DeMicco and Weitzner are mojoless

By Wally Edge

Not a great cycle for Message & Media hotshots Steve DeMicco and Brad Lawrence: their two State Senate candidates got beaten – Ellen Karcher received 46% in District 12, and Seema Singh took just 37% in the fourteenth.

And now DeMicco and Lawrence have a bigger problem: their mail in the 37th district for Democrats Loretta Weinberg, Gordon Johnson and Valerie Huttle – the reformer pieces – seems to have really annoyed Bergen County Democratic Chairman Joseph Ferriero. Does this put DeMicco and Lawrence in a war with the powerful Ferriero?

And Jamestown’s Larry Weitzner again convinced a wealthy Republican to self-fund a campaign he was never going to win. In District 15, Robert Martin got just 37% of the vote in his challenge to Democratic State Senator Shirley Turner. It didn’t help when some of Martin’s final mailer ended up in the sixth district.

Weitzner also played a role -- his firm did the TV and mail -- in the first district, where Republican incumbent Nicholas Asselta lost to Democrat Jeff Van Drew by twelve percentage points.

Interestingly, these two consultants who had bad ’07 cycles could face off against each other next year: DeMicco is working for U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg and Weitzner is with GOP U.S. Senate candidate Anne Evans Estabrook.

(In case you missed it: a few Republicans were not pleased when Estabrook sent a mailer to Republican households last week introducing herself as a Senate candidate.)

WALLY EDGE can be reached via email at politicsnj@aol.com.

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