The DCCC had been trying to recruit Jeff Van Drew for years. He was the perfect candidate for them-- a South Jersey machine-backed hack in the state legislature who tended to vote with the GOP more frequently than any of his colleagues. Although Obama comfortably won the district (NJ-02) twice, the long-time mainstream conservative congressman, Frank LoBiondo, seemed untouchable. The machine and the DCCC decided that the only way too beat him would be with an extremely right-wing Democrat: Van Drew. But Van Drew wasn’t interested in giving up his safe seat. So he flirted with the DCCC but never but out-- until LoBiondo announced he was finished… and retiring. At that point, Van Drew jumped right in with support for the machine, the DCCC and even his colleagues in the state Senate who were eager to be rid of him and pass the Van Drew problem on to DC Dems. “We were delighted,” one of his former Trenton colleagues told me, “to see him take his anti-environmental, anti-gay, anti-women, NRA A+ to Washington… Good riddance!”His decision to jump the fence didn’t surprise anyone in Jersey politics-- and shouldn’t have surprised anyone who reads DWT since we had been predicting it for months… and celebrating it once knew for certain that he was about to make it official. Reactionary Blue Dogs-- especially intellectually-impaired ones and especially ones who live at Fox News the way he does and who say the kinds of anti-Democratic crap he does, usually switch parties. It was just a matter of when. A couple of days ago, Ben Jacobs of New York Magazine explained how it happened. Basically, he wrote “Van Drew panicked. Last week, the first-term conservative Democrat polled his district about his opposition to impeachment. The results were very one-sided. Over 70 percent of Democratic primary voters would be less likely to support him if he voted against impeaching Donald Trump. Van Drew immediately went silent and was unreachable by allies [DCCC chair Cheri Bustos] in the party. The next day, he was meeting with Donald Trump at the White House to discuss switching parties. Within 48 hours, word had leaked out about his decision and, within a week, Van Drew was on cable news pledging his “undying support” to a president whom he voted against 93 percent of the time."
A longtime state senator from South Jersey with a reputation for being a “right-leaning moderate” in Trenton, Van Drew “was used to getting some backlash from members of his own party who didn’t think he was sufficiently liberal,” said one New Jersey operative who worked with him in the past. But the operative said “this whole process started happening” when Van Drew became one of two Democrats to vote against opening the impeachment inquiry on October 31. Advisers had urged Van Drew to vote yes to keep his options open, but the New Jersey representative barged ahead.The initial vote against opening the inquiry came as a particular shock to local Democrats only days before state legislative elections in New Jersey. “People were freaking out,” said Michael Suleiman, the chair of the Atlantic County Democratic Committee.Van Drew offered a variety of reasons for opposing impeachment. Sometimes he argued the process was ill-advised with an election less than a year away. On other occasions, he said that he didn’t see enough evidence to convict Trump.One well-connected South Jersey Democrat told New York, “He never really had a rationale that was consistent. You need to have your own narrative. Not a Republican-lite narrative, but a Jeff Van Drew narrative.” However, the New Jersey operative noted that Van Drew did not seem to view his opposition to impeachment as being “pro-Trump at first,” but simply an effort to be reflective of his district. And then “he started spiraling.”
Although Jacobs asserts that the 2018 election was “relatively easy,” he’s wrong. It should have been relatively easy. The GOP put up a pyscho-clown that even Republican voters were uncomfortable with. Van Drew out-spent him $1,877,531 to $299,475, Van Drew only managed 52.9% of the vote-- less than Obama did both times he ran. DCCC and its allies spent another million dollars smearing Republican Seth Grossman and the NRCC ignored the race entirely. In the end, Van Drew won the 4 biggest counties and lost the 4 smallest, although he didn’t live up to expectations in Cape May or Gloucester. Turnout wasn’t as strong as it should have been, primarily because progressives just didn’t want to cast their ballots for someone who holds Van drew’s reactionary ideology… “Van Drew,” admitted Jacobs, “felt bruised that his victory was not by the margins he was accustomed to in his past legislative wins, according to the South Jersey Democrat-- even though federal races are far more partisan than state-level races. The result prompted Van Drew to go back to his playbook from his days in Trenton and try to demonstrate his bipartisan credentials.” Exactly the wrong move.
Although the New Jersey operative described Van Drew as very attentive to polls in the state legislature, the congressman had long been reluctant to actually put a poll in the field on impeachment. It was suggested that he knew the data “would put him in a box” and he was afraid to see it. When he finally commissioned a poll, in conjunction with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he “genuinely freaked out” when he saw the results.From that moment, it was only several days before Van Drew defected to the GOP. Former White House political director Bill Stepien and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie tried to clear a path for the congressman among Republicans in the Garden State. Kellyanne Conway, who was the only White House staffer present for Van Drew’s meeting with Trump, played a vital role as well.Van Drew was the first member of Congress to switch parties in almost a decade. The last one to do so, Parker Griffith, a one-term congressman from Alabama who switched from Democrat to Republican in 2009, told New York, “Ordinarily, it’s a mistake to switch parties. I made a mistake by switching parties. The mistake I made-- I made an assumption that everybody knew as much about politics as we did in D.C., and it really is an emotional decision.”Griffith was skeptical of Van Drew’s choice. “I hope he’s got a better handle on what he’s doing than I did.” The former congressman compared Van Drew’s Oval Office handshake with Trump to “fondling a rattlesnake.” He added, “I’m sure it made him feel good temporarily, but I don’t think Trump makes friends well, and doesn’t keep them well.”Van Drew now faces a number of political obstacles. As Suleiman told New York, he is “now persona non grata with Democrats.” The local county chair, who had been fiercely critical of Van Drew’s stance on impeachment before his defection, said, “No one likes a weasel, and no one likes a turncoat.” Already, several Democrats are running for the party’s nomination in 2020. Brigid Callahan Harrison, a political-science professor at Montclair State University, is currently considered the favorite.
She’s certainly the favorite of the grotesquely corrupt Norcross machine that had made Van Drew’s career. And because Norcross is behind her, Bustos and the DCCC are behind her. Trump is behind Van Drew, of course, but there were already 3 loyal Republicans running against him when he switched parties, including a very wealthy self-funder, Dave Richter. Trump will hold one of his bund rallies in NJ-02 early in the New Year.
Griffith, who eventually returned to the Democratic Party after losing his primary as a newly minted Republican in 2010, noted the personal cost that Van Drew could face as well.“He’s alienated a lot of people who put their faith in him,” said Griffith. Reflecting on his own experience, the former Alabama congressman said, “When you look in the faces of people you disappoint, and the tears in their eyes, and to this day it breaks my heart to think about it.”The hope for Van Drew is that his embrace of Trump will help convince voters that his party switch was motivated by a crisis of conscience, rather than a crisis of polling, and ease any bitterness. But it is a big risk for the freshman congressman who represents Atlantic City-- a community that’s had bad experiences betting on Trump in the past.
On Monday, Greg Giroux wrote for Bloomberg News that Van Drew’s chances to win are iffy “House party-switchers,” he wrote, “have a mixed electoral record, with some going on to win re-election while others facing primary defeats by voters unconvinced by their political conversion… Even with presidential support, Van Drew can’t expect a coronation in the June 2020 Republican primary against opponents who have been campaigning for months to unseat him. ‘As a lifelong conservative Republican, I have a message for liberal Switcheroo Van Drew: Bring it on,’ Bob Patterson, one of the candidates running in the Republican primary for New Jersey’s 2nd District, said in a Dec. 19 statement. Patterson criticized Van Drew as ‘pro-choice, pro-amnesty and anti-Trump.’” But can that message win when Trump is behind him?Brigid Harrison, the Machine/DCCC candidate, lives in Longport, which has always been a very exclusive area of the shore… kind of an “old money” area-- and the wrong look for the Democratic Party. Ashley Bennett announced on Friday. Last year she was elected to the Atlantic County Board of Freeholders, having gained a good reputation for challenging incumbent Freeholder John Carman after he posted a meme critical of the national Women’s March. Like most of the candidates running, Bennett is African-American. The Machine, of coursed, insisted on a white person. Amy Kennedy-- wife of Patrick Kennedy-- is also running. They live in Brigantine, another exclusive community for wealthy white people.Other candidates who have already thrown their hats into the ring are John Francis, a West Cape May commissioner, who spent “nearly three decades as a planet walker, playing the banjo and ‘traveling the globe by foot and said with a message of environmental respect and responsibility. He spent seventeen years without speaking.”Another Freeholder, Jack Surrency, from Cumberland County, is also running for the seat. We’ll spend some time trying to figure out who the best candidate or candidates are as alternatives to the Norcorss Machine’s Van Drew and Harrison. Meanwhile, if you're interested in helping keep the DCCC from recruiting and electing more Jeff Van Drew types, please consider supporting the candidates here, at the Primary A Blue Dog ActBlue page. Have't they done enough damage to the Democratic Party already-- and not just in New Jersey?