In a piece over at CNN.com, I do my best to take a coherent message out of a night that didn’t particularly lend itself to one:
Corzine, for his part, ran a polarizing campaign; every time Christie’s name appeared in one of his commercials, it came with a scarlet (R) — for Republican — attached. Republicans are not popular in New Jersey, but local issues drove the race.
Whereas three-quarters of Corzine’s voters cited a national issue — health care or the economy — as their primary reason for voting for him, two-thirds of Christie’s picked a local one (property taxes and corruption).