Bruce James

Salem Freeholder Bruce Bobbit to GOP opponent: "Don’t tell me I’m a freaking tow truck driver. He can kiss my ass."
In often overlooked Salem, a competitive freeholder race.

Republicans in New Jersey’s least populated county have an opportunity this year to take back a majority on the freeholder board that’s been controlled by Democrats since 2002, but they’ll need to sweep the election to do it.

“We’re counting on it,” said Salem GOP Chairman Paul Reed.

It’s not impossible.  While Democrats hold a 6-1 majority on the board, Salem is a true ticket-splitting swing county.  National and statewide voting trends don’t always correlate with local election results in this county of 64,000, where voters tend to judge local candidates by personal interaction rather than the letter next to their name.

And the county’s votes on national and statewide elections are unpredictable.  Ingrid Reed, Director of the Eagleton Institute for New Jersey Politics, noted that the county went for Al Gore in 2000 by six points and George W. Bush in 2004 by the same margin.  In the 2005 Assembly races, it picked Democrats over Republicans 58% to 42%.  But Jon Corzine only edged out Doug Forrester by two points.

In 2007, Salem elected one Democrat and one Republican to the Board of Freeholders -- each by comfortable margins.  In 2006, voters elected a Republican Sheriff and two Democratic Freeholders.  And in 2005, Sullivan won his Freeholder seat by exactly one vote over GOP incumbent David Sparks.

Passaic County Republicans don’t need an internal war.  But they’ve got one.

The latest flare up between leadership factions in the party occurred last Monday, when freeholder candidates Mike Marotta and Jerry Holt held a joint beefsteak dinner fundraiser with Chairman Scott Rumana, who’s also an Assemblyman, at the Brownstone Restaurant in Paterson.

That led Rumana’s critics to charge that he was competing for resources with the cash-strapped freeholder candidates.  Rumana, in turn, said that his critics were holdovers from the dark days of the party and puppets of the man who used to control it: Peter Murphy.

Meanwhile, Marotta and Holt are stuck uncomfortably in the middle while they try to campaign against Democratic incumbents Bruce James and Greyson Hannigan.