The Census found that there were 330,697 full-time and 87,337 part-time local government employees in New Jersey in 2009, and that there were 140,260 full-time and 39,806 part-time state employees. Because we don’t have a good sense of the role played by part-time employees, let’s just total up the number of full-time state and local government employees: 418,034. New Jersey has a population of 8,707,739 and private non-farm employment is 3,640,654. This gives us a crude sense of the number of public employees in New Jersey relative to the number of private employees. It is important to note, however, that many private employees work for institutions, like private hospitals, that rely heavily on state and federal funding. Moreover, many public employees are married or otherwise tied to private employees and voting adults not otherwise attached to the workforce.

About 63 percent of the population is between the ages of 18 and 65, which gives us 5,485,876 people. The foreign-born portion of the population is 17.5 percent, the Latino population is 16.7 percent, the African American population is 14.5 percent, the Asian American population is 7.8 percent, and the non-Hispanic white population is 61.1 percent. Note that these numbers are for the state population, not for the electorate. Ron Brownstein suggested that while President Obama won 52 percent of the non-Hispanic white vote, he would only need 41.4 percent of the non-Hispanic white vote if his minority support remained at 2008 levels and the black and Latino share of the electorate continues to grow in line with past experience.

Those are some reasonably hard numbers, but now let’s make a few speculative leaps.

I think it is safe to say that Republicans tend not to get high marks from African American voters. Moreover, many of New Jersey’s African Americans are concentrated in high-poverty cities, like majority-black Newark and Camden. For a number of reasons, these groups seem to have a durable allegiance to the Democratic party. A strong candidate can make inroads, but let’s acknowledge that this is a difficult constituency for any Republican candidate to win over.

The Latino population is very diverse, in terms of national origin, class, educational attainment, and much else, yet one can make a decent case that the Republican brand has suffered among Latinos in recent years due to a number of factors, e.g., the fact that Latinos were heavily concentrated in hard-hit sectors and regions during the recession and the perception that Republicans who oppose legalizing unauthorized immigrants are somehow anti-Latino.

Even if a New Jersey Republican didn’t share the views of Republicans in other regions, the partisan label is very powerful, as David Schleicher argues in his paper on municipal partisanship:

Several laws – by my definition “unitary party rules” – serve to ensure that the national parties are on the ballot in local elections and that candidates, activists and voters do not defect from dominant national parties during local elections. When combined with the little information available about individual council candidates, the existence of the national party heuristic on local ballots crowds out other information and the laws create severe barriers to entry for potential local parties. The result is that the vote in city council elections directly tracks the vote in national elections, despite strong empirical evidence that voters have very different beliefs about local and national issues. In cities in which one party dominates at the national level, there is no competition. Thus, local legislatures are extremely unrepresentative of voter preferences and have little democratic legitimacy. Repealing the unitary party rules would spur a rearrangement of the two-party system at the local level and create party competition at the local level.

I think it not unreasonable to posit that there would be a fairly low ceiling for the approval rating of any Republican governor in New Jersey.

Now let’s factor in Christie’s

(a) famously confrontational posture towards public employees in New Jersey, and the resources public employee unions have devoted to defining and opposing his agenda;

(b) his explicit opposition to abortion;

(c) the influence and reach of media outlets sharply critical of his agenda and personal style, and the extraordinary expense involved in presenting a counternarrative via paid media;

and (d) the fact that local governments are strongly inclined to blame the deterioration of public services, layoffs, etc., on the governor rather than their own managerial failures.

What would you guess his approval rating would be? Jordan Fabian of The Hill reports that it has reached a new low:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) job-approval rating has tumbled to a new low, according to a poll released Tuesday.
Voters are evenly split, 44 percent to 44 percent, on whether they approve or disapprove of Christie’s job performance as governor, a Fairleigh Dickinson University/PublicMind survey shows. That compares to his 51-41 percent approval/disapproval rating in April.
Garden State voters also have an unfavorable view of their governor: 40 percent view Christie favorably, while 45 percent view him unfavorably. That’s down from his 47-41 percent favorable/unfavorable rating in April.

Interestingly, it appears that Christie is fairing extremely poorly among female voters:

A gender gap appears to be driving Chrisitie’s low numbers in the Fairleigh Dickinson poll: Women disapprove of Christie 53-36 percent, while men approve of his job performance 52-36 percent.

I actually laughed when I saw Fabian’s post. Christie is doing about as well as President Obama before the killing of Osama bin Laden, when he was widely considered a lock for reelection. Granted, the circumstances are very different. But it’s important to keep this broader context in mind.