Podcast: Play in new window
Seth Grossman WPG Radio Nov 8, 2025.
Here is a summary of the topics discussed by Seth Grossman in the audio clip:
Why Did Jack Ciattarelli and other NJ Republicans Lose So Badly? A central theme is why Republican candidates like Jack Ciattarelli and Claire Swift lost their elections.
The “Trump Factor”: One big reason was that the NJ elections were “all about Trump. Trump was extremely unpopular among most NJ voters and that put all Republican candidates in “bind”: The would lose a big chunk of voters if the criticized him, but they would lose different voters if they supported him.
Jack Ciattarelli and Republicans had no persuasive message. Jack Ciattarelli was too vague. Saying “I’m going to lower taxes” or “I’m going to bring ‘affordability” back to New Jersey did not resonate with voters. This was a complete departure with Ciattarelli’s stump speech during his Republican Primary campaign.
Atlantic County Republican Assembly candidate Claire Swift was even worse. She “praised” Governor Murphy’s fake property tax relief programs and described herself as a Republican “who can work with Democrats”. She was inviting Democrats to vote for real Democrats and not giving Republicans a good reason to vote for her.
Mikey Sherrill’s Election Night Victory Speech: She correctly pledged to support the Constitution. She quoted the New Jersey state motto, “Liberty and Prosperity.” She or her staff almost certainly read our our website, libertyandprosperity.com. The problem is that America has not had much of a Constitution since 1942. That is when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped limiting the federal government to the powers “enumerated” in Article I, Section 8. Sherrill also misunderstood New Jersey’s motto. She implied that government is to provide people with “liberty and prosperity”. The true meaning of that motto is that government secures “liberty”, that is the “unalienable rights” of each individual. Those individuals then are free to make their own choices to work, save, invest and produce to create prosperity!
Economic “Illiteracy” of Young Voters: Young people feel they have “no hope of succeeding” under the current economic system are “absolutely right.” He blames:
Housing Unaffordability: Seth bought a house in Florida for $100,000 ten years ago now. Now that same house, just a starter row home is worth $400,000. How can a young family starting out afford that?
Underlying Causes: Seth attributes this inflation to high real estate taxes (funding public employees) and restrictive zoning laws that make building new homes difficult and expensive.
Atlantic City Takeover: There is no need for state government to be running Atlantic City. The only reason the state took over in 2016 was to force local taxpayers to pay off roughly $480 million of illegal debt run up by former Republican Governor Chris Christie. When Atlantic City lost 2/3 of its tax base in 2009 it was required by state law to cut spending and balance its budget. However, Christie was running for President and didn’t want to cut wages or employees. And so allowed Atlantic City to illegally borrow more than $80 million a year for nearly six year. The casinos should pay their share of that debt through the Casino Reinvestment Development tax. Better to pay down the debt than to waste in on junk like empty baseball stadiums, train stations and convention halls!
Government Shutdown and Obamacare: The big issue of the federal government shut down is that Obama raised the cost of medical care for everybody. However, nobody cared because Democrats subsidized health care insurance for 2/3 of the people so only one third of Americans got clobbered with big increases. Now the subsidies are expiring and the other 2/3 are getting clobbered. But now, the 1/3 who already got clobbered don’t care. The Democrats pulled off a classic “divide and conquer” strategy.
TRANSCRIPT:
SETH GROSSMAN: We don’t have time to, cry too much about last week’s election because the Democrats are revved up. They are now getting ready to remove, Jeff Van Drew from office and take that seat back for the Democrats. As soon as they get a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate, they will impeach Donald Trump again. So, we only have a year to get ready for that.
Meanwhile, the was an interesting thing with the Democratic winner of the election for Governor. I know for a fact that Mikey Sherrill ior someone on her staff looked at our Liberty and Prosperity website. Did you watch her Election Night Victory Speech? It’s posted on our website.
The first thing Mikey Sherrill said after she thanked her supporters was to remind them how took an oath to support the Constitution when she joined the Navy, and how important the Constitution i to her. And then she reminded all of her supporters that the motto of New Jersey has been Liberty and Prosperity since 1777. She said Liberty and Prosperity has been the motto ov ourstate for almost 250 years and she wants to bring both liberty and prosperity back to New Jersey.
So if you didn’t know anything else about Mikey Sheryl, you’d think she was speaking at a Liberty and Prosperity Saturday breakfast meeting. And I I find it interesting that she could not have gotten the information she used in her victory speech if either she or her supporters haven’t been to our libertyandprosperity.com site during the last couple months. And I know for a fact that they have been because we’ve been getting a lot of negative comments from Democrats, on our liberty and prosperity site. We would not get those negative comments posted on our website if we didn’t have a lot of Democrats going there. I wish we had more Republicans paying attention to what we’re posting, but that’s the way it is.
Now what happened on Tuesday? Well, I I think you you said what a lot of people have been saying, it was all about Trump. And for the past month, I think I’ve been saying that if the election is about Trump, Jack Ciattarelli is gonna get clobbered. So if we wanna win votes for Jack Ciattarelli, we have to talk about stuff other than Trump. And, we certainly did that. But, you know, the Jack Ciattarelli campaign did not. And we we go into that, you know, a little bit later. When you talked about, Claire Swift, that you were shocked that Claire Swift lost. But what was the focus of of the Claire Swift campaign? When they had to debate between the, the two Democratic assembly candidates and the two Republican assembly candidates? If you didn’t know what the parties were, you wouldn’t know who was a Democrat and who was a Republican. You had, Claire Swift was praising, you know, that all those fake tax abatement programs, you know, the anchor program and the the the the senior freeze act and this act, which were nothing but fraud shell games to raise taxes on some people to lower taxes on other people. And you had, you know, all four Republican assembly candidates were praising the Murphy gimmick, as if it were real tax relief. And I think you had clear some of the Claire Swift commercials were saying, you know, vote for me because I will cross the aisle and work with Democrats. Well, if you’re a Democrat and you wanna get things done, who would you vote for? A real Democrat or a Republican who says she’s gonna work with the Democrats? And if you’re a Republican, how can you be so enthusiastic about a candidate who’s telling you right up front? You know, you vote for me and I’m gonna work with Democrats. So, there was an awful message out there, and all that stuff is posted at our libertyandprosperity.com website. Well, I I still I didn’t even hear the candidate who who beat her until she was on this show, and I didn’t even know who was running against her. So Yeah. Goes to show you what kind of campaign they ran. So, I I don’t know. Right. Well, anyway, among some of the things that are posted, I won’t go into all the reasons why, Trump is unpopular as he is, but you’re absolutely right. Some of the polls show that Trump has a 39% approval rating who like what he’s doing and 61% against. You know, some say that Trump is at 42% approval and, if 55% against. But whatever, you know, poll you use, you have to admit that he is very, very unpopular and that puts every Republican in a bind. Because if you start criticizing Trump, you know, you have about 35% of Republicans who will not vote for anyone who criticizes Trump in any way. And you have about, you know, 58 to 60% of voters, will vote against any candidate that seems to be with Donald Trump. So it’s it’s something that we somehow have to, get rid of or or or get out of the, our our system. Now the the other thing that we we talk about is that, in in Jack Chedarelli’s campaign, when you were watching his commercials, he never said that, you know, this is a problem that Murphy caused, and this is how I’m gonna fix it on day one. And this is, and my opponent, Mikey Sherrill, agreed with Murphy. You know, he never got specific. He just said, well, I’m gonna give you lower taxes. I’m gonna make things more affordable. I’m gonna bring electric rates down. But he didn’t specifically say what he would do to make that happen and why Mikey Sherrill would not make that happen. And one thing I learned is, you know, being a trial lawyer, they tell us in the seminars all all the time, never expect the jury to say what you, the lawyer, are not willing to say. So if if Ciattarelli was unwilling to say, this is what I’m going to do, and this is my why my opponent will not do it, and this is what caused the problem, this is how we fix the problem. You know, the voters are not gonna conclude what the candidate is not willing to say, which is really a darn shame because on our website, we posted what Jack Chederilli was saying during the primary when he was running against, Bill Spadia. You know, in every stump speech, every commercial, Jack Cederally said, on day one, I’m gonna do this, and this is why I’m gonna do it. And my opponent’s not gonna do it, and this is why you gotta vote for me. He said that in every stump speech during the primary, but as soon as he was running against the Democrat, he stopped saying it. And it it was astonishing. Oh, boy. I didn’t realize that. You know? It just yeah. It’s it’s something. So so that’s going on. Meanwhile, some other issues, you know, that we have going on, the Atlantic City takeover, we have, Republican senator Vince Polestino wants to have the Atlantic City takeover for ten more years. And as we pointed out last week, and what we have in the website, the only reason Atlantic City, was taken over in the first place had nothing to do with, mismanagement or Atlantic City not being able to run, its government. It’s everything about Chris Christie mismanaging the town for six years and running up an illegal 80,000 or rather $80,000,000 deficit during each of those, years and putting Atlantic City $480,000,000 in debt. And the only purpose of the state takeover was so that, Atlantic City, government officials would hire lawyers to say, wait a minute. Why should Atlantic City taxpayers have to pay off that debt? The state illegally did the debt, let them pay it, and that was the reason for the state takeover. But now you take it at another level. You have Vince Palastina as saying, well, no. No. No. We don’t want that money to pay this because right now you have something called the casino reinvestment fund, which works, very much like the the old Bugsy Siegel skim. You know, when the mob ran Las Vegas, they would take, you know, 2% of the winnings of the casinos. They stick they take the cash and and then handed out to all their mafia friends. That’s basically what the, the casino reinvestment tax is all about. Right now, most of the money from that tax is paying back the illegal debt that Christie piled up for six years. But, now, Vince Polestino wants to use that money for, quote, redevelopment. And if you have a look at what that money was used for for redevelopment before, what was it used for? A baseball stadium, An empty boardwalk hall? An empty convention hall? We used to have a mostly empty boardwalk convention hall. Now we have two almost empty convention halls and a train station that nobody uses. So what brilliant projects, are we gonna use other people’s money to pay for? So we have that going on. We have the, you know, the whole issue with the, you know, the government shutdown. And and what’s it all over? It’s over the Obamacare subsidies. And this is something that has been going on for, like, twelve years. And and it was a classic divide and conquer. Anyone who’s self employed like myself knows that, when Obamacare went in, we got clobbered. Our our insurance, you know, basically doubled, tripled. You know, for some people had to go up three times, and we were hurting. But, the Democrats kept getting elected because they used the government. What what they basically did is, they forced young people who didn’t need expensive insurance to buy super expensive insurance that, they didn’t need and they couldn’t afford. So to get their votes, Obamacare, basically subsidized and paid the premium for all these young people to pay for this overpriced insurance, which was basically used to insure illegal immigrants, by the way. And so the young people kept voting Democrat because they didn’t know how expensive this insurance was because it was being covered by all these subsidies, which expired three weeks ago. Now, you know, this is not a crisis that happened three weeks ago. It was a crisis that everybody knew was coming. But did the Republicans prepare and say, you know, Obamacare is overpriced, it’s bloated, it can’t work. I mean, anybody who who gets a dent on their car and they go go into the shop and they say, well, how much would it cost you to fix this dent? The first thing the body shop guy is gonna say, well, do you have insurance? And if you say, well, no, I don’t have insurance. The body shop guy will say, okay, that’ll be like $250 or $300 and you get it done. If you say I have insurance, the body shop guy is gonna say, well, that’ll be about $4,000, but don’t worry. Your insurance company will pay for the whole thing. And by the way, I could do this for you and that for you and all these other things. Whenever you get a third party involved, whenever you have something being paid for with somebody else’s money, and you don’t know don’t care how much it costs, it’s gonna be wasteful and a whole lot more expensive, and that’s all this Obamacare is is talking about. But, of course, nobody’s talking about any of that. All you’re they’re talking about is that young people, if if, they don’t get the subsidies to to continue, they’re gonna be forced to pay, you know, $1,518,000 dollars a year for insurance that they don’t want and they don’t need, and it’s way overpriced. So, so so there’s no planning here, and and we have to deal with that. Boy, you got you got enough to talk about today, Yeah. We do. But but but mostly we’re gonna be talking about, you know, what went wrong and and and what could could could fix it. And it’s it’s it’s a real problem too because one thing about Trump, you know, Trump is unpopular, but Trump has that kind of personality that he will never admit that anything he said or did, is causing him to be unpopular. And and nobody could even tell him anything that he would disagree with, and they’ll get fired. So, so Trump is gonna be Trump. And what we really have to do is figure out how if Trump is gonna be Trump, what can Republicans do to establish a program that could get them elected? And, and then, with without, you know, criticizing or or hurting Trump, but to show that you’re your own person and that you can get elected. So so those are the issues. And and by the way, another big issue, why the young people have turned against Trump and the reason the young people have turned, against Democrats is basically economic illiteracy. Most young people today believe they have no hope of succeeding in life under our current economic system. And they’re absolutely right. When we boomers went to school, we had one parent was able to support a household. We went to college and we paid for a year of college with a year of working during the summer. College has gotten way expensive. These kids build up this debt, and they’re still paying student loans when they’re in their forties and fifties. It’s outrageous. And I could give you a personal example of how we have made life unaffordable for young people. Ten years ago, I did somebody a favor in Florida. They want they they were losing their home, and I agreed to to buy their home, a little row house in a in a working class neighborhood. I agreed to to to buy their home and let them stay on as tenants. And I did, and they were very grateful. And I still own a house that row house there, and I still rent out the property. I bought that property for a $100,000, a townhouse in a working class neighborhood. I looked up the thing, the appraisal today. It’s now worth $400,000 How can you justify a house that was a $100,000 in a working class neighborhood ten years ago is now worth $400,000 How could a young family possibly afford something like that? Now if we would, have economic literacy, we would know that the reason that the house prices are so high are because, real estate taxes are too high and that real estate tax are too high because we’re paying too much money for all these public employees in the school system. We go on and on about the spending. And we also have these zoning laws that make it almost impossible to build anything anywhere unless you spend a fortune on lawyers and planners and politicians and campaign donations and lobbying for these neighborhood groups. In other words, just to build a house, you have to go through all the trouble that, Eustace Meeta had to do to build a hotel on the boardwalk, which he ended up not getting permits anyway. So all that stuff is driving up the cost of housing, and, but the young people know don’t know that. So we need more freedom. We need less regulation. We need less government. We need to bring government politicians and salaries under control. But the young people don’t see it that way. They say, oh, no. No. We have to get it from the millionaires and billionaires. And we we need more government control and more government power to help us. So they got it backwards. But somehow, we have to deal with that. Anyway, we’ll be talking about this, a lot at libertyandprosperity.com, and I invite our folks to go to the website and to our breakfast that we have every Saturday morning in Somers Point. Thank you very much, Seth. Seth Grossman, Liberty and Prosperity, and the website libertyandprosperity.com.
