Booker’s Lead Slips to Six Points
By Alec Torres
October 1, 2013 10:31 AM

"Internal polling conducted by New Jersey senatorial candidate Steve Lonegan’s campaign and obtained by National Review Online shows Newark mayor Cory Booker’s lead slipping to six points, 48 to 42. A Quinnipiac poll released last week showed Booker leading Lonegan by 12 points, and even that poll was considered a positive sign for the former Bogota mayor, as the earliest tallies showed Booker ahead by over 20 points.

The latest internal numbers for Lonegan also show Booker’s negatives inching up. “Booker is 37-27 net favorable, a major shift from the 42-18 numbers he held two weeks ago,” a memo from pollsters to the campaign reads. Nonetheless, the pollsters find significant advantages for the celebrity mayor, who, they note, is “still getting a significant share of the suburban and Republican vote.”
. . . .
it is clear that Booker — who was expected to waltz to victory in this race — now has a real competition on his hands."
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/360...nts-alec-torres

Lonegan's doing this in an ultra blue state by being true to his small government, libertarian leaning roots. No reaching across the aisle to compromise.

Note: Lonegan and another small government conservative were the only two R's in the primary, i.e. willing to challenge Booker. .

Zitat

---

All of this is accentuated by Lonegan’s deliberate contrasting of the free market, as exemplified by his own success story, with the massive failures of the liberal welfare state. The desperate need of liberalism to control the lives of individual Americans, as they once sought to control young Steve Lonegan’s by pushing him into a lifetime of government dependency.

Lonegan is not shy in making his contrasts with what he disdainfully refers to as the “Obama Agenda,” which he describes as everything from Obamacare to the Common Core education issue to Cap and Trade.
. . . .
They say Steve Lonegan is an underdog.

Then again, he has been an underdog his entire life. Listening to the complete version of his struggle with blindness is truly inspirational. It is both Steve Lonegan’s American story and America’s story. A story of persistence, courage, and character.

Now Steve Lonegan pledges to put these qualities into the fight against Obamacare.

New Jersey voters, watching agog as what Lonegan calls the “cold, cruel fingers” of the entitlement state now strangle their own jobs and health care, are paying attention.
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/10/01...ans-bold-colors

---

For those who are unaware of it, the reference to a lifetime of government dependency is a reference to Lonegan's retinitus pigmentosa, a hereditary eye condition, which has left him legally blind.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/05...w_republic.html

Zitat

---

tLonegan, 53, campaigns with the single-mindedness of a bloodhound and the subtlety of a rattlesnake

---