NJ-07

[Suburbia]

Rate NJ-07, Democratic incumbent Tom Malionowski vs. Republican challenger Tom Kean Jr., who always chooses to run in challenging years for Republicans (2006, 2020) but not good years for Republicans (2010, 2014?)

I say Lean R.

Kean Jr. 51%
Malionowski 48%

[CookieDamage]

arent you sick of being a troll

[Suburbia]

arent you sick of being a troll

I am not a troll, I am a realist.

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

Rate NJ-07, Democratic incumbent Tom Malionowski vs. Republican challenger Tom Kean Jr., who always chooses to run in challenging years for Republicans (2006, 2020) but not good years for Republicans (2010, 2018?)

Probably misreading your post, but 2018 was a good year for Republicans?

[Gracile]

Probably the most overrated GOP pick-up opportunity in the House. I don't see how Malinowski could lose in this environment.

[Suburbia]

Probably the most overrated GOP pick-up opportunity in the House. I don't see how Malinowski could lose in this environment.

Kean Jr. has name ID. He is not a Trumpist either. He is a center-right Republican focused on taxes, schools and jobs. He doesn't care about social issues. He's not Cotton or French Hill in AR.

[Gracile]

Rate NJ-07, Democratic incumbent Tom Malionowski vs. Republican challenger Tom Kean Jr., who always chooses to run in challenging years for Republicans (2006, 2020) but not good years for Republicans (2010, 2018?)

Probably misreading your post, but 2018 was a good year for Republicans?

I think he was referring to the 2018 Senate elections/NJ-SEN in particular (though it's doubtful Menendez could have lost that year against Kean, too).

[Suburbia]

Rate NJ-07, Democratic incumbent Tom Malionowski vs. Republican challenger Tom Kean Jr., who always chooses to run in challenging years for Republicans (2006, 2020) but not good years for Republicans (2010, 2018?)

Probably misreading your post, but 2018 was a good year for Republicans?

I meant 2014. Lance was a mediocre, boring congressman, Kean could have challenged him

[Pessimistic Antineutrino]

Rate NJ-07, Democratic incumbent Tom Malionowski vs. Republican challenger Tom Kean Jr., who always chooses to run in challenging years for Republicans (2006, 2020) but not good years for Republicans (2010, 2018?)

Probably misreading your post, but 2018 was a good year for Republicans?

I meant 2014. Lance was a mediocre, boring congressman, Kean could have challenged him

Lance was a popular, moderate congressman and Kean was his protege, ideologically. They shared an office building. I suspect that Lance would have at one point stepped aside to let Kean take the seat.

Kean is by far the best candidate they could have put up, but it won't be enough. In this environment, sharing the ticket with Trump will be enough to sink his boat. The district has changed a lot in a short period of time.

I'm no fan of Malinowski, but he appears rational, level-headed, and fervently anti-Trump. That'll be enough for him to win reelection here.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Districts like this probably won't flip back in 2020, but probably will flip back in 2022, provided that it's a Biden midterm.

[LabourJersey]

Biden is 100% going to win this district in November. Even if he doesn't win the election.

Malinowski is a decent candidate with a lot of money; he won't run behind Biden here.

I'd say this is Lean/Likely D at this point.

[Tekken_Guy]

Malinowski easily. If Kean is winning, that means Trump is almost certainly carrying the district, which is unlikely as he could’t do so in 2016.

[The Mamdani Virus]

Likely D, Kean needs to learn to wait and not run in D wave years, had he run for this seat after redistricting or for Senate in 2014, he very well could have won, instead he ran this year for House and ran in 2006 for Senate, I kind of feel bad for him, he has terrible political instincts.

[Roll Roons]

I'm gonna be bold and say Kean. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but this district is not VA-10. Several Republicans have been able to win here in the Trump era, and he's one of them, doing so in a district that is even bluer than NJ-07. Bramnick and Munoz held on last fall despite Murphy and Malinowski campaigning hard for their opponents, and Guadagno carried the district while losing statewide by 14.

In 2018, some people said Pete Flores' upset victory in the State Senate race foreshadowed Will Hurd defying the wave and holding on. I think last year's Assembly results in LD-21 could say the same for NJ-07.

[Tekken_Guy]

I'm gonna be bold and say Kean. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but this district is not VA-10. Several Republicans have been able to win here in the Trump era, and he's one of them, doing so in a district that is even bluer than NJ-07. Bramnick and Munoz held on last fall despite Murphy and Malinowski campaigning hard for their opponents, and Guadagno carried the district while losing statewide by 14.

In 2018, some people said Pete Flores' upset victory in the State Senate race foreshadowed Will Hurd defying the wave and holding on. I think last year's Assembly results in LD-21 could say the same for NJ-07.

I’m going to have to disagree with your take.

1. Kean won, and Bramnick and Munoz too, because they were incumbents running for state-level offices, which are less polarized than Congressional races. Same with Guadagno in the governor’s race. It’s easier for them to separate themselves from the national GOP in state races than Congressional.

2. Flores won in a Hispanic-heavy district in a low-turnout special election. This district is filled with educated whites who have moved away from the GOP. They turn out at much higher rates than Hispanics do. And this election is a regularly-scheduled November election with the Presidential race at the top of the ticket.

3. Hurd won because he was the incumbent, and he won by a much narrower margin than Flores did despite his district being less Democratic. Kean is the challenger this time around and doesn’t have incumbency advantage.

[Bidenworth2020]

I'm gonna be bold and say Kean. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but this district is not VA-10. Several Republicans have been able to win here in the Trump era, and he's one of them, doing so in a district that is even bluer than NJ-07. Bramnick and Munoz held on last fall despite Murphy and Malinowski campaigning hard for their opponents, and Guadagno carried the district while losing statewide by 14.

In 2018, some people said Pete Flores' upset victory in the State Senate race foreshadowed Will Hurd defying the wave and holding on. I think last year's Assembly results in LD-21 could say the same for NJ-07.

I’m going to have to disagree with your take.

1. Kean won, and Bramnick and Munoz too, because they were incumbents running for state-level offices, which are less polarized than Congressional races. Same with Guadagno in the governor’s race. It’s easier for them to separate themselves from the national GOP in state races than Congressional.

2. Flores won in a Hispanic-heavy district in a low-turnout special election. This district is filled with educated whites who have moved away from the GOP. They turn out at much higher rates than Hispanics do. And this election is a regularly-scheduled November election with the Presidential race at the top of the ticket.

3. Hurd won because he was the incumbent, and he won by a much narrower margin than Flores did despite his district being less Democratic. Kean is the challenger this time around and doesn’t have incumbency advantage.

I agree with all of these points, and I would add the following:

1) Malinowski has proven himself to be a strong politician. He beat an incumbent who had the same moderate reputation Kean supposedly does by 5 points.

2) The 2020 environment in general but especially in places like this is just as bad if not worse than it was in 2018 when Malinowski won in the first place. I would not be shocked if Biden won the seat by upper single digits, for example. While can certainly could and likely will outperform Trump, I have my doubts it will be by more than 4-5 points, which likely wouldn't be enough.

[LimoLiberal]

I'm gonna be bold and say Kean. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but this district is not VA-10. Several Republicans have been able to win here in the Trump era, and he's one of them, doing so in a district that is even bluer than NJ-07. Bramnick and Munoz held on last fall despite Murphy and Malinowski campaigning hard for their opponents, and Guadagno carried the district while losing statewide by 14.

In 2018, some people said Pete Flores' upset victory in the State Senate race foreshadowed Will Hurd defying the wave and holding on. I think last year's Assembly results in LD-21 could say the same for NJ-07.

I think this is a bit of historical revisionism. Will Hurd was widely touted by Wasserman and co. as a godly incumbent who was defying all political trends.

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1029724725440860160

GOP internals released and unreleased showed Hurd up by massive margins with no Dem response and the NYT/Siena project had Hurd cruising in September and October.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections_in_Texas#District_23

Gina Ortiz Jones' fundraising dried up after those NYT/Siena polls.

The Flores upset in September contributed to a greater narrative that had started in the 2018 TX-Sen primary (where Beto lost several border counties to a rando with a Hispanic last name), that Beto was weak with Hispanics and they wouldn't turn out in the midterms as they had for Hillary.

The pundit class seemed very confident that all this made Hurd safe and able to survive a blue wave.

But the blue wave came. Beto won TX-23 by 5 points (outperforming HRC) despite his massive, crippling weakness with Hispanics, and Gina Ortiz-Jones came extremely close to winning. The reaction I and many others had after 2018 wasn't that Hurd had overcome all odds and defied the blue wave of the century. It was shock at how well GOJ and Beto had done considering all we had heard about Hurd's incredible skills and Texas democrats' crippling weakness with Hispanics during midterms.

If anything, Flores' win in September 2018 was misleading.

[Lognog]

Can someone start making a collection of Bronz's troll takes to bump Election Day