It's a close race. Good News, Kossacks! Linda Stender is running neck and neck with Santorum-lite bad boy Mike Ferguson. (49% Ferguson, 46% Stender).
Linda's bringing in money. Meanwhile, closer to home, I was quite happy to very literally run into Linda Stender this morning, as she and a few supporters were out meeting the public at the local train station today. She was very pleasant and quite engaging, even though it wasn't even 7am yet. With just a little research at PoliticsNJ.com, I was able to find that "Rep. Mike Fergsuon has raised $2,405,369 and has $925,870 cash-on-hand, while challenger Linda Stender has raised $1,368,083 and has $295,671 remaining in her warchest. But in the last quarter, Stender raised more money than Ferguson: $468,343 to $393,723." I was a little taken aback by this, since the disparity is so great. I'm given to understand that the race is dead even otherwise, so if anyone out there can spare it, please please go and make a contribution as I'm sure she will need it.
More polls.
Constituent Dynamics released polls for a bunch of Congressional races around the country. Among these races is NJ7 between incumbent Mike Ferguson (R-NJ7) and Linda Stender (D-NJ), which is a virtual tie at 49/46 respectively among likely voters.
With the margin of error of 3.1 percent that is a tie.
Constituent Dynamics does their polling via robocalls that people respond to via push buttons and that method is not too common. Still, with a sample of 1022 likely voters from October 8-10 it's gotta be close.
Good (effective) negative ads.
Some of the Linda Stender mail pieces have been hard-hitting, some have been a little blander. But this one shows that the campaign has chutzpa and is ready to take the fight to Mike Ferguson (R-NJ7) for the next two weeks.
For those who don't know, Ferguson was in a row back a few years where he got in a bar tussle in Georgtown with a woman and only his staffers saved it from being a big mess. Mailing this piece just a little over a week after the Mark Foley shenanigans hit the news is bold and extremely aggressive.
It's good to see the Stender campaign jumping on this and pointing out the hypocricy of Ferguson's protestations against Foley. He is part of the problem, and the folks in NJ7 need to realize that.
This piece, with the party graphic, the loud callout on the front page and the entire news article with no redactions makes the point clearly.
Ferguson's dirty - Delay, illegal campaign financing, more.
As a resident of New Jersey's 7th Congressional district, I am unfortunate enough to be represented by Mike Ferguson, who has a number of strikes against him worthy of notice:
Recieved more money from Tom DeLay than any other Representative - $57,000 of it.
Recived the biggest fine from the FEC in history - $210,000, for illegally loaning money to his campaign.
Called "Mr. Embyro" by his colleagues for his total opposition to abortion and stem cell research. In fact, he apparently declared to a mom whose son is paralyzed "'Mrs. Riccio, your son is not going to walk in his lifetime."http://www.nj.com/...
Oh, and he likes hitting on college girls in his spare time, too. http://www.whymikewhy.com/...
You can read more about him at http://www.whymikewhy.com/...
And he's a prick. If you were to design a weapon against Republican Congressman Mike Ferguson, you could not do much better than Tricia Riccio. ...
She is an articulate soccer mom whose son, Carl, broke his neck during a high school wrestling match in 2003.
Since then, she has become a crusader for embryonic stem cell research, on the reasonable grounds that it presents the only chance her son will ever lift himself out of his wheelchair and walk. ...
But Riccio had something more. She made it personal. She made Ferguson sound cruel.
In a meeting in his office last year, she said, Ferguson flat-out told her that her son's case was hopeless.
"He said, 'Mrs. Riccio, your son is not going to walk in his lifetime.'"
Delay, Abramoff, and Ney. TIES WITH TOM DELAY AND JACK ABRAMOFF
Ferguson has taken:
- $57,403 from Tom DeLay's ARMPAC.
- $1,000 from convicted DeLay associate Jack Abramoff.
- $3,000 from Abramoff associate and former DeLay staffer Tony Rudy.
- $7,500 from Bob Ney, the first congressman to plead guilty in the Jack Abramoff investigation.
- $2,500 from former Tom DeLay chief of staff Ed Buckham, whose consulting firm closed down after Abramoff's guilty plea.
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