Curtis Bashaw maneuvers his lanky body through a maze of picnic tables, stopping every few steps to repeat his upbeat introductory pitch to voters waiting for lunch on a recent weekday.
He is a Republican running to represent New Jersey in the U.S. Senate, he tells groups of graying attendees at Bergen County’s annual senior festival. A fiscal conservative, he adds. A hotel owner from Cape May, N.J. A gay, married man.
“I don’t think government should tell us what to do in our own homes,” he says, bending down on one knee to be heard above music coming from a nearby stage.
He has positioned himself as a moderate competing for a seat vacated in spectacular fashion by the state’s longtime Democratic senator, Robert Menendez, who was convicted of peddling his political influence in exchange for cash, gold and a Mercedes-Benz. Mr. Bashaw, 64, beat a candidate endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump to win the Republican nomination, and his showing in November will be a measure of his party’s appeal to centrist voters at a time of heightened polarization.
New Jersey has teetered between political parties when selecting governors. But it has been 52 years since voters elected a Republican senator, and both Mr. Bashaw and his closest supporters acknowledge that his road to victory is narrow.
“I don’t mind being stealth,” he says.
With the race for president at a fever pitch, turnout is expected to be robust, a factor that in New Jersey benefits Democrats, whose voters outnumber Republicans by 930,000. Mr. Bashaw has chipped in $1.8 million to his campaign, yet as of July 1 had $3 million less to spend than his Democratic opponent, Representative Andy Kim, who unveiled his first television ad last week and said he planned to be on the air through Election Day.
Last month, the state’s main gay rights organization, Garden State Equality, endorsed Mr. Kim. “If they’re about equality for gays — I’m gay,” Mr. Bashaw said, sounding exasperated.
He has assembled a formidable team. His main political adviser, Mike DuHaime, twice helped lead former Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, to victory. Jeanette Hoffman, his communications director, is a former executive director of the New Jersey Republican State Committee. Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, came on as a strategist in July.
One independent poll soon after the primary found Mr. Kim, a third-term congressman, ahead by seven points. A survey commissioned by the Bashaw campaign two months later found that he had narrowed the gap and was behind Mr. Kim by five points, within the poll’s margin of error.
It has been an extraordinarily volatile campaign cycle that has already reshaped politics in New Jersey.
“It’s interesting that this race is flying under the radar since it has shaken up the political power structure in such a significant way,” said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute.
The political intrigue in New Jersey spiked last September when Mr. Menendez was indicted, in New York, on corruption charges. The governor’s wife, Tammy Murphy, made a play for Mr. Menendez’s seat. That led her main opponent, Mr. Kim, to file a federal lawsuit challenging a practice that for decades has given preferential spots on primary ballots to candidates favored by the state’s powerful county political leaders.
Ms. Murphy, battered by accusations of nepotism, dropped out of the race. Mr. Kim won his legal challenge, upending a central pillar of party politics in New Jersey. Two of New Jersey’s 12 House members died after lengthy hospitalizations. And a jury convicted Mr. Menendez of taking bribes and acting as an agent of Egypt.
Yet until August, Mr. Menendez, 70, was still toying with seeking re-election as an independent — a strategy that Democrats struggling to retain a narrow majority in the Senate feared could siphon enough votes from Mr. Kim to benefit Mr. Bashaw.
That worry vanished when Mr. Menendez quit the Senate and pulled his name off the ballot hours before the deadline. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 29.
Mr. Bashaw, a first-time candidate, owns and operates coastal hotels on Long Island and at the southernmost tip of New Jersey in Cape May, where he renovated Congress Hall, a resort that dates to the 19th century and has long been a magnet for politicians from Trenton to Washington. He was appointed by Jim McGreevey, then the Democratic governor, to run the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority in Atlantic City, N.J., in 2004, a post he held for about two years that involved managing land use and trying to lure private investment to the seaside city.
Mr. Bashaw has been endorsed by several police unions and said he believed that Mr. Menendez’s trial and the first lady’s campaign had left enough of a taint on Democrats to help him make his case to voters.
“The stench of Menendez’s corruption hangs in the air,” he said. “The inside baseball of Tammy Murphy’s campaign is in the air.”
He cited the porous southern border and government regulation as issues he would tackle in Washington. He has criticized Mr. Kim for calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and has stressed Israel’s right to defend itself.
He said he supports abortion rights, but has also repeatedly said that the Supreme Court got it right when it overturned Roe v. Wade, ending a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy, because it returned decision-making to the states. Mr. Bashaw said that if elected, he would support bipartisan federal legislation to make abortion legal nationwide, but declined to say until what point in a pregnancy he believed it should be allowed.
Mr. Kim said he was baffled by his opponent’s position. “For him, the only thing ‘pro-choice’ means is the choice for legislators to make decisions about women’s bodies,” said Mr. Kim, a member of the Pro-Choice Caucus in Washington who opposed the end of Roe.
Mr. Bashaw, who during the primary waited for months to say he supported Mr. Trump, said the former president has his vote. “I’m going to vote for President Trump, in this race, at this point,” Mr. Bashaw said.
State Senator Michael L. Testa Jr., a right-leaning Republican who is chairman of Mr. Bashaw’s campaign, said Mr. Bashaw must appeal to the state’s 2.4 million so-called unaffiliated voters, who are not registered with either major party and whose support Republicans need to win statewide elections.
“There’s a narrow pathway,” Mr. Testa said from a coffee shop at Congress Hall. “If he executes his plan and it’s authentic, he can attract voters to the Republican Party who haven’t been voting with the party.”
People like Joanne Russo.
Ms. Russo, 68, an unaffiliated voter from Bogota, N.J., stopped Mr. Bashaw abruptly as he was campaigning in Paramus. “You’ve got to win,” she told him. “You have no choice.”
In an interview, she said she believed that the Democrats’ grip on both U.S. Senate seats, the governor’s mansion and both houses of the State Legislature had left New Jersey without a healthy system of checks and balances.
“New Jersey is in the Democratic bag,” Ms. Russo said. “I feel like, ‘Why vote?’”
Mr. Kim, 42, represents a largely rural and suburban district in southern and central New Jersey and is less well known in the more populous urban centers close to New York City, where he has been campaigning hard since jumping into the race the day after Mr. Menendez was indicted. Three debates between Mr. Bashaw and Mr. Kim are planned this month.
Democrats control the Senate, 51 to 49, and are fighting to protect seats in hotly contested races in Michigan, Montana and Ohio. Losing New Jersey, ranked by the Cook Political Report as solidly Democratic, would be a major upset.
Even Mr. Bashaw’s allies in Cape May, who are quick to praise his business acumen, say they are concerned that, if elected, he would have little choice but to fall in line with the conservative wing of the Republican Party, particularly if Mr. Trump wins the presidency.
“I always swear he’s the smartest guy in the room,” said Tom Carroll, who with his wife led Cape May’s revival as a bed-and-breakfast destination and has worked closely with Mr. Bashaw on historic preservation and business improvement efforts in the small city.
“As much as I like Curtis,” added Mr. Carroll, a Democrat, “I’m not really happy with him being a catch for the Republican Party and Trump.”
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