Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're in election season now. Early voting continues in New York and New Jersey. Connecticut does not have early voting, though they will, starting next year under a new law. We talked about some of the New York races with Brigid Bergin last week. Now, we'll check in on some of the hot races and issues in New Jersey with WNYC's Nancy Solomon. Though the entire state legislature is up for election right now, the most interesting and consequential races might be for your local school boards, some of them being caught up in the culture wars.

Plus, we might get a hint of some key 2024 congressional races for next year with control of Congress as we were talking about a little bit with Congressman Himes being at stake next year and how they might be run. We'll also talk about a big windmill manufacturer pulling out of a plan to build two wind farms off the Jersey Shore just yesterday despite the legislature granting them $1 billion in tax credits. Governor Murphy called the decision to withdraw outrageous. Hi, Nancy, welcome back to the show.

Nancy Solomon: Hi, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Can we do the wind farms first? What was the Danish company, Ørsted, planning and what happened yesterday?

Nancy Solomon: Yes, this was huge. Ørsted is the largest producer of offshore wind in the world. The Murphy administration was feeling pretty good about their contracts to have the biggest wind developer in the world doing their offshore wind. We've seen lots of other projects that are struggling up and down the East Coast with costs and inflation, but there was no hint that this was coming.

They announced that they're pulling out. They have two projects. One of them has already been permitted, which is a huge thing because it takes upwards of five years, even a little bit more to get the permits pushed through both federally and the state permit. They had invested a lot. They're talking about, I think, a $4 billion write-down by walking away from New Jersey. There are two projects.

What the Murphy administration folks tell me is it's a major setback for them. It's going to cause a very significant delay. Their kind of mantra in all of this for the Murphy administration was wind turbines in the water by the end of the administration, so that's January 2026 is the end of the Murphy administration. Now, they're looking at 2027 as the possible earliest time we're going to see turbines in the water.

Brian Lehrer: Well, conservatives, as you know, have been targeting the non-fossil fuels energy source as everything from ugly to a threat to whales. How much did politics as opposed to just a profit margins business decision play into this withdrawal?

Nancy Solomon: I haven't heard anything from Ørsted that would suggest it was politics. I'm not saying it isn't. Certainly, Republicans and the groups at the Jersey Shore were taking a victory lap yesterday, very happy that this has happened. Really, what Ørsted talks about are the economics of these projects and that the bids that they put in pre-pandemic and pre-war in Ukraine are just not sustainable. The whole bidding process, what that means is that they're locking in at what rate they're going to sell megawatts once these projects are up and running.

They're locked into an economic enterprise that is not working for them. The reason it's not working is that the war in Ukraine has really spiked up the cost of steel. They're facing also other inflationary costs and then interest rates are a huge part of this, so spiking interest rates. Other states are reopening their bids and allowing the companies that lost the bids and the companies that hold the projects to recompete but now bid at a higher price given what's happening with the price of these projects.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sure a lot of our listeners in Jersey have seen the signs that have been put up in a few places around the Jersey Shore. They look like official traffic signs, the electronic kinds that would normally be telling you, "A lane is closed," and they say, "Save the whales," and "No wind farms," and things like that.

I think it's pretty rich how fossil fuels advocates had suddenly become environmentalists concerned with saving the whales but only saving them from wind farms. We had a marine biologist on the show earlier this year, I don't know if you heard that segment, saying wind farm construction has not been a threat in the way that some had argued, and that that's disinformation, but did they get some of what we might call non-agenda-driven public on their side?

Nancy Solomon: Oh, definitely. There was a poll that came out a month or two ago that showed that Republicans are now opposed to wind power in much larger numbers. It had bipartisan appeal. Now, Republicans particularly are starting to be against wind power. As you point out, some of this comes from the oil and gas industry. They are pumping millions if not billions of dollars into campaigns that promote oil and gas and-

Brian Lehrer: They've got the pumps to do it. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Nancy Solomon: [laughs] -and that put out false information about wind power. That's happening. There's also an actual real group at the Jersey Shore that has been, for a good 20 years, opposed to what they call industrialization of the ocean. They want a clean ocean. They're surfers. They're fisher people. There is that legitimate group, but it's also questionable where they get their money too. Now, they're getting support from very conservative forces.

There's that group. Then I think, yes, whales started washing up at the shore really since 2016. It was amazing to watch how media companies and reporters and people at the shore just immediately jumped into this idea that the whales are dying because of wind power, which there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that. In fact, the problem whales face is the problem everyone at the shore faces, which is climate change.

Brian Lehrer: Surfers for fossil fuels. Before we move on to the election itself, it sounds like from what you're saying that the timing of this withdrawal of that wind farm project just before Election Day is a coincidence.

Nancy Solomon: It's hard. I agree. The timing is insane, but I'm not sure that the world's largest wind power company is really paying attention to the New Jersey state legislative elections. I have yet to find it. Some of the behind-the-scenes stuff is likely to come out over the next weeks and months about the relationship between the Murphy administration and Ørsted. So far, I haven't been able to uncover anything that would suggest that they wanted to try to hurt Democrats in New Jersey. It doesn't really make sense that they would care.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, as we now transition with our Nancy Solomon to talk about the elections themselves, electioneering welcome here. Anything you want to say or ask or advocate for in any New Jersey election is fair game right now. We're going to start with the school boards and then go on to the state legislature or anything on the wind farms, stories, comments, questions, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text. I might even take a look at our Twitter feed, which I haven't been doing much lately. Let's talk about the elections themselves. Can we go right to the issue of school board elections and the culture wars? New Jersey has 600 school districts as you know. Are they all electing school boards?

Nancy Solomon: 90% of them are. They have a choice between doing it in the spring or doing it-- It became a new thing a few years ago to do it in November, which is more cost-effective. Most school districts are holding their elections now in November, which is, of course, next Tuesday.

Brian Lehrer: I see we are reporting on Gothamist that conservative politicians and some parents have been organizing against an education policy that extends anti-discrimination law to transgender students. What's the policy and who's against it?

Nancy Solomon: Right, so the policy is called Policy 5756. Exciting. Basically, what it is trying to do is to protect transgender students and protect them like any other protected class of students are protected from discrimination. That can be interpreted as not outing those students to their parents. That has inflamed parents who say, "What the hell are you talking about? Of course, you have to tell us if our kid is showing up at school looking like they are changing their gender." It's a matter of state law, the anti-discrimination law.

The attorney general, Matt Platkin, has taken a pretty aggressive approach to these local districts that have said, "No, we're not going to abide by this rule," and is basically going after them for violating the anti-discrimination laws of the state. It's turned into a huge political fight. It's something that it's really easy to-- We see lots of misinformation about lots of things. This is one that's just ripe for misinformation and for getting people inflamed. I think I found it pretty surprising and interesting that one of the bigger groups that's organizing around parental control has, on their website, 481 school board candidates that they're recommending around the state. That's a pretty big wave of people fighting on this issue.

Brian Lehrer: I see some of these same groups oppose teaching about slavery and the Holocaust and teaching sex ed to students who they say are too young for these things. Are these all bound up together teaching history and sex ed and the transgender anti-discrimination issue?

Nancy Solomon: They are in the sense that people are talking about parent control and that is the words that they use. Those words poll really well. You poll people. They like the idea of parents having control over everything to do with their kids, right? If you poll people, "Do you support banning books? Do you support prohibiting sex education," that stuff doesn't poll that well, but parental control does. Because of that, that's how these are all bound up. They're not saying there should be no curriculum on the Holocaust or slavery or sex education. They're saying that they believe it's being taught to kids who are too young for it.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Next up, the whole state legislature. Before we get to that, let's take a call or two coming in. Here is Deborah in Jersey City, who says she voted early last Saturday. Deborah, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Deborah: Hi, good morning. Yes, I voted Saturday. My peeve is I've been getting bombarded in the mail with flyers and political postcards from the two Board of Education slates, and these actually tell you nothing. I turned around and just voted for the three independent candidates even though I couldn't find much on them because our school budget is over $1 billion.

When we went to voting for school board in November, we lost the right to vote on the budget. I understand that schools need to be fully funded, but we have 35,000 children in this district. $1 billion? That's bigger than our city budget. Where is it going? My taxes have jumped so bad and I'm a senior citizen. I want to pay my taxes because I want the leaders of tomorrow to be educated, but I want to know where the money is.

Property tax owners, we're not piggy banks for everything that the Board of Ed wants. They need to show us where the money is going. Maybe they need to stop trying to teach kids like they did 50 years ago where you plop a bunch of kids in front of a teacher and expect them to learn all the same way. Let's use the technology that we have now. It just drives me crazy.

Brian Lehrer: Nancy, talk to Deborah.

Nancy Solomon: Well, Deborah, there's a lot there in what you said. These are the crucial issues, the ones that you're raising. There are school board races going on all over the state and voters really don't know anything about these candidates. I think that's a perennial problem. It's not just going on right now. That happens all the time. These are small races. There isn't the level of local media that is needed to be able to unpack these things.

You're really going into the polling booth really blind on this one. Then high property taxes and the cost of schools, it's getting to a crisis point in New Jersey. It's a huge problem. The Democrats are finally talking about it and talking about doing something about it. They do have a plan to cut taxes for seniors. That would be an enormous help for people, especially someone like you who is a senior, obviously. I think you raise very important issues and getting change is hard. I watch it year in and year out. I watch the same problems.

I think the next question for people to ask is, and particularly since the majority of the state are Democrats, why don't we see reform candidates running in Democratic primaries who are going to really reform the system? We're not seeing that. We see the party candidates year in and year out win their primaries. Then when you get to November, for Democratic voters, there's not a whole lot of choice. There's a little bit more churn on the Republican side, but not on the Democratic side.

Brian Lehrer: Deborah, thank you. Keep calling us. Ralph in Atlanta County is calling on the cancellation of the two wind farms yesterday. Ralph, you're on WNYC. Hi.

Ralph: Hi, Brian. How are you doing today?

Brian Lehrer: All right, what you got?

Ralph: It's good. I retired down here in 2018. I've been around for this entire windmill battle if you want to call it that. It's interesting because it's been in the works for many, many years. I guess about a year and a half ago, there started to be public opposition to it when the whales started turning up dead. Originally, when Jeff Van Drew, our congressman, got involved in the fight, his argument was, "Well, let's just slow this down and take a good look at it and make sure this isn't what's harming our wildlife," which, to me, is a very reasonable argument.

Two months into it as it became more and more popular among a certain group of people down here, signs started popping up with Jeff Van Drew's name on the front yards. It said, "Stop the windmills." It went from slowing it down and let's figure it out to stop the windmills. It has been politicized to a great extent and I just wanted to point that out.

Brian Lehrer: Ralph, thank you very much. Nancy, next up, the whole state legislature. Democrats control both Houses. Is majority control considered in play this Election Day?

Nancy Solomon: Everyone that I've talked to who or the people who pay attention to New Jersey politics says no that the Democrats will probably lose a few seats, but they won't lose their majorities in either House. I would put that in the category of the conventional wisdom and it might very well be right. It usually is. I feel like this issue that we were talking about earlier about the school board races, that is an incredible wild card.

Let's not forget the massive freak thing that happened two years ago in 2021 when a truck driver named Ed Durr beat the Democratic Senate president down in South Jersey with virtually no campaign money. Things can happen. I'll tell you one more thing about this going back to the idea that the school board races could be what drives what happens in the legislative races. We always talk about the top of the ticket, the bottom of the ticket.

Imagine if you will just explain to people, you've got the biggest names at the top, and then it goes down in some kind of order. We have cycles where, every four years, the presidential race got the biggest turnout. Then you've got the governor's race in an off-year, that has high turnout. Then you get the congressional midterms, less turnout but still higher turnout. This is the race that has the lowest turnout in the four-year cycle.

The state legislative races are at the top of the ticket. There's no congressional races, no presidential race, no gubernatorial race. I spoke to this woman, Darcy Draeger, who's run for the assembly a couple of times. Now, she's running an opposition to this parental control movement that Tom Malinowski, who lost his seat in Congress in New Jersey, started this group. It's called Districts for Democracy. This issue really has been bubbling up since then.

The last two election cycles, she, looking at ballots, would see that voters generally drop off as they go down the line like, "I don't know who these people are. I'm not going to vote for them." You see less people voting as you go down the ticket. The last two years, she said there wasn't that kind of drop-off, and that people are turning out for these local races. An angry voter is a very powerful thing. I would not stake my crystal ball prognosis on what's going to happen on Tuesday. I think this is a real wildcard election.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I'll mention for the first time on the show that I will be hosting an election night special Tuesday night. We will be live in the eight o'clock hour. Nancy might even join us to talk about some of the New Jersey races and the implications for next year. That's what I want to ask you about next, Nancy, because there have been some Republican advances in the last two elections in Jersey, closer for Governor Murphy's reelection than might have been a few years earlier.

Tom Kean, Jr., unseated Tom Malinowski for Congress last year. Are there certain issues that seem to be favoring Republicans in recent times in addition to the school board issues that we just talked about and that we might get an indication from this year's results how people will campaign in next year's elections?

Nancy Solomon: I definitely think that, yes, we are seeing issues that are resonating. Mike DuHaime is a Republican political strategist. Smart guy. He's worked on some of the biggest campaigns in New Jersey. What he said is that Republicans win in New Jersey when Democrats don't talk about affordability and bread-and-butter issues. This time around, the Democrats are talking about it, so it's hard to say.

We heard from the caller. I do think that this is also the thing that makes New Jersey unpredictable that we haven't had a US senator elected from the Republican Party in 50 years. They've all been Democrats, but yet, the governor's race has flipped back and forth. That gives you a sense of, "What's the governor in charge of?" Taxes and affordability, quality of life in New Jersey, the schools, not really a whole lot of control by the governor, but people see that as the issues that really affect them here at home. That's what they're voting about. That's, I think, why you see this difference. I don't think we're going to see it play out too much in the congressional races in 2024, but we don't seem to see the federal races swing at the same level that we see those state races and the governor's race.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Now, I think Marian in Hackettstown is calling maybe with some information for the earlier caller, Deborah in Jersey City, who was calling as a taxpayer. Marian, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Marian: Hi, I just wanted to point out. I go frequently to our Board of Ed meetings. That's where the voters can get information about how the budgets are set. They always present what the upcoming budget is going to be, what they're going to spend their money on, what the proposals are, and all the information is going to be there. Board of Ed meetings, sadly, are so poorly attended. We go and it's the same handful of faces that go.

It's incumbent on a voter to educate themselves and go and get the information before they walk into that voter booth and just stare at these names that they have no idea who they are. I also just want to say, the Board of Ed races here in New Jersey, they're not party-affiliated. They're not Democrats or Republican for the Board of Ed. They're just names of a party.

Brian Lehrer: Individuals, yes.

Marian: Right.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Marian, which makes it opaque, right? Unless somebody's really read-in, which most voters are not, Nancy, they may not know which side of culture war issues they're taking inadvertently.

Nancy Solomon: No, I think it's really hard to know. Unless you, for instance, go to those websites, either the New Jersey Project is the parental control side or Districts for Democracy is the pro-public education, pro-let-teachers-teach side, I don't know quite how to wrap up there what they do. Local school boards are really the bread and butter of all local issues because of the cost of the schools.

You can get involved at the local level. That's the good side of it. Districts for Democracy, what they were telling me is that they are seeing a real politicization of school boards where people are starting to talk about Republican values and ideas that they're running on. It is technically nonpartisan and it used to be truly nonpartisan. They're seeing a shift away from that.

Brian Lehrer: How can people learn about the positions of the candidates who are on the ballot for school board? We have a couple of callers actually calling to ask that exact question who may, by this conversation, have been motivated to vote but aren't sure how to parse one candidate from another.

Nancy Solomon: I was looking at a bunch of the websites for the legislative candidates. The Republicans, they have a playbook right now. It is parental control or parental choice. Usually, it's control is the very top issue on their list of issues on their website over and over and over again with these different candidates. I think if you can find the candidates for your school board online and look for those buzzwords, you can then figure out-

Brian Lehrer: -who's who.

Nancy Solomon: -who's who. I would say, look at the New Jersey Project website because some of their stuff, it's way out there like their merchandise and the T-shirts. This stuff would be a little surprising to maybe people who think, "Yes, I want to have a little more control over what my kids are reading." Then you go to their website and you think, "Oh, this is a lot more conservative than I thought it was."

Brian Lehrer: Like what? Do you remember any catchphrase that might be on a tote bag or something like that?

Nancy Solomon: Oh, man, you're testing my memory, Brian. There are faces of Phil Murphy with some very aggressively nasty things about him. That's what I remember.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Last thing, any specific interesting legislature races in North or Central Jersey, our core listening area, that you would like to mention for people who might consider it in their interest at the last minute here to show up on whatever side they're on on those races?

Nancy Solomon: Yes, sure. I think Vin Gopal is a Democrat in Monmouth County, an incumbent who is really on the ropes around some of these parental control issues most specifically. He's considered a rising star of the Democratic Party. That's what I'm watching. He's being opposed by the Republican challenger who's a guy named Steve Dnistrian. Those websites that I was describing of the issues, parents' rights is right there at the top on his, so that gives you a clue.

In Bergen County, the incumbent senator, Joseph Lagana, really has a competitive race going on against the Republican, Micheline Attieh. Again, parental rights, job creation, taxes, supporting the police, those are the issues that she's talking about on her website. The Ed Durr race, it's out of our listening area pretty much, but that's the race we're talking about in South Jersey. The truck driver who stunned Steve Sweeney. Now, it's a big question whether he can manage to get reelected.

A longtime assemblyman who lost his seat in that sweep slate of that vote two years ago is coming back at him. This time, not running for the assembly, running for the Senate. That's John Burzichelli. He was in the assembly for 20 years. Those are the races I'm looking at. There's always good fun from the machine in South Jersey. They've put some phantom candidates on the legislative ballot. That's where they pick people who aren't really-- They exist. They're real people. They had real petitions to get themselves on the ballot, but they're not really running. They're running as conservatives to take votes away from the Republicans. It's a nasty, little trick.

Brian Lehrer: That's a Democratic Party machine trick.

Nancy Solomon: It is. I don't think there's ever been any criminal charges brought against it. It's not clear whether or not it's legal as far as I can tell, but some reporters are going after this as they always do. Matt Friedman of POLITICO New Jersey has been hitting it hard. We have a new attorney general. Not so new now, but he's getting a lot done in New Jersey. Frankly, I'm pretty impressed with him and maybe he's going to go after that. I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Phantom candidates. I thought Halloween was over. Nancy Solomon, keeping us New Jersey politics smart. Nancy, thanks a lot.

Nancy Solomon: Oh, thanks, Brian.

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