News
After Long Primary Night, GOP Candidate Awaits Final Tally
By John Burton
SEA BRIGHT - Tuesday was a long night for friends and supporters of GOP candidate Diane Gooch as they waited for final votes to be tallied in the primary battle between Gooch and Tea Party candidate Anna Little for the right challenge incumbent Democrat Frank Pallone Jr. in the race to represent the 6th Congressional District.
Early in the evening, the crowd at Merri-Makers at the Waters Edge on Ocean Avenue enjoyed a buffet dinner, and talked politics among themselves.
After the polls closed at 8 p.m., supporters crowded around a laptop computer to check results while the candidate remained sequestered with campaign staff and party officials in a closed room at the catering hall.
With no final tally in sight, Gooch emerged at 11 p.m. to address her supporters.
"I'm sorry," told the audience as her family and staff stood nearby. "We won't find out tonight."
With votes still being tallied as the night drew to a close, Gooch thanked the crowd for their efforts on behalf of her campaign.
"It's been an incredible race," she said, adding that she appreciated the support she had received during her run for the nomination. But as for now, "We'll find out when we find out," she said, as the deejay cued up Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'".
Gooch, a Rumson resident, who along with her husband, Michael, owns The Two River Times™, was making her first attempt at elected office by seeking the party line in the November general election to represent the 6th District, which includes 44 municipalities covering portions of Monmouth, Middlesex, Union and Somerset counties.
Gooch, who is also the Monmouth County Republican vice-chair, won the party endorsement for the four counties and had garnered support from a number of party stalwarts, including the state legislators representing the county's three districts, two of the three GOP county freeholders and some local elected officials and Republican organizations from around the district.
But she faced a challenge from Highlands mayor and former county freeholder Anna Little.
Little ran a campaign that seemed to tap into some of the prevailing voter backlash aimed at incumbents and the political establishments, what is referred to as the "Tea Party" crowds that are seeking to push back on what they view as overreaching government intrusion and spending.
Little had garnered endorsements from a number of the Tea Party groups throughout the state, as well as from activist and former gubernatorial candidate Steve Lonegan, and a number of political conservative organizations in her attempt to circumvent the party establishment, running a sort of insurgent campaign to take on Pallone.
Pallone, Long Branch, is an 11-term member of the House of Representatives, who has drawn the ire of some conservatives for his role in supporting the Congress's health care, and "cap and trade" environmental legislation and other portions of the Democrats' agenda.
As of Wednesday afternoon the unofficial tallies in Monmouth County showed Gooch trailing Anna, by 45.91 percent to 54 percent of the vote. But in Middlesex Gooch was leading with 58.17 percent to Little's 41.58 percent. In Monmouth County, however, there remained approximately 44 provisional ballots (for those who for whatever reason were prevented from casting electronic votes) to be counted. According to Hedra Siskel, Monmouth County's superintendent of elections/ commissioner of registration, those ballots would be evaluated for acceptance and then counted probably by Wednesday night (after press time) and the results would likely be known by Thursday.
Calls placed to the Middlesex Board of Elections on Wednesday were not returned by press time.
The Gooch campaign said it would wait until every vote was counted before making any decisions.
For the other congressional race in Monmouth County, a seemingly similar scenario took place as upstart David Corsi, Oceanport, actually defeated in Monmouth County the Republican Party approved Scott Sipprelle, Princeton, who owns a successful investment firm. Sipprelle won sufficiently in the remainder of the 12th District to win a place on the November ballot to take on Democratic incumbent Rush Holt.
Tuesday evening Monmouth County Republican Chairman Joseph Oxley seemed genuinely surprised by the tight race. "Nobody expected this," he said.
As for the reasons for the outcome and the number crunching, "That's what we're going to have to sort out," Oxley added; but he did think the low turnout for the election was a factor. "It's going to be like school board races," he said, "very low numbers."
In Monmouth County there were 9,406 Republican votes cast for the district (not including provisionals). Countywide there were 32,861 GOP votes cast out of 432,861.
"There were dynamics at play this election day," not in the least, were people distracted by the beautiful weather, said Joseph M. Kyrillos Jr. (R-13), a Gooch supporter. "A majority of voters did not come out and that was bad for democracy," he said.
"The great irony is that Diane Gooch and Anna Little agree on a majority of issues," Kyrillos added.
"We know for sure the people who consider themselves part of the Tea Party did organize and managed to connect with other people to make an impact on this primary," observed Ingrid Reed, director for the Eagleton Institute of Politics, at Rutgers University.
"Anna Little supporters had great, great energy," observed Kyrillos.
Given Corsi's and Little's strong showing with much less resources, the Republican Party in the counties, "You sort of have to ask, Where was the Republican Party in terms of organization and getting out the vote?" Reed wondered.
The Republicans would be ill advised to assume they have the ready support of Tea Parties and should expect to have to work to win them over, as Little's and Corsi's campaigns showed, "that makes it their running against the Republican Party as well as the Democratic Party," Reed said, with the thinking being, "part of the process is part of the problem."
Congressional and countywide Democratic candidates did not face primary challenges.
