Plainfield's next question: Who replaces Van Blake?

The unspoken question behind the current races has all along been 'Who will replace Rayland Van Blake on the City Council'? You may want to check out my earlier post on this topic ("Who will replace Van Blake?" -- March 9, 2007) for a tipsheet.

(Yesterday's election results are below, along with some comments and observations.)

Rayland rolled to victory in the Freeholder race without breaking a sweat, thanks to the backing of the Union County Dem organization. Though fellow Plainfielder and incumbent Freeholder Adrian Mapp did not get another Freeholder term, he did outpoll his running mates by nearly a thousand votes, signifying his Plainfield vote base.

Cory Storch and Linda Carter won re-election to the City Council, and the incumbent Dem team will be back in the Legislature come January 1.

CITY COUNCIL

One 4-year Term, Wards 1 and 4 at-large
Linda Carter (D)	1,088
One 4-year Term, Ward 2
Cory Storch (D)	924
Deborah Dowe (R)	258

FREEHOLDER

Three 3-year Freeholder Terms
Bette Jane Kowalski (D)	32,502
Daniel P. Sullivan (D)	32,121
Rayland Van Blake (D)	30,604
Patricia Quattrocchi (R)	26,857
Robert Reilly (R)	26,560
John Russitano Jr. (R)	26,183
Adrian O. Mapp (I)	6,734
Becky McHugh (I)	5,879
George P. O'Grady (I)	5,841

LEGISLATURE

County	Precincts	Green	Stender	Des Rochers	Gatto	Colon	Makrogiannis
Total	176/176	13,399 27%	13,638 27%	10,124 20%	10,311 21%	1,173 2%	981 2%
Middlesex	16/16	1,161 22%	1,082 21%	1,341 26%	1,359 26%	125 2%	115 2%
Somerset	19/19	1,515 21%	1,457 20%	1,895 26%	2,073 28%	193 3%	159 2%
Union	141/141	10,723 29%	11,099 30%	6,888 19%	6,879 19%	855 2%	707 2%

PUBLIC QUESTIONS

1. PROPERTY TAX REFORM -- Defeated: 635,260 to 562,779

A constitutional amendment to dedicate 1% of the sales and use tax receipts to a property tax account, to be distributed annually to taxpayers as rebates.

2. STEM CELL RESEARCH -- Defeated: 647,228 to 575,618

Approval would float $450 million in bonds to establish New Jersey as a stem cell research 'player'.

3. OPEN SPACE FUNDING -- Approved: 650,157 to 554,957

Approval would authorize $200 million in bonds for Green Acres ($109M), Farmland Preservation ($73M), Blue Acres ($12M) and Historic Preservation ($6M).

4. RIGHT TO VOTE LANGUAGE CHANGE -- Approved: 708,052 to 476,652

Approval would remove the 'idiot or insane person' language and replace it with denial of the right to vote, on a case by case basis, to persons deemed by a court to lack the capacity to understand the act of voting.

Note: All precincts have not yet reported. Ledger stats page is here.

SOME OBSERVATIONS

As evidence of the 'blue-ing' of the suburbs, one has to look no farther than some nearby formerly solidly Republican strongholds. In Bernardsville, two Republicans won Council seats, but a Democratic candidate missed by only 3 votes, and the other Dem was only 12 votes behind that.

In Somerset County's Freeholder race, where over 60,000 votes were cast, Dem candidate Melonie Marano of Green Brook lost by only 1,842. This is a long cry from the days when Dems only ran in Somerset County as 'sacrificial lambs'.

But, lest Dems break an arm patting themselves on the back, they should also consider the results in neighboring North Plainfield, where Republican Jennifer Uptegrove beat Dem Santiago Soto, 1424 to 840. This is a town with a Democratic-controlled Council and a Democratic mayor who is serving in her third term.

In the 14th District, one of the state's two 'clean elections' trials, Dem Linda Greenstein handily defeated her Republican opponents, despite a massive media campaign against her.

The out-of-state right-wing moneybuckets crew that funded Common Sense America is estimated to have spent more than half a million dollars in a media blitz that seemed to have no effect, though it created a great deal of consternation among the bipartisan supporters of the 'clean elections' reform.

Some Plainfielders may recall meeting Chris Campos, the former Hoboken councilor who visited Plainfield during Rayland Van Blake's original run in 2002. They were both young -- 26 then -- and cutting their teeth in politics.

Campos' path diverged sharply from Rayland's. First, he got involved in a notorious DWI scrape in New York City, with the NYPD caught on tape calling the Hoboken PD, asking what to do about the ticket.

In June, he lost to an anti-machine candidate, Dawn Zimmer, by a mere 8 votes. Contesting that election, he and Zimmer agreed to a re-run set for yesterday. Zimmer won that race last night, so you can expect some interesting stories to come out of Hoboken in the next four years. (See the Jersey Journal story here; check out Zimmer's website here.)

-- Dan Damon

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