Schundler Could’ve Won
Conservatism didn't lose in New Jersey.

By Patrick Ruffini
November 7, 2001 3:50 p.m.

n a perfect world, elections wouldn't be decided in favor of the candidates with the sharpest commercials or the most disciplined message. Campaign spin doctors would take a backseat to the power of ideas. Elections would be won by principled reformers, and lost by third-rate apparatchiks.

Bret Schundler's defeat in the New Jersey governor's race on Tuesday is yet another painful reminder of the truth that we do not live in such a world. In our world, strategy and message matter at least as much as policy when it comes to winning elections.

The conservative movement's instinctive reaction to Schundler's loss will be to ignore this inescapable reality. We will express astonishment at the Jim McGreeveys of the world who "lie" and distort to get elected, and imagine our pious selves blindsided by their tactics. We shouldn't be so naïve. The way to defeat liars isn't to cry foul as Bret Schundler did repeatedly on guns and abortion — semi-informed, cynical voters generally have better thing to do than take pity on you. It is to outfox them.

Conservatives knew well that Schundler was a perfect candidate on pure substance. Real Republicans who can win over the hearts of minority voters as Schundler did in Jersey City are indeed a rare breed. But we should have realized all along that Schundler's intellectual heft and his storybook mayoralty wouldn't sell themselves. Left unexplained and undefended, they became liabilities that the Democrats used to paint Schundler into a box. In an ironic twist, it was Democrats who baited comfortable suburbanites by associating Schundler with the worst of Jersey City's problems — when by almost all measures, things improved under his tenure. (Inverting reality actually works quite well as a campaign tactic against candidates whose only response is silence.)

Schundler's intelligence was also made to work against him, this time, by his own doing. After the primary, the Schundler campaign sought to neutralize the abortion issue, a necessity in perhaps the most pro-choice state in America. Schundler tried to do this with a wonderfully clever piece of logic that must have stumped many a debating partner he had back at Harvard:

If [McGreevey] believes I am an extremist and unfit for office because of my pro-life position, than he believes that any Catholic who adheres to the teachings of the Church is also an extremist and unfit for office. What I said today is that only in places like the Ayatollah's Iran, are there religious tests where adhering to a certain belief can disqualify you from serving in government.

The newspapers didn't get the argument, and the next day ran headlines like "Schundler calls McGreevey an 'Ayattolah.'" Because few people other than Schundler had never quite thought about the issue in that way before, most voters shrugged off this sophisticated (but untested) argument as yet another crude political attack.

After months of this, Schundler couldn't even buy a break. In the last weeks of the campaign, he was pummeled on the airwaves by Democratic state-party-committee advertising. In these ads, the maverick mayor had been thoroughly redefined as yet another cog in one of the worst state Republican machines in the nation — the inversion of reality strategy at work again. In the last weekend of the campaign, I saw dozens of political ads in the Philadelphia media market, which services traditionally Democratic South Jersey — and not a single one of them had anything nice to say about Bret Schundler.

Schundlerites will say this all changed on 9/11, when fundraising dried up and the underdog campaign was denied the political oxygen it needed to mount an effective challenge. On the contrary. The tragedy created, for a while at least, an environment perfectly suited for a Schundler ascendancy. What the attacks made abundantly clear was that the gauzy, bite-sized Clintonian politics that McGreevey specialized in had come to an end. Suddenly, McGreevey's trump cards — a symbolic commitment to unrestricted abortion that a New Jersey governor has nothing to do with enforcing, a pledge to support all gun-control measures no matter how ineffective, inflexible opposition to choice in education — didn't seem that meaningful anymore.

In this new environment, it was Schundler who had the upper hand. The very qualities for which he was ridiculed for before September 11 — a reputation for toughness, principle, and confrontation — became the very qualities that Americans now demanded of their wartime leaders. On leadership, Schundler could have drawn a strong contrast with McGreevey, an awkward political cipher who seemed desperately out of his league in these epic times.

Schundler could have grabbed hold of the mantle of strong leadership, run with it, and won. Polls suggested that an electorate that certainly hadn't cut Schundler any slack ranked his ability to lead in a crisis as his most compelling attribute. After September 11, the things voters liked about Schundler mattered more than anything else. And the things they liked about McGreevey seemed suddenly less important. Mysteriously, Schundler failed to capitalize on this moment. Had he done so, he might have connected with liberal New Jerseyans who disagreed with him on virtually everything else in much the same way that President Bush has won over these same voters with his steadfast, unwavering response in the aftermath of September 11. The same impulse that makes some ex-Gore supporters glad their man isn't leading us into war could have worked in Schundler's favor in confounding the received political wisdom in New Jersey.

Mike Bloomberg's remarkable victory in New York City is proof that Schundler could have pulled it off. Schundler and Bloomberg were alike in ways that mattered profoundly in this election: both were former businessmen who could promise outside-the-box solutions to the economic crisis. One built a multibillion-dollar-business empire from scratch. The other was a former investment banker who took a sick city and made it a key player in the economic recovery of New Jersey, building brand new office complexes that now serve as a refuge for businesses from the World Trade Center. Schundler was at least as credible as Bloomberg on the issue of reviving the economy after the attack. And yet the fate he suffered stands in marked contrast to Bloomberg's success. The difference was message: Bloomberg won because he turned his business experience into a campaign mantra that was pounded into the subconscious of New York voters day and night (and yes, Bloomberg's millions were a factor, but not as big a factor as Giuliani's endorsement and Mark Green's implosion). Schundler lost because he got too distracted discussing the need for things like cowpox vaccines and defending himself on losing wedge issues like gun control.

Schundler's loss didn't have to happen. Rather than signaling any sort of partisan trend, the victors of all three major elections on Tuesday prove that good campaigns do matter more than anything else, including partisanship. Two of the three winners, Bloomberg and Mark Warner, ran strong campaigns that actually overcame partisan disadvantages, in Democratic in New York and Republican Virginia respectively (although the media will mistakenly focus on their self-financed campaigns). If they won, Schundler could have won in Democratic New Jersey. Conservatives can and should take solace in the fact that Schundler's loss wasn't a function of his conservative ideals but of an unfocused campaign that simply didn't promote the unique strengths Schundler could have brought to the governorship, post-9/11.