state in a television world."

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Although some political scientists have argued that campaigns are a useful way of educating voters about the issues, the survey found that New Jersey voters increased their knowledge of only the candidates over the course of the campaign, not of political issues more generally.

The number of voters who could identify Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) or who knew which party controlled the State Assembly, actually declined between April 2005 and now.

Shure said that this finding makes sense, since candidates are more concerned with marketing their personal image than the platform of their party.

"Candidates in an election are like jockeys in a horserace," he said. "Their only goal is to win the race, not improve the breed. I'm not surprised the campaign didn't teach people much about state government."

Shure said campaigns are not designed to inform voters but rather sway them toward a particular candidate, often with crude attacks aimed at "those voters least informed, least paying attention and least interested."

He and Samerjan agreed that both Corzine's and Forrester's campaigns were focused on voters who spend less than five minutes thinking about politics each week.