NJ Education Report

NJEA is touting its potent “member to member” campaign for Corzine (see yesterday’s post here and NJEA’s powerpoint here), and we’ve been poking at the data in Ginger Gold Schnitzer’s titillating presentation. (Sorry. Just trying to get into the spirit of the powerpoint, which labels NJEA members’ unenthusiastic view of Corzine as “electile dysfunction.”) Anyway, in August NJEA officials discovered that there was only a 5 point gap between members who planned on voting for Corzine (40%) and those who intended on voting for Christie (35%). So they launched a comprehensive “communications campaign to inoculate the public” that included: 104,619 telephone calls, a full-time (8 am to 8 pm) campaign office, specially-designed software, polling, data analysis, direct mail, broadcast T.V. and cable advertising, and paid Facebook, Hulu.com, and youtube spots. The result of all this effort was that NJEA’s management moved Corzine’s favorables up 18% (from 39% to 57%) and his unfavorables down 19% (from 56% to 37%). And he lost the election.

NJEA members pay over a $100 million in dues each year. Do they get to vote on how it gets spent? Maybe someone should do a poll.