Jersey City, NJ – Independent Candidate Stirs Up the Governor’s Race in New Jersey

Jersey City, NJ – Christopher J. Daggett had the crowd on its feet.

Well, it was a bar, there were not many seats, and the crowd was only about 50 people. But they were devoted Democrats in a bastion of New Jersey’s Democratic machine. And Mr. Daggett, the independent candidate for governor, was winning them over.

While the Democratic governor, Jon S. Corzine, and the Republican candidate, Christopher J. Christie, appear to be turning off voters with nasty ads and personal attacks, Mr. Daggett is turning them on — or at least persuading them to give him a closer look. After he showed up his rivals in the first debate, his campaign is causing concern in both parties. His plan to cut property taxes is getting attention. His poll numbers are climbing. And on Sunday, he won a rousing endorsement from New Jersey’s largest and most influential newspaper, The Star-Ledger of Newark.

Breaking from his wonkish, occasionally witty but mostly sober delivery, Mr. Daggett, 59, is telling audiences it is time to think the unthinkable: that a vote for him might not be wasted.

“It’s like the ’73 Mets,” he says. “Ya gotta believe!”

Cinderella stories do not get much more improbable, and Mr. Daggett is far more likely to play the role of spoiler than to pull off an upset. Even with matching funds, he has spent only $1 million, compared with $16.8 million by the governor and $5.4 million by Mr. Christie. He has never run for office and has no organization or political base. And he last enjoyed regular news coverage as Gov. Thomas H. Kean’s environmental protection commissioner before some of today’s voters were born.

Yet Mr. Daggett’s dry talk of substance has filled an enormous vacuum. Mr. Corzine, elected on a promise to use his Wall Street savvy to fix the state’s fiscal problems, instead swung and missed on several big initiatives before seeing his popularity plummet with the state’s economy. And he has spent his energy and millions trying to poison Mr. Christie’s image among voters, rather than talking about his agenda for a second term.

Meanwhile, Mr. Christie squandered a huge advantage in the polls by refusing to say how he would fix the state’s vexing problems, apparently miscalculating that his take-no-prisoners record as a corruption prosecutor would be enough against such a damaged incumbent.

Indeed, Mr. Daggett’s rivals have said so little about how they would tackle New Jersey’s taxes, deficits and unemployment that Mr. Daggett is being greeted at times like a Jimmy Stewart character in a Frank Capra film.

Mary Jean Chryek, 54, a Democrat, said that Mr. Corzine was a failure and Mr. Christie only wanted to “tear other people down,” but that Mr. Daggett, whom she had not heard of before the Oct. 1 debate, was different.

“He’s a man with a plan, and he’s willing to divulge it,” she said, minutes after requesting four of his campaign signs to display at her corner house in the Heights section of Jersey City.

Mr. Daggett’s big idea is to kill off a sacred cow of Trenton: rebate checks intended to relieve the choking property-tax burden in New Jersey’s 566 municipalities that now exceeds income, sales and corporate taxes combined. For years, income taxes have been redistributed back to homeowners each year. But last year’s Wall Street troubles forced deep cuts in the rebates.

Instead, he would offer direct property-tax credits of 25 percent, up to $2,500, per homeowner — with a catch: If a town’s budget grew faster than inflation, residents would lose their credits. He says this would cap local spending once and for all. To pay for the credits, he would extend the 7 percent sales tax to services provided by lawyers, accountants and architects, which he says are mainly used by upper-income earners.

What makes his plan attractive on the stump could render it dead on arrival in Trenton, where many legislators are lawyers and no special interest wields as much power as public-sector unions, which would have much to lose from local spending caps.

But Mr. Daggett is undeterred. As the top regional Environmental Protection Agency official in 1985, he recalls standing up to his Reagan administration bosses and local leaders — including a furious Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato of New York — by bringing a halt to Westway, a plan for an underground West Side Highway in Manhattan, because it threatened striped bass in the Hudson River.

He says his specialty is solving thorny problems by getting people on all sides to set aside emotions and agree on facts. Last year, he led a task force of developers, environmentalists and other warring forces who produced 91 unanimous recommendations for fixing New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection — and issued a report containing a none-too-subtle rebuke of Mr. Corzine, who had appointed him.

It was Governor Kean who first brought Mr. Daggett into government in 1982 as his deputy chief of staff and encouraged him to begin thinking about an independent candidacy several years ago, Mr. Daggett says. But it was the task force’s work that showed him “how broken state government was under Jon Corzine” and convinced him to run, said Jeffrey Tittel, state director of the Sierra Club, who sat on the panel and endorsed him last month.

Mr. Daggett first broke through a month ago with TV ads using look-alikes to lampoon Mr. Corzine and Mr. Christie, and he has begun putting those spots on the air again, though infrequently. He asks voters to take a leap of faith, saying he needs only 34 percent of the vote in a three-way race. He says that voters are stuck picking the lesser of two evils, and that he is the kind of positive candidate they can get behind.

Yet he is not all sweetness and light. He scorns Mr. Christie’s personality, saying the Republican is arrogant and intellectually dishonest, “treating the voters as though they aren’t smart enough to know” that his campaign promises are impossible to meet.

Mr. Daggett finds the governor personally likeable, he says, but entirely unsuited for his job. “I spent six years at an investment firm,” he said. “Wall Street guys are terrific people, but you can never ask them to manage anything. He’s not comfortable bringing people together, and he doesn’t have the patience to go back and forth making public policy. And there’s an unwillingness to really fight for what he believes in.”

Pollsters say Mr. Daggett is hurting Mr. Christie more, by siphoning off anti-incumbent voters. And some talk-radio hosts are asking if he is not a stalking horse for Mr. Corzine. But in a sign of his rising stature, opposition researchers from both parties have begun sifting through Mr. Daggett’s business dealings.

There is plenty to comb through: As a developer of so-called brownfields for the past 13 years, Mr. Daggett has been trying to profit heavily from some of New Jersey’s biggest cleanup sites, including an old chromium plant in Jersey City where his efforts have met fierce resistance and charges of political deal-making.

But Mr. Daggett says he welcomes the scrutiny. And anyone counting on him to quit the race might consider a memo that surfaced after his rejection of Westway a quarter century ago. Despite considerable pressure, an E.P.A. official advised the agency’s boss in Washington, “it doesn’t appear that Daggett has gotten the message.”