John Villapiano

In district 11, a last minute shot by the Democrats to make the Assembly contest competitive with a six-figure check translated in part into an attack ad targeting Republican David Rible of Wall Township.

Rible is running for the Assembly with Mary Pat Angelini of Ocean against Democrats John Napolitani of Interlaken and John Pirnat of Belmar.

On Sunday, after attending a service at St. Stephen AME Zion Church in Asbury Park, the men went to the brick wall of a convenience store in Asbury, and acknowledged the name of Justin Johnson.

Johnson, 19, a resident of Atlantic Avenue, died of a gunshot wound last Thursday in Old Village, and now his name is scrawled on a piece of cardboard taped with a balloon to that wall with others who were the victims of gang shootings.

A woman stopped by to look at the messages for the dead left on the wall. Her brother was also killed and his picture is there, and the men listened to her story in this campaign season, in this town devastated by gang violence.

Democrats John Villapiano, John Napolitani and John Pirnat - the three Johns, as they call themselves - are not the favorites in this seaside legislative race. The senate candidate Villipiano is up against a popular legislator in Assemblyman Sean Kean, and lacks significant financial support from the state committee.

For more 11th district campaign videos, visit Max Pizarro's Video Blog

In an under-the-radar race in district 11, Republican Assemblyman Sean Kean is depicting his opponent as a big tax guy, a onetime member of the Assembly who voted for Gov. Jim Florio's tax hike in the early 1990s and subsequently lost his seat in Trenton.

In his stump speech, Kean uses the jaw-dropping jump in the state budget from $21 to $34 billion since Democrats took office. Given those figures, the last thing the state needs, in Kean's view, is John Villapiano, a broadly grinning, big-hearted liberal returning to Trenton.

With about five weeks to go before the general election, it’s risky to write off any political campaign as a lost cause. But several underdog candidates who once seemed to have a slight chance at running competitive races do not seem to have picked up steam or support from their parties.

State Senate candidates Robert Colletti, Richard Dennison, Gina Genovese and John Villapiano have all run spirited campaigns. And while none has a good shot at winning on November 6th, all four insist that their campaigns are very much alive.

Meanwhile, Seema Singh’s State Senate campaign isn’t necessarily dead, though it is on life support.

John Villapiano, who served in the Assembly from 1988 to 1990, is seeking a political comeback as a State Senate candidateThere’s a big dividing line in the 11th district, and it’s not just where the breakers catch the brunt of the ocean in Asbury under the Paramount Theater, or where the old Long Branch Boardwalk crumbled, leaving behind an eminent domain-purged stretch of high rises and attendant fufu shops.

It’s a line even older still, even more entrenched, that separates one town from another, rich from poor, where the median household income in Asbury Park is $23,081, and 30% of the16,546 population live below the poverty line, while in Rumson, population 7,137, the median household stands at $120,865.

If the latter is the district’s lavish hilltop paradise, there’s another divider in Asbury, a town in flux, where west of the railroad tracks the hard-bitten times are evident, and where to eastward the gay community continues to suffuse the place with redevelopment dollars and a touch of the Parisian. Up against the influx of gay yuppiedom, old guard dogs of the Jersey rock and roll scene like the Wonder Bar and the Stone Pony look one wayward wave removed from getting scrubbed off the map for keeps.

Assemblyman Sean Kean today used the unraveled Fort Dix attack plan to rail against the state’s current methods of homeland security fund distribution, saying state Democrats were putting partisan politics ahead of safety. He used the thwarted plan as an argument for the need-based system of distributing state homeland security dollars he has been pushing for in the Assembly.

“Hopefully this will serve as a reminder that we need to remain ever vigilant against these threats and that one way to do so is to ensure we are wisely utilizing our state homeland security dollars,� said Kean, a Monmouth County Republican.