[ad_1]
There were no public questions on my official 2021 primary election sample in New Jersey that came in the mail the other day. Yet one of the historic proportions is growing significantly in Tuesday’scontest: the future of the Republican Party, not just here in Garden State, but in the United States.
New Jersey, like the Commonwealth of Virginia, is holding gubernatorial elections in odd numbers following the presidential election, which has long given the news media an inflection point to watch voters vote many months into the start of a new term of the presidency.
As such, contests of both states have been used in recent years as augurities for next year’s midterm elections.
This year, however, the four wayraces for the GOP governor nomination in New Jersey are only partly about who Republicans want to challenge incumbent Democratic Governor Phil Murphy in November. (Especially since Murphy is likely to be re -elected no matter who they choose.) The hottest issue in this primary, believe it or not, is whether New Jersey Republicans believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. .
Incredibly, five months after former President Trump directed an angry mob on Jan. 6 to head to Capitol Hill and “stop stealing” the 2020 election, the question about the legitimacy of the previous election dominates in the May 25101.5 FMNew Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission debate.
The broadcast face-off was between businessman and former state legislator Jack Ciattarelli, who lined up with state Republican organizations, and Hirsh Singh, a Trump acolyte and longtime candidate who previously ran for governor in 2017, and has since been getting missing campaigns for the Senate Chamber and the United States. (Brian Levine and PhilRizzo were also on the ballot, but did not qualify for debate.)
Singh billed himself as “the only MAGA candidate” in the race, and vowed to “make New Jersey great again.” When asked by 101.5 FM’s Eric Scott who actually won the 2020 election, Singh replied, “We all know Trump won,” adding that “there are election results that have been disqualified nationwide.”
Scott did not ask Singh to hurt just one example of the 2020 election results “being disqualified” anywhere, let alone “nationwide.”
“So, I was hoping we could go back to Phil Murphy and New Jersey, but Joe Biden won the presidency,” Ciattarelli replied. “The Trump campaign and the Trump team have filed 62 lawsuits nationwide regarding voter fraud and voter irregularity. Two of those cases have reached the Supreme Court, which has a majority of Trump nominees and conservatives. magistrates, and decided decisions. against the Trump team 9-0. Joe Biden is our president. “
To curb the so -called controversy, Singh cited public opinion, such as TheReuters / Ipsos pollthat found that 53 percent of Republican voters surveyed between May 17 and 19 believe Trump is the “real president.” According to Reuters, nearly one in four adults surveyed, including 56 percent of Republicans, believe the 2020 election that Biden won by 7 million pesos was “tainted by illegal voting.” That number has only dropped a few percentage points below where it was when pollsters asked the same question after the election.
Singh insisted during the debate that his opponent was part of a cabal of Republicans, such as Rep. LizCheney and Sen. Mitt Romney, “stabbed in the back by Mr. Trump” and needs to be cleaned up from the GOP. Ahead of the debate, Singh said Trump was “the greatest president” in his life and that Trump supporters were unfairly branded as “terrorists if we are patriots who love America.”
Ciattarelli, who opposed Trump in 2016, but in 2020 more or less aligned himself with him, made his own effort to pacify Trump’s base, saying he “supported Donald Trump’s policies “in China, border security, economy and its conservative choices for the Supreme Court and the federal bank.
For Singh, like the people who rushed to the U.S. Capitol in January, the 2020 election was an emotional flashpoint, still sensitive to touch.
The Capitol Hill uprising, whose obvious goal was to block or prevent legal certification of the 2020 presidential election, resulted in five deaths, including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, a New Jersey native. and military veteran. Two responding policemen committed suicide after the attack, and more than 140 were injured.
Subsequently, federal prosecutors criminally charged hundreds of Trump supporters, including law enforcement officers and inactive U.S. Marine duty, for their actions that day. A military contractor from Colts Neck in central New Jerseywas among those arrested. TheAsbury Park Pressreported that a federal judge ordered him to take care of heldin after concluding that “his extremist ideology and comments favorable to a civil war became a danger to the community.”
Nearly a year and a half since the bloody turmoil, the first inside the U.S. Capitol, it’s not just New Jersey’s gubernatorial candidates talking about fighting the outcome of the 2020 election and the importance of what followed. .
Last month, the two remaining Republican members of the New Jersey Congressional delegation split over the question of whether or not to allow a bipartisan panel, modeled on the 9/11 commission, to investigate the Jan. 6 insurgency.
Rep. Chris Smith, who was first elected to his seat in 1980, was one of 35 Republicans to join their party and vote in favor of a commission. Rep. Jeff Van Drew, who was elected as a Democrat in 2018 but replaced the parties that supported Trump in 2020, voted against the investigation.
Ultimately, this measure was defeated in the United States Senate after Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced his opposition. Democrats were able to skin just six of their Republican colleagues to vote to form the panel, four votes short on destroying the filibuster.
Before the Senate vote, Brian Sicknick’s mother and girlfriend walked through the halls of Congress and had face -to -face meetings with Republican senators. The pair told reporters they hoped to persuade members, who themselves were attacked that day, to vote for the investigation.
“I usually stay in the background,” Gladys Sicknick said, according to NJ Advance Media. “I’m not quiet anymore.”
“If they look at the footage that took place, it’s very obvious that it wasn’t a peaceful day,” said Sandra Garza, Sicknick’s girlfriend. “Police officers were attacked, they were beaten, fire extinguishers were thrown at them, flagpoles were attacked.”
Before the Senate rejected the commission, former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, a Republican, and former Rep. Lee Hamilton of Indiana, a Democrat who co-chaired the 9/11 commission urged the Senate to authorize an investigation into the Jan. 6 attack:
Today, democracy faces a new threat. The January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was one of the darkest days in our nation’s history. Americans deserve an objective and accurate account of what happened. As we did in the wake of September 11, it is time to put aside partisan politics and unite as Americans in the common search for truth and justice.
After the proposal’s defeat in the Senate, Kean said the Guyians’ failure was “loss of democracy.”
“It saddens me because there is no real, public reason to deny it,” the former governor said. “I think some people are scared of what they’ll find out. That’s not a good reason to deny it.”
The real problem is that a lot of people think that what happened on January 6 was justified, and believe that Trump should still be president. After Tuesday’s premiere we’ll have a better idea of how many of those people live in New Jersey. The country will watch.
[ad_2]
picture credit