'We're the sleeping giant': Meet the man who thinks he can turn New Jersey red in 2020

From Delaware — home state of former Vice President and Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden — north to New Jersey and the suburbs of New York and on to Vermont and New England, Democrats can count on heavy support in the 2020 election. And yet, as veteran USA TODAY NETWORK columnist Mike Kelly and visual journalist Chris Pedota found, resilient pockets of Trump supporters persist amid this Democratic landscape. This is the third installment in a five-part series,"Red Islands in the Blue Sea.”

ABOARD THE MARINER III in NEW YORK HARBOR — It was a perfect night for a political message, and Steve Rogers was on a roll.

Nearly 80 Republican donors, some from as far away as Florida and Texas and others from as close as Rogers' own middle-class enclave of Nutley, New Jersey, had crowded aboard this century-old yacht for an evening of unbounded faith in President Donald Trump.

A golden sun dropped through the thin clouds and orange-purple sky over New Jersey. A warm breeze rippled the water. A gaggle of kayakers paddled by.

And now it was time for Rogers.

At 68 and after nearly four decades as a Nutley police officer, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve and, for the last seven years, a Nutley township commissioner, Rogers finds himself with a top perch in the Republican political pyramid as a member of Trump’s 2020 campaign advisory board.

For months he had been telling friends that he plans to win New Jersey’s 14 electoral votes for Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Friends would smile, maybe pat Rogers on the back and wish him good luck.

But Rogers insists he is not joking around.

“I’ve heard people say New Jersey is not in play. Why waste our time and money?” Rogers said in an interview. “But I believe New Jersey is in play. We’re the sleeping giant. I want to make New Jersey the shot heard 'round the world.”

Such unbridled optimism is rare in politics — even rarer among Republicans in America’s Northeast, where Democrats have built a formidable power base for their party’s presidential candidates. If Republicans promise to win, they often add a note of blinking-yellow caution.

Rogers does not care. Nor is he one to inject caution — even as Trump faces an impeachment inquiry. He sees New Jersey as a launch pad for a substantial Trump reelection in 2020.

No matter that Hillary Clinton won the Garden State in the 2016 presidential election with a 14 percent margin over Trump. No matter that voters elected four rookie Democratic congressional representatives in 2018 in what had been GOP-controlled districts or that Phil Murphy, a Democratic progressive, swept into the governor's seat in 2017 by a 14-point margin.

Rogers refuses to back down. Not even the rising chorus — and poll numbers — that call for Trump's impeachment have deterred Rogers in supporting the president.

“People are excited about the president,” Rogers said. Again, he is not joking.

The statement is typical of Rogers. It is broad, maybe even a little too broad. It also defies the dozens of surveys showing Trump’s approval ratings stuck below 50 percent since he entered office nearly three years ago.

Rogers, gray-haired but with the same trim, muscular carriage from his days on the police force, insists he relies on another type of research: the “laboratory” that he calls his own town of Nutley.

“I listen to what people say,” he said.

Thanks in part to Rogers' campaigning, Nutley’s voters embraced Trump in 2016 despite backing Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. “People,” said Rogers, “see Trump as restoring the economy.”

And even though Nutley supported Gov. Phil Murphy by 12 points over Republican Kim Guadagno, the incumbent lieutenant governor under Gov. Chris Christie, Rogers is not fazed. Nor is he discouraged by his own failed, decidedly quixotic attempt to win the GOP nomination to run against Murphy. In the June 2017 primary won by Guadagno, Rogers received less than 6 percent of the vote.

Guadagno lost badly in the general election, said Rogers, because she was largely seen as an extension of Christie, who left office with record-low approval ratings. As for his own race, Rogers blames his poor showing on his inability to rally the state Republican Party to his conservative cause.

The 2020 presidential race will be different, Rogers said.

“The president is very popular due to the fact that he has kept his promises on the economy,” he said. “I’ve been talking to people. They tell me their 401(k) retirement funds are strong. They like the fact that he is the guy who tells it like it is.”

'We are going on the offense'

And now, on a recent evening aboard the Mariner III in New York Harbor, Rogers delivered his message to a wider audience.

The Mariner III's engines quieted, and the 100-foot-long yacht, with its polished teak railings gleaming in the twilight, drifted under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty.

Seated by a gunwale on the top deck was John McCann of Oakland, New Jersey, who lost his bid to oust Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer of Wyckoff but is running again in 2020.

“I am what I am,” McCann said in a brief interview as the Mariner III slowly navigated the harbor. “I am running in full support of the president.”

Mendham Borough Mayor Christine Serrano-Glassner, whose husband was chairman of Trump’s campaign finance committee in 2016, said she believes that the president’s standing in New Jersey and in other Democratic states is rising.

“Trump’s support has picked up significantly,” she said as she waited for Rogers to speak. “Look at the economy.”

What’s striking is that financial experts across all political corners have been pointing to a variety of signs that indicate the nation’s economy is slowing — perhaps even heading toward recession. But this was not a night for nuance.

Rogers, his voice booming, launched into 10-minute pep-talk — what he described as a “game changer in the Trump campaign.”

“We are no longer on the defense,” Rogers declared. “We are going on the offense.”

The audience clapped. Rogers paused for a second or two.

“We’re going to come with all our might,” he continued. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to use the weapons of duty, of honor, of God and of country to take down the Democrat socialists. And make no mistake about it, they are socialists. And their agenda is dangerous for this country. We’re no longer fighting a political war. We’re fighting an ideological movement.”

He paused again.

“The survival of our nation is at stake,” he said.

Leaning against a yacht railing, D. Patrick Six, a Texas energy investor and former part-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, stepped toward the microphone after Rogers finished.

“The people want it. The nation needs it,” Six told the crowd. “This administration will take us into the next decade.”

'Stronger and tougher'

Weeks later, after speaking gigs in Florida and Atlantic City on behalf of Trump, Rogers walked into the Eagle Oaks Golf Club in Farmingdale, New Jersey, for a $125-per-person, get-out-the-vote dinner sponsored by New Jersey Women For Trump. Along with conservative radio host Steve Hook and former Trump White House staffer Sebastian Gorka, Rogers had been tapped as a speaker.

After passing through a squad of armed security guards at the door who checked names of guests, Rogers found himself standing before a Dixieland jazz combo that played patriotic songs such as "You're a Grand Old Flag," a cardboard cutout of a smiling Trump with a promise to "flip" New Jersey to a Republican majority and a table with a stack of "Socialism Sucks" posters.

Rogers strutted into the club's ballroom and paused. More than 400 people — many of them women clad in red dresses, red skirts, red shirts, red blouses, red shoes and red hats — sat at circular tables.

"What you see here is what the poll-takers do not see: grassroots America," Rogers said. "People from all walks of life are here, all different types of professions."

Later, at the podium for his 13-minute speech, Rogers echoed some of the boisterous themes he raised during his speech on the yacht in New York Harbor.

"I have a message for the Democrats and a message for the press," he said. "Know this: The Republican Party in the United States of America is stronger and tougher than it ever was in the history of this country. And know this: The Republican Party in the state of New Jersey is alive and well."

The audience cheered. Rogers raised his voice another notch.

"We are engaged in an ideological war against a monstrous evil called socialism," he told the crowd. "It is being advanced on every level of government. It is being advanced in our elementary schools, in our high schools and in our colleges. It is being advanced, ladies and gentlemen, in order to enslave the hearts, the souls and the spirit of the American people."

If you spend any time with Steve Rogers, you realize something about him: He knows how to craft a message.

“He’s been tremendous for the campaign,” Julio Gonzalez, a Trump fundraiser from West Palm Beach, Florida, said of Rogers’ impact on the president’s reelection efforts.

Gonzalez said he often teases Rogers as “the only Republican in New Jersey.” And while the informal title is delivered in jest, it nonetheless underscores one of Rogers’ prime themes for his own political life and for Republicans in general — that the party has to embrace a more basic, even simplified sense of where it stands on issues.

“It’s a new brand of conservatism and a new brand of Republicanism,” said Vin Burra of Staten Island, who now runs the Young Republican Club of New York. Being a Trump supporter in Democratic strongholds along the East Coast, Burra said, is “almost like a guerrilla fighter.”

“You’re sort of like an undercover agent trying to save the nation, and everywhere you look there are people operating against you,” he added. “You sort of feel like James Bond, trying to make change happen while you’re surrounded by hostiles.”

30 years of advocacy

Rogers learned the craft of political messaging nearly 30 years ago as a police officer. Noticing that police were being criticized, he convinced a New York radio station to let him host a call-in show — “The Police Desk” — in which he unabashedly defended police from accusations of excessive force and racism.

The show had a strong following among police officers. But the audience quickly expanded in the early 1990s, when Rogers found a nemesis: the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Sharpton began leading weekly demonstrations in Teaneck after a white police officer shot and killed a 16-year-old African-American teenager in 1990.

Rogers felt that the officer, Gary Spath, had been unfairly criticized. After all, Rogers said repeatedly, the teenager, Phillip Pannell, was carrying a gun.

No matter that Pannell had been shot in the back by Spath after a foot-chase near a Teaneck elementary school. And no matter that Pannell’s gun — a hollowed-out starter’s pistol that could fire .22-caliber bullets — was never drawn from his coat pocket and that forensic evidence indicated that the teenager was raising his hands to surrender.

Rogers had a simple message when he was asked to speak to a rally at the Bergen County Courthouse with hundreds of mostly white police officers who felt the media had focused too much on the racial discord that the shooting touched off.

“He had a gun,” Rogers said, repeating the line, which quickly turned into a chant by the crowd.

From Teaneck, Rogers became a conservative voice — mostly in defense of police in the first years, but then quickly branching into other issues that touched on the economy, taxes and such cultural touchstones as prayer in schools.

He also became a regular on CNN and Fox — and not just about politics. After serving several years a U.S. Navy military intelligence unit after the Sept. 11 attacks, Rogers became a go-to commentator on terrorism.

Now Rogers’ focus is entirely one man and one cause: Donald Trump.

Serving Nutley

Another cause is his work as a commissioner in Nutley.

On a recent morning, Rogers was seated behind a desk in his commissioner’s office. On the wall behind him, a framed photograph of President Ronald Reagan looked down. Across the room — next to a ceremonial sword presented by a U.S. Marines veteran group and a bookcase that held a World War I pith helmet and a signed photograph from Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani — hung a framed print of a painting of George Washington kneeling in prayer by his horse.

Rogers, who describes himself as a born-again Christian, keeps a copy of the King James Bible on his desk — just inches from a jar of red, white and blue jelly beans. Tucked inside the Bible’s cover are two letters — one that Rogers wrote to God and another to the commissioner who will replace him when he retires next summer.

“I believe in term limits,” Rogers said. “I said I would serve two terms. After this, I’m done.”

As Rogers arrived at his office that morning, the news was brimming with talk of impeachment over allegations that Trump tried to enlist help from Ukraine’s government in an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Just the night before, the cable news shows featured yet another story on how Giuliani had tried to intervene with Ukraine.

“Rudy’s off his rocker,” Rogers snapped as he sorted mail and listened to a voicemail message from a military veteran in Nutley.

Rogers is not worried about the threat of impeaching Trump.

“The Democrats have been doing what they said they would do,” he said, adding: “The story to me is that there is a great divide in the Democratic Party.”

As for impeaching Trump, Rogers added: “This will all be cleared up. Either the president committed an impeachment offense or he didn’t. No one is going to support breaking the law.”

He paused.

“The president,” he said, “broke no laws.”

The phone rang. A conservative talk-radio host from Phoenix was on the line. He wanted Rogers for a five-minute interview. An hour later, the phone rang again — this time from a Miami radio station.

At the end, Rogers rose, strutted through the door and settled behind the wheel of his car for a short drive across Nutley to Petracco’s & Sons Delicatessen.

Ten minutes later, he stood in the middle of the deli. A bust of Elvis Presley sat atop a counter. The sharp aroma of provolone cheese wafted through the air.

“This is where America comes together,” Rogers said.

Alphonse Petracco, the deli’s owner and also a Nutley township commissioner and Trump supporter, looked up from a table were he sat and smiled.

“I’ve learned a lot from Steve Rogers,” Petracco said. “Speak your mind. Stand up for what your values are, and don’t be afraid to say what’s on your mind in government.”

Minutes later, Rogers was out the door and heading back to his office.

“There are a lot of hidden Trump supporters,” he said as he cruised Nutley’s streets.

Rogers was smiling as he said this — as if he knows something the rest of us don't.

Mike Kelly is a columnist for the USA TODAY NETWORK. For more of Kelly's work, please consider subscribing to NorthJersey.com and the USA TODAY NETWORK.

Email: Kellym@northjersey.com Twitter: @MikeKellyColumn

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Election 2020: Meet the man who thinks he can turn New Jersey to Trump