Bret Schundler

Here's a scenario: a former Jersey City mayor quits the post to make an unsuccessful bid for governor. After an eight year absence from the local political scene, he returns to run for mayor against 10 candidates, including an incumbent with a big war chest but who is under fire for raising property taxes, and a rising star named Cunningham.

The main issues in the campaign are taxes, crime and housing.

Sound familiar?

It probably does, and it's not just because that's one probable story line for the 2009 election.

Bret Schundler, the Mayor of Jersey City from 1992 to 2001, hasn't decided if he'll run again next year.
Shortly after moving to Jersey City in 1985, a 26-year-old Bret Schundler ascended the escalator at the Grove Street PATH station and found a group of men drinking beer and playing craps.

"It was incredible to me that they could be doing that in plain view in that public a place and not worry about it," said Schundler, who had left off working on Democratic political campaigns to take up a career in finance.  "But the police back then didn't think that was enough of a serious crime to worry about."

Witnessing that kind of scene helped inspire the beginning of an extraordinarily unlikely political career.  Seven years later, Schundler, who had undergone an ideological transformation into a conservative Republican, went on to be elected mayor of a heavily Democratic city.

Almost eight years after leaving office and going on to run two unsuccessful bids for governor, Schundler now says that he's witnessing a throwback the machine politics that he worked so hard to change - the same type of policies that he thinks brought Jersey City to the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1990s, when the city led the state in job losses and 22% of residents defaulted on their property taxes.

Even though he says he’s the front runner in Tuesday’s Republican U.S. Senate primary, Murray Sabrin is already thinking ahead to 2009.  One Sabrin friend, with knowledge of the campaign strategy, says that the Ramapo College professor is likely to run for Governor next year.  That throws an interesting wrench into the plans of former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan, who is likely to count the Ron Paul/Libertarian wing of the New Jersey GOP as part of his natural base in a gubernatorial primary against U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie.   Sabrin has been complaining about Lonegan since last month, when the conservative leader pulled out of a campaign fundraiser and slapped his wrists for running an especially nasty Senate campaign.  

Former Mayor Bret Schundler's political future is the talk of Jersey City political circles this week because of polling phone calls being received in the area.

Schundler, a conservative Republican who served as Mayor of this ultra-Democratic town from late 1992 until 2001, would not confirm or deny putting a poll in the field, but responded by e-mail that he has not decided whether or not to run again.

The polling questions, however, have set off speculation that Schundler is leaning towards making a run for it, while others doubt what kind of support Schundler can get after leaving the city's political scene altogether and running twice as a firmly right wing gubernatorial candidate.

Either Justin Murphy thinks the name Bret Schundler is magic, or he’s got nothing else: the former Tabernacle Deputy Mayor announced that the former Mayor of Jersey City and 2001 gubernatorial candidate endorsed his bid for the GOP nomination for Congress in the third district – for the second time.  Schundler first endorsed Murphy on January 28.