You Know He's a Candidate by the Campaign Button

With New Jersey's gubernatorial primary about a month away, the leading Republican candidates are coming into view. Good thing for the front-runner that it's tough to quote the crickets in print.

Businessman Doug Forrester has managed to pull narrowly ahead of his GOP rival, former Jersey City mayor Bret Schundler. But that's only among the small number of voters who've heard of either man. By any measure, Mr. Forrester should be better known: He ran for U.S. Senate against Robert Torricelli in 2002. In the middle of that campaign, Mr. Torricelli, known as the "Torch," was handicapped by a fundraising scandal -- the Senate ethics committee had just admonished him for accepting pricey gifts and loans from a supporter who had pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign contributions. When the news broke, things suddenly were looking up for Mr. Forrester.

Then came the switcheroo. Mr. Torricelli's negatives jumped and he pulled out of the race five weeks before the election. Mr. Forrester should have won by default, but retired Senator Frank Lautenberg came to the rescue by way of a friendly state supreme court, which unanimously ignored state election law to let the Democratic party place a new name on the ballot. The well-liked and well-known Mr. Lautenberg trounced Mr. Forrester.

If Mr. Forrester is a student of history, he should be worried. According to Quinnipiac polls, between January and early September in 2002, the percentage of voters who hadn't heard of him never fell below 71%. Among Republicans, it was 64%. When the Torch burned out eight weeks before Election Day, voters looked for another candidate, saw Mr. Forrester and asked, Who's that guy?

You'd think the 2002 election controversy would at least have raised Mr. Forrester's name ID. But this year, even after a deluge of campaign ads on expensive New York and Philadelphia channels including some attacking his presumed Democratic opponent Jon Corzine, 50% of voters still don't know who Doug Forrester is. He's lucky that Mr. Schundler, who's trailing only slightly, is even more unrecognized by most Jersey voters. Should Mr. Corzine be looking for a winning campaign strategy in the fall, his best bet might be to smile, keep quiet and never acknowledge that there's even another candidate in the race.