11,859 of these are registered as Democrats, 3071 are registered as Republicans, and 43 are listed as Independents. Obviously Woodbridge Township strongly favors Democratic candidates. The local government is comprised of a Democratic Mayor, a town council that is 100% Democratic, a Democratic state senator, a Democratic state assemblyperson and a Republican congressman. It is no surprise then that although Connelly did lose the district-wide election she did win in Woodbridge by a vote of 8,678 to Franks 6,394. Also Pete Dalina, a local tavern owner and father of one of our councilmen was running for County Freeholder. This probably brought out more democratic voters. This was a long-winded way of saying that it really would not matter who the democrats put on the ticket, that person probably would have won in Woodbridge. Using this as the basis for making decisions as to where to spend money in a campaign it would then not make sense to devote a lot of resources to Woodbridge Township with the exception of GOTV which is not usually paid for by the candidates anyway.

             Most of the information I was able to gather was from coverage given by the free media. The first I read of Maryanne Connelly was on September 24 when the Home News Tribune ran an article about women congressional candidates. Connelly and Theresa de Leon were the only two women running for congress in New Jersey this year. The focus of this article was mostly about Connelly and her background as a retired AT&T employee and Fanwood mayor, but never touched upon any issues. There were a few articles mentioning Bob Franks but they were mostly in the context of his position on the Budget Committee and his opinions on the Bill Clinton sex scandal. It was not until the last two weeks of October that more information was being printed. This information was obviously fed to the writers of the articles by the candidates' offices.