I wrote a while back about a stealth campaign being waged against New Jersey's Stem Cell proposal, which would have allowed the State to sell $450M in bonds over a ten-year period to fund research at State and non-profit facilities.
The stealth campaign's approach? "STOP HIGHER TAXES, VOTE 'NO' ON ALL BALLOT QUESTIONS."
The irony? The stealth campaign not only took down the Stem Cell question (by almost 2-1) but also managed to kill a proposal that might have actually LOWERED taxes.
Question #1 this year would have specifically targeted the money brought in by last year's increase in the state sales tax (from 6% to 7%) to lower property taxes in the municipalities. The stealth campaign against stem cells so ingrained "no taxes" in people's minds, that when they saw a proposal mentioning "sales tax" and "property tax," they reflexively voted "no" without reading the question.
At least that's the only way I'm able to reconcile polls that showed that people want property taxes lowered, and favored targeting the sales tax increase towards doing that by overwhelming numbers.
However, the "no on all questions" people didn't manage to kill ballot question #4, which removed the words "idiot" and "moron" from the list of classes of people ineligible to vote in the State. No joke. Unfortunately for all of us, that law doesn't seem to have been enforced while it was still on the books, because the results of today's ballot measures might have gone another way.
Oh, well, we still held the Assembly and increased our lead in the State Senate, and the Democrats swept every race in Cumberland County except a special election for Council here in Vineland where we lost by 250 votes to the well-funded Republican Machine. Still, questions #1 and #2 bug me.
©2007 P. Sungenis, All Rights Reserved.
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