Family-friendly NJ Democrats turn to the middle as vote looms. Here's why | Stile

Democrats, depicted as “woke” radicals who want to move the country too far and too fast to the left, are pushing a new image in this fall's races for the New Jersey Legislature.

Candidates, especially those in danger of being dislodged from their competitive districts, are presenting themselves as the homespun offspring of Ozzie and Harriet who are concerned about property taxes and other kitchen table issues.

For state Sen. Joe Lagana, D-Fair Lawn, and his Assembly candidate partners in the 38th Legislative District in Bergen County, the message literally begins on the kitchen table — in a new video depicting the candidates working together to make tomato sauce.

“That's us. Chris Tully, Lisa Swain and me, Joe Lagana, working together so Bergen families have a fair shot,” Lagana says, after serving a plate of pasta smothered in the new sauce. “Together, there is no problem too big, no ask too small, when you work every day for your family.”

In Central Jersey, District 16 Democratic candidates state Sen. Andrew Zwicker and his running mate, Assemblyman Roy Freiman, D-Hillsborough, and newcomer Mitchelle Drulis, of Raritan Township, are also turning to the homespun tableau, posing in family group shots in their mailers and ads, with the 1990s-era Freiman falling off the couch during horseplay with his kids.

“It helps to learn a little about their own families," begins one of their mail pieces.

And in the hotly contested 11th District in Monmouth County, incumbent Democratic Sen. Vin Gopal in one television spot is surrounded by police officers, who praise him for his responsiveness and for being a local guy.

“You have a problem, you call Vin," says one blunt-speaking officer. “The guy’s lived in Monmouth County his whole life. He’s one of us.”

Still shellshocked from 2021?

This family-first approach is part of a familiar campaigning strategy that introduces candidates in a gauzy, innocuous and friendly way — the politician from the neighborhood — before savaging their opponents. In almost all cases this fall, Democrats have followed the warm and fuzzy portraits with attacks on Republican rivals as Trojan horses for Trumpist extremism. Once in office, Republicans are certain to roll back reproductive rights in New Jersey, they charge.

But the approach also indicates that the party is still shellshocked from the 2021 contests, when Republicans snapped up a surprising six seats in the Assembly and one in the Senate. It was part of a national post-pandemic backlash fueled by a sense that Democrats had lurched too far to the left and lost touch with mainstream values and needs. The word “affordability” suddenly became the new rallying cry for Democrats, a call to focus more on pocketbook issues like property taxes, health care and schools instead of progressive goals.

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Now, with fear of Republicans gaining more ground this year and with all 120 seats in the Legislature on the ballot, Democrats, who have held a majority in both houses for nearly two decades, find themselves on the defensive again in a new culture war backlash over the once-bipartisan plan to build wind turbines off the Jersey Shore; Gov. Phil Murphy’s ambitious clean-energy call for electric cars; and a right-wing push to ban books and a “parental rights” crusade to notify parents over kids transitioning to another gender.

For Republicans, Murphy has become the cause celebre in their attack ads as they seek to gin up their base voters for what is expected to be a low-turnout election.

“The extreme left is destroying New Jersey!” reads one mailer from the Republican State Leadership Committee featuring Murphy with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, whose poll numbers have tanked in the state. The piece encourages voters to submit their ballots by mail.

Democrats, struggling to find a coherent pushback message, have also sought to boost their base voters, by labeling the Republicans as extremists and warning that they will roll back abortion rights in New Jersey if they reclaim the majorities.

Independent groups closely aligned with Democrats have led with hard-hitting attacks on the abortion issue, including Prosperity Rising NJ, a political action committee linked with Senate President Nicholas Scutari that has taken aim at Republicans in three competitive races.

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“Trenton Republicans will strip away everything we value," reads a mailer from the Communications Workers of America, the state’s largest public employees union.

Yet the candidates themselves have also taken a softer, homespun tack on abortion rights. Zwicker and Drulis, for example, have featured their children in warm, family-oriented television spots. In the ad, Drulis effectively argues that reproductive rights are a cherished, mainstream New Jersey value, not an agenda goal pushed solely by the left.

“Being a mom means she’s the reason I smile," Drulis says in an ad broadcast in August. “But she’s also the reason I worry. I worry about affording to stay here. I worry about her basic rights and freedoms.”

Headed to the center on police reform, parental rights

Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, said that approach “dovetails with the other side of the argument, which is ‘Our opponents are the radicals. Radical is not pro-choice (in New Jersey).' ”

He added that Democrats are making a “family values” argument, which is to preserve the right to decide on an abortion if “it should ever come to a member of our family.” And in New Jersey, where a majority of voters support some form of abortion rights, it’s an argument “that most New Jerseyans probably identify with.”

Democrats are attempting other pivots the family-friendly middle. Gopal’s appearance with police, for example, deflects the “defund the police” charge that haunted Democrats in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. But it is also a bid by Gopal to appeal to independents in a district that has become a priority for state Democratic Party leadership.

Another issue that has prompted a more centrist positioning is the “parental rights” push by right-wing groups that have pressured local school boards in Monmouth County, East Hanover and elsewhere to require school officials to notify parents when a student is considering a gender change. This new policy runs counter to a 2017 bipartisan state law, signed by Republican Gov. Chris Christie, that required protecting a transgender's student's confidentiality and restricted notification without the student's consent.

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But parental rights activists say the 2017 law and the State Board of Education guidance that carries out its provisions stripped away the fundamental rights of parents to raise their children. The policy, they say, is big-government intrusion into the rights of parents.

That is a distortion of what the policy actually did — which was to protect a small number of vulnerable children from possible violent retaliation from parents unwilling to accept their change. Still, polls show that the issue, when boiled down to an emotional, slogan-like simplicity, is a potent one for Republicans who have embraced the cause.

“Republican candidates are using these attacks because they work,” said Dan Cassino, director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University poll, who showed in a recent survey that the issue could prove to be a powerful weapon for Republicans. “If voters are thinking about parental control of schools when they go to the ballot box, Democrats are in real trouble.”

It also helps explain why Gopal and other competitive-district Democrats have tried to protect themselves from the attacks from the right saying they oppose parental rights and supervision. In the 3^rd Legislative District, in South Jersey, Democratic Senate candidate John Burzichelli adopted a pro-parent position that doesn’t necessarily embrace the “parental rights” agenda — nor does it outright reject the state policy limiting parental notification.

“Parents should have a major role in deciding what’s best for our kids' schooling — not bureaucrats in Trenton, or Washington," reads a Burzichelli mailer.

Burzichelli, a former longtime Assemblyman from Gloucester County, is seeking to unseat Republican Ed Durr, the truck driver who defeated the powerful Senate President Steve Sweeney in 2021. In an interview, Burzichelli explained the reasoning behind the mailer.

“It's not fair to say that the only parental right that matters is those that are focusing on gender issues,” he said.

Charlie Stile is a veteran New Jersey political columnist. For unlimited access to his unique insights into New Jersey’s political power structure and his powerful watchdog work, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: stile@northjersey.com 

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: NJ Democrats turn toward the middle ahead of 2023 election