Republicans want Menendez’s Senate seat. Trump devotion is getting in the way.

New Jersey Republicans should have their best chance in decades to win a Senate seat with Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez on trial, but the leading candidates are mired in a losing strategy: supporting Donald Trump.

It’s become a ritual for Republican candidates nationwide, and tends to lead to success in party primaries. But backing Trump hasn’t worked yet for anyone seeking statewide office in New Jersey.

The party’s conundrum is on stark display in the Senate primary: Christine Serrano Glassner, a Trump-endorsed mayor, is all in on 2020 election denial while the moderate hotelier Curtis Bashaw is now backing Trump with no substantial record of supporting him in the past.

Chris Russell, a longtime top Republican strategist in the state not affiliated with either campaign, sees this as a liability. “Anytime that a Republican in New Jersey gets into a position where they are identified solely by the national brand, it just doesn’t go well.”

It also hasn’t worked in a number of flippable statewide races in blue and swing states around the country, with notable losses for Trump-backed candidates in last year’s Kentucky governor’s race and the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate election that helped preserve Democrats’ slim majority.

Trump lost by double digits in the past two presidential elections in New Jersey, and his support of the GOP nominee for Senate didn’t help defeat Menendez in 2018.

Yet endorsing the former president seems to be a must for most Republican candidates. The same is true in the early stage of the 2025 Republican primary for New Jersey governor, with one of the two declared candidates endorsing Trump last month after famously calling him a “charlatan” who is unfit to be president nine years ago.

In the Senate contest, both candidates are racing to pledge their allegiances to Trump ahead of the June 4 primary, while Democrats have spent most of the year railing against the state’s party boss system. As a result, neither party’s primary has focused much on policy. For Democrats, most of the oxygen was consumed by debate over New Jersey’s “county line,” a unique ballot design that gives party leaders unusual influence over elections. For Republicans, what little oxygen is left has been sucked up by Trump.

Mike DuHaime, another top GOP strategist and an adviser to the Bashaw campaign, said that to win as a Republican in New Jersey, “It’s difficult to do, but the math is simple. You need to win more than two thirds of independents.”

“You have to be bigger than the national brand, you have to have to be a little bit more local. And if it’s just a typical Democrat versus a typical Republican, you don’t win,” he added.

Bashaw’s first television ad, put out on May 2, gives some sense of his policy positions, heavily criticizing President Joe Biden’s border policy and inflation — both issues that Serrano Glassner also lists on her website.

Serrano Glassner, meanwhile, started airing ads Thursday touting her recent endorsement by Trump and pointing out Bashaw’s past donations to “radical Democrats,” saying he “is no conservative.”

Bashaw had no record of supporting Trump besides having a Trump supporter on his campaign when he launched it in January. Then, in early April, Bashaw suddenly endorsed the former president. Jeanette Hoffman, a spokesperson for Bashaw, called that move a clarification of his position, saying, “[Bashaw] would support [Trump] as an alternative to President Biden, who’s taken the country in the wrong direction on issues ranging from the economy to the border.”

But Bashaw’s campaign is not totally leaning into Trump’s political rhetoric — and part of his strategy is to win over a portion of Biden voters as a “common sense Republican.”

Serrano Glassner, on the other hand, has wholeheartedly embraced Trump — and all of his conspiracies about the 2020 election. Married to former Trump campaign adviser Michael Glassner, she said that the election had “entirely too much suspect and criminal activity that was taking place” during an April 3 online “debate” — which Bashaw backed out of less than a week before. That sparked criticisms from Serrano Glassner that he was “too chicken to debate the only pro-Trump candidate in the U.S. Senate race, just like he’s too chicken to back Trump.”

And in a rally in Wildwood on May 11, Trump rewarded Serrano Glassner’s loyalty with an endorsement. “I was going to stay out of it but you’re running against a Christie person,” he said onstage, likely a reference to Bashaw’s 2016 support of the former New Jersey governor.

Other warning signs for GOP

The last time Menendez was up for reelection in 2018, Republican Bob Hugin raised at least $8 million before the primary. He ultimately raised and spent $39 million — most of it his own — to try defeating the incumbent Democrat who had just beaten corruption charges a year earlier. Menendez spent a third of that and won by 11 points.

But now, with Menendez on trial again and Hugin now leading the state GOP, neither Republican has anywhere close to the money Hugin had and spent in the primary, although that could change after the election.

There are other warning signs that Republicans Bashaw and Serrano Glassner don’t have much of a chance and aren’t trying very hard to take back the Senate seat: Neither candidate has raised even a fraction of what the last Republican nominee for Senate did in 2018, when Menendez was fresh off a mistrial, and one recent poll showed Democratic Rep. Andy Kim up six points when up against each Republican in general election races to replace Menendez.

First quarter campaign filings show Bashaw has a campaign war chest of $1.1 million, while Serrano Glassner has around $400,000. A significant portion of Bashaw’s funding — $600,000 — came from Bashaw himself in campaign loans. Kim, on the other hand, has nearly $7 million in his campaign stash and has proven to be one of the country’s most effective fundraisers since winning election to the House in 2018.

Statewide races in New Jersey are extremely costly due to the need to buy into both New York and Philadelphia media markets — two of the most expensive in the nation. Russell explained that each candidate should be raising “something in excess of a half million dollars in the last three months, and I’d argue that’s probably light, then that’s a problem,” he said prior to the release of the filings.

Local support is also crucial in this race, as national organization support tends not to flow into New Jersey for Republicans. The National Republican Senatorial Committee did not spend any money on Senate races in the state in 2018 or 2020, the last time that Sens. Menendez and Cory Booker were up for reelection, respectively. They also aren’t making a bid in the state this year, but are using Menendez’s trial as campaign fodder against other vulnerable senators, like Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey and Montana’s Jon Tester.

And the state party stays out of primaries, except for exceptionally rare cases, Russell said. He added that their neutrality up to now has been “standard” compared to previous primaries.

Neither candidate can expect much national help, either. The National Republican Senatorial Committee is not expected to play in the New Jersey Senate race, instead focusing on incorporating Menendez’s legal problems into a larger narrative against Democrats in Pennsylvania and Montana races.

Bashaw has more organizational support than Serrano Glassner, which typically translates to primary success because of New Jersey’s county line system. Candidates endorsed by county organizations get placed in a row or column, making them appear more legitimate to voters — it can increase a candidate’s share of a primary vote by up to 50 percentage points, according to one study.

Although a federal judge has ruled that system unconstitutional in the Democratic primary — because of a lawsuit brought by Kim — it is still in place for the Republican primary. Bashaw has the endorsement of 14 county parties, twelve of which use the county line, while Serrano Glassner has seven endorsements, six in counties that use the line.

Is the race really competitive?

Despite Bashaw’s advantage in his finances and his local support, polling shows that both he and Serrano Glassner lag significantly behind Kim in a general election. If indicted Menendez enters the race as an independent — which he has said he’ll do if he is “exonerated” by the summer, Kim has a six-point lead over both Republican candidates, while if Menendez stays out, that lead grows to nine points over Bashaw and 10 over Serrano Glassner.

The last time Republicans seemed to have a chance to flip the seat, in 2018, Hugin lost decisively by 12 points. The bigger threat to the seat had actually come earlier that year, in the Democratic primary, when relatively unknown challenger Lisa McCormick won nearly 40 percent of the vote in what was widely seen as a protest against Menendez.

Since then, though, Democrats have increased their registration to a nearly million-voter advantage. And although voters have elected several Republican governors since a GOP Senator served in Washington 52 years ago, it seems unlikely they would break their pattern of keeping that seat blue in the same year Biden and Trump top ballots, Taylor said.

“I have a hard time seeing that a voter would vote for Biden and then, especially given the incredibly slim majority, would vote for a Republican senator,” said Jessica Taylor, the senate and governors editor of the Cook Political Report.