New Jersey's Republican candidates for Congress are spreading a common, ominous message: Be very afraid of those Democrats asking for your vote, because they are actually out-on-the-fringe leftists who coddle terrorists and worse.

Democrat Andy Kim, the candidate for the 3rd Congressional District in South Jersey, for example, is depicted as the founder of a "radical resistance group" that was "so extreme" that it promoted books by a "cop killer and a convicted terrorist."

"Andy Kim is not just far left. He's far out,'' intones the narrator of the 15-second spot aired by Republican incumbent Tom MacArthur, who according to recent polling is locked in statistical tie with Kim.

Mikie Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor who holds a slight lead, and an overwhelming money advantage, against Republican Jay Webber in the 11th Congressional District in North Jersey, is routinely accused of supporting the dismantling of the Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency.

And Tom Malinowski, the Democrat who is locked in a close race in the 7th Congressional District against Republican Leonard Lance in Central Jersey, is deemed "so out of touch that he lobbied for terrorist rights" in the mid-2000s when he worked as a lobbyist for a prominent human rights group.

This grim, bordering-on-hysterical message reflects the dilemma Republicans face as they run a midterm election while President Donald Trump is in the White House and dominating the public mind.

While candidates in deep-red states proudly boast of their ties to Trump, New Jersey Republicans are, for the most part, keeping their distance and voicing their enthusiastic praise behind the closed doors of fundraisers.

Trump is unpopular here. So is his vow to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which mandates coverage for pre-existing conditions, and his vow to spend billions on a new border wall with Mexico instead of building a needed rail tunnel under the Hudson River. Voters are unhappy with a Trump-penned tax overhaul that curtails their ability to write off the highest-in-the-nation property taxes.

Trump's nationalistic immigration rhetoric is out of step in a state with a tradition of tolerance. Women voters are especially appalled by Trump.

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As a result, Republicans are eager to change the subject by discrediting Democrats by demonizing them. It's an attempt to match or bypass discomfort with Trump and the Republican agenda by sowing fear about their challengers.

Ironically, New Jersey's Republicans are being buoyed by Trump and his own campaign of fear. He casts the so-called caravan of Central American migrants and refugees walking toward the U.S. border with Mexico as a Democratic Party ploy to flood the country with illegal aliens. He also has suggested — without evidence — that terrorists have infiltrated the caravan.

"As we speak, the Democrat Party is openly encouraging caravan after caravan of illegal aliens to violate our laws and break into our country," Trump said at a rally last week in Wisconsin.

The attacks by Trump and candidates in the three battleground New Jersey races for Congress are aimed at mobilizing base Republican voters and possibly attracting disillusioned Democrats and the few remaining independent voters who have yet to make up their minds.

The strategy looms as a wild-card in neck-and-neck races, like the Kim-MacArthur battle, where Trump's approval rating is evenly split — with 49 percent approving and 49 percent disapproving of the job he is doing, according to last week's Monmouth University poll. Trump carried the district in 2016 by six points.

MacArthur, a former insurance executive, has closely aligned himself with Trump, backing the House bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and being the lone member of the New Jersey delegation to vote for his tax overhaul.

The Democrat-as-fringe-candidate strategy could resonate among the pro-Trump conservatives in the Ocean County part of the district, but is more of a gamble in the more Democratic western half, which spans Burlington County near Philadelphia.

That helps explain why he has bombarded the Philadelphia television market with his ad accusing Kim of promoting a book written by Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former member of the Black Panthers who was convicted of the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer.

At issue is a website for a group that Kim helped form, RISE Stronger, which grew out of a Facebook group. A volunteer, not Kim, posted a link to a Goodreads.com reading list of about 100 recommended books.

Among them were Abu-Jamal's “We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party'' and one written by Bill Ayers, a leader with the Weather Underground, a radical counterculture group that opposed the Vietnam War and bombed several public buildings. The reading list also recommends the "Diary of Anne Frank" and works by authors such as Ray Bradbury and Margaret Atwood.

During a candidate forum at the Asbury Park Press earlier this month, MacArthur argued that Kim's involvement with a website that "celebrates" those books is evidence that Kim is a "far-left ideologue."

Zach Carroll, Kim's campaign manager, said MacArthur is "grasping at straws" in an attempt to deflect attention away from his votes to "gut" Obamacare protections, such as prohibiting insurance companies from rejecting customers with pre-existing conditions.

"Andy did not post the link, does not know who posted the link, did not endorse the list of books, and has not read any of the books that MacArthur is referring to in his ad,'' Carroll said in a statement.

Webber leveled a similar guilt-by-association attack, arguing that Sherrill organized a rally where the abolishing of ICE and open borders was "demanded."

Webber, who held a press conference with two county sheriffs to criticize her, says the issue confirmed that Sherrill "runs" with left-wing groups who views are far out of the mainstream of the historically Republican 11th District, based in Morris County.

Sherrill attended a rally in September to condemn the Trump administration's policy of separating immigrant families at the border, and several people brought signs calling for the abolishing of ICE.

But Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor and a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot, said she had nothing to do with the signs and that she is opposed to abolishing ICE.

“You know, Jay Webber is doing, I think, what typical politicians do when they don’t have a vision of how to serve their community,” Sherrill told NJTV news.

Malinowski, who served as a State Department official, has been fending off the soft-on-terrorist charge leveled by the Congressional Leadership Fund, a PAC closely aligned with House Speaker Paul Ryan.

But Malinowski, a former lobbyist for Human Rights Watch, worked on issues that enjoyed wide bipartisan support at the time.

He says he worked closely with the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee for president, on a bill that banned torture, by forbidding the military to use any interrogation method not explicitly authorized by the U.S. Army Field Manual.

"The bill also mandated access by the International Committee for the Red Cross to all terrorism detainees, which effectively ended secret detention by the CIA. He wrote the text of the bill, worked closely with McCain and his staff through all phases of getting the bill passed,'' according to a summary of Malinowski's work provided by the campaign.

Malinowski also advocated for the closure of Guantanamo Bay prison — which McCain supported in his 2008 campaign — and using civilian courts to prosecute terrorism detainees.