By Rachel Kapochunas, CQ Staff

CQ Politics Presidential Race Rating: Democrat Favored

Electoral Votes: 15

While most New Jersey Democrats — voters and top officials alike — would have preferred Hillary Rodham Clinton as their presidential nominee, Barack Obama quickly assumed front-runner status in the state against Republican John McCain after he clinched the Democratic nomination.

Clinton won the Feb. 5 “Super Tuesday” primary by 10 percentage points. Joseph Marbach, a political scientist at Seton Hall University, said the fact that New York is just across the Hudson River and omnipresent in much of the state’s media and culture made Clinton the “favored daughter.” But party activists say the state’s organizational muscle has now moved seamlessly behind Obama.

John McCain stands a better chance of compelling Obama to spend some money in the expensive New York media market (which covers northern New Jersey) than to actually pull off an upset victory.

But McCain’s efforts to create an image as a Republican maverick and his differences from party orthodoxy on issues such as climate change could give him broader appeal than the past several Republican presidential candidates.

“McCain can make it more competitive than it has been in recent years, simply because he does have a certain appeal to independent voters,” said Marbach, adding: “I think ultimately the state remains true to its recent voting pattern.”

The last time, President Bush lost the state by 7 percentage points — by far the best showing for a GOP nominee since 1992, when his father lost the state by just 2 points. But along the way, the Democratic trend in the state has broadened and deepened. Both senators from the state are Democrats ( Frank R. Lautenberg and Robert Menendez ), and that has been the situation for three decades. Democrat Jon Corzine has a solid hold on what is arguably the most powerful governorship in the nation. Democrats have majorities in both halves of the Legislature and a 7-6 edge in the state’s House delegation.

Obama will find strong support in the state’s urban areas, Marbach said, including Essex, Hudson and Union counties near New York City and Camden County near Philadelphia. These also are home to most of the state’s black residents — 15 percent of the state’s population, according to the latest census estimate — who are expected to turn out in record numbers to back Obama’s bid to become the first African-American president.

Mainly affluent Bergen County in the New York suburbs, the most populous county, has ventured far from its history as a Republican stronghold and is now something of a tossup. Kerry carried it narrowly.

Bergen County also is the home base of Lautenberg, whose vast wealth as founder of payroll service giant Automatic Data Processing Inc. has fueled his political career. He served three Senate terms before retiring in 2000 but then came back in the fall of 2002 to claim the seat that Robert G. Torricelli was forced by ethics woes to relinquish.

Now the third-oldest senator at age 84, Lautenberg’s a solid but not quite prohibitive favorite to win re-election against former Rep. Dick Zimmer, a relative moderate who jumped into the race late after a series of GOP recruiting stumbles. Zimmer lost a vitriolic Senate race to Torricelli in 1996 and then narrowly lost a comeback bid for his old House seat in 2000.

Republicans will be focusing much of their congressional campaign efforts defending their two open House seats, both of which are subject to serious Democratic takeover bids. (Bush carried them both only narrowly last time.)