Barack Obama

Barack Obama and Joe Biden are likely to carry New Jersey, according to the most recent independent poll

Yet another poll gives Barack Obama a huge lead over John McCain in New Jersey.

In a Fairleigh Dickinson University Public Mind poll released today, Obama leads McCain by eighteen points – 53% to 35%.  That’s five points higher than the last FDU poll, in which Obama led by 13%. 

The survey shows 80% of voters under 30 planning to cast their ballots for Obama, along with 85% of former Hillary Clinton supporters. 

“From the beginning, the McCain campaign hoped to use disgruntled Clinton supporters to their advantage. If McCain’s strategy in picking Governor Palin for his running mate was to win over former Clinton supporters, Garden State women are clearly not impressed,” said pollster Dan Cassino.

Wall Township Mayor John Devlin would just as soon not have to brave the wildcard impact of a national race.

A Democrat in a Republican town – the first Democratic mayor, in fact, in town history, he says voters know him locally as a nonpartisan elected official.

Although he prefers to run in non-presidential election years, his record is 1-1.

“I won when I ran in 2000, the year Bush beat Gore,” says the mayor. “Then I lost in the 2004 election, when Bush beat Kerry. That was a large turnout election. The Republican community came out in droves."

U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-Hoboken) is scheduled to return to Florida on Thursday and Friday of this week to stump for Sen. Barack Obama (D-Il.).

The senator was in the battleground Sunshine State earlier this month campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nominee in Miami.

Before he leaves, Menendez is also scheduled to keynote a rally sponsored by Latinos for Obama at the Robert Treat Hotel in Newark on Wednesday evening.

In Monmouth County, every town comes intriguingly into play on some level, several more critically than others.

Republicans have owned the Freeholder Board for over 20 years, but in the last two elections Democrats picked up two seats to bring them to within one of county control.

A profusion of newly registered Democratic voters have boosted the party’s confidence heading into Nov. 4th, and now Democrats Amy Mallet and Glenn Mason are ready for that 11th hour jolt of cash from the Democratic State Committee.

State Party Chairman Joseph Cryan wants to win here.

He wants it more than he would like to pick up additional warm bodies in the Assembly next year, where his party’s already built a comfortable majority.

A victory by either Mallet or Mason would make a Democratic Party statement.  But neither is a name candidate running against incumbent Freeholder Director Lillian Burry and auto dealer vice president John Curley, an intensely focused campaigner who served as a Red Bank Councilman and has close political connections to state Sen. Jennifer Beck (R-Monmouth).

NEWARK - It was appropriate that their office should stand across the street from the War Memorial. Sized up as a group, they were the veterans of a lot of Essex County wars.

The office setting, too, underscored tough times, like a set-piece out of "Glengarry Glen Ross.".

A former Countrywide home loan office that went belly up in a bad economy, this storefront a few doors down from the Robert Treat Hotel now houses the county’s Obama campaign headquarters, which officially opened Monday.

"You could say we’re one good thing to come out of them going out of business," said West Ward Councilman Ronald C. Rice, county campaign coordinator, standing in the split level, nearly wallpapered over now with Obama campaign signs.

The Obama campaign started small here, with handfuls of coffee house organizers lining up behind a grassroots operation called NJ for Obama in the face of a big party machine backing Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), and an unpopular war in Iraq.

Founded in an Edison coffee shop in December of 2006, the group’s leader was Damian Bednarz, 25, a Master’s student in international relations with Seton Hall University’s Whitehead School of Diplomacy.

"Obama has something that Hillary Clinton can’t buy or reproduce, and that’s a sense of inspiration," Bednarz said at the time. "If anything, I’m encouraged by Clinton’s frontrunner status because I know our work is so special."

In the months following, some elected offiicials endorsed the Illinois senator, among them Assemblyman Neil Cohen (D-Union), who came out in favor of Obama in April of 2007, followed by state Sen. John Adler (D-Camden) a couple of weeks later.

"At this time we need someone special... someone who is going to build a bridge brick by brick to peace through negotiation," said Cohen, a graduate of Howard University who arrived at politics through the Civil Rights era.