The odds are so stacked against independent candidates in New Jersey that it would likely take someone far more rich and famous than Piscopo to truly have a shot. | AP Photo Comedian Joe Piscopo would face daunting obstacles as an independent candidate for governor

Comedian Joe Piscopo, most famous for portraying Frank Sinatra on Saturday Night Live, is considering running for governor of New Jersey as an independent.

But Piscopo might want to run in character as Sinatra, the late Hoboken native, because the odds are so stacked against independent candidates in New Jersey that it would likely take someone far more rich and famous than Piscopo to truly have a shot.


Although it takes just 800 petition signatures from voters to get on the ballot as an independent, New Jersey’s tradition of strong control by the two major parties, expensive media markets and arcane ballot position rules set up obstacles that no independent candidate has managed to even get close to overcoming.

Piscopo, a supporter of President Donald Trump who had been a lifelong Democrat and spent months teasing a potential run for governor as a Republican, thinks the state’s highest-in-the-nation property taxes and massive pension shortfall — exacerbated by both parties —have made New Jersey ripe for revolution.

“I think the voters have finally, after decades, have come into their own. And they’re not locked in by the two party system anymore. I honestly believe that now, especially in New Jersey,” Piscopo said in a phone interview.

Gov. Chris Christie isn’t buying Piscopo’s chances, and even suggested he was talking about running just to boost the ratings for his radio show.

After Piscopo told the Record he doesn’t believe Republicans can win the governorship considering Christie’s deep unpopularity, Christie told reporters that “getting political analysis from Joe Piscopo is probably less valuable than getting comedy analysis from me.”

“The fact is independents don’t win in this state. They simply don’t,” Christie said. “If he’s going to run as an independent, he has as close to zero chance of being governor as he possibly could have based upon the history of this state.”

But if Piscopo does run, his voters will have to find him on the ballot

Christopher Daggett, a former Department of Environmental Protection commissioner, learned that in 2009 when he ran as an independent.

Daggett qualified for two-for-one matching funds from the state and hired campaign staffers. He participated in state-sponsored debates with Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine and Christie, the Republican challenger. It was, by all accounts, a real campaign. And Daggett at one point even surged to 20 percent support in the polls.

But even with his public funding, Daggett was unable to raise enough to compete with either candidate in ad buys in the New York and Philadelphia TV markets — the nation’s first and fourth most expensive, respectively. And despite his endorsement by The Star-Ledger, the state’s largest newspaper, Daggett had to face the hard reality of New Jersey’s balloting rules.

“Running as an independent in New Jersey is a very big risk, and part of the reason is because you have all kinds of barriers people put in front of you,” said Daggett, who stressed that he could only speak about his experience and not the current race.

Under a law that dates back nearly a century, any political party that receives at least 10 percent of the total vote for Assembly in the past election receives its own column. That has essentially given Democrats and Republicans a monopoly on the first two columns of each ballot.

Every independent candidate competes in random drawings in each county for ballot placement with all the other independents, possibly relegating even a legitimate candidate to ballot Siberia, behind someone who was running on a lark. So Daggett had no advantage over perennial candidate Gary Stein who chose a different Sinatra song title for each of the slogans that appeared next to his name on the ballot in New Jersey’s 21 counties.

Former kids TV show host Floyd "Uncle Floyd" Vivino ran as a write-in candidate in 2009. But if Vivino, one of whose campaign planks was to pave over the Hudson River to make the commute to New York City “a straight shot for everyone,” had collected 800 petition signatures to get on the ballot, Daggett would have had no advantage over him.

“If you run unaffiliated you can never qualify for that because you don’t have a party. Right away it’s unfair from the democratic process. Why do two parties get a leg up on that?” Daggett said.

Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray held a focus group of undecided voters in the lead-up to the 2009 election. They were open to supporting an independent candidate — until they considered Daggett’s remote chance of winning.

“When I asked them, almost every single one of them raised their hands and said they wanted to vote for Daggett,” Murray said. “By the same token, every one of them backed off and said they were going to look at viability prior to Election Day.”

In the end, Daggett got just under 6 percent of the vote.

“We just really do not have that culture where an independent candidate can do well. We are such a party-controlled state,” Murray said. “Our party organizations have such significant control over the mechanisms of power in a way that other states do not that it’s extremely prohibitive for somebody who is not a superstar in another aspect of life who can self-fund to actually make any inroads.”

Ramapo College finance professor Murray Sabrin felt he was making inroads as a Libertarian candidate for governor in 1997, when moderate Republican Gov. Christie Whitman was up for re-election. Like Daggett, Sabrin qualified for matching funds but he ultimately earned less than 5 percent of the vote.

“A week or so before the election, I was at double digits in the polls. Because the election was close people broke for [Jim] McGreevey or Whitman to prevent the other candidates from winning,” said Sabrin, who has since unsuccessfully run twice for the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate.

Still, there are veterans of New Jersey politics who believe this year could be different. One of them is former Democratic Gov. Jim Florio, who saw his tenure end in the early 1990s after a revolt over taxes, fueled by right wing radio.

For one, Florio said, Piscopo has built-in name recognition. That’s something other candidates spend millions to get. In a Quinnipiac poll released March 15, when Piscopo was still weighing a run as Republican, he had the second most support among Republicans, at 18 percent. Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, who’s been in office for seven years, had 28 percent, while every other Republican candidate was stuck in the low single digits, within the poll’s margin of error.

“Traditionally it’s been very difficult, but I think if there’s anything I learned in the last year or so, traditions no longer automatically apply,” Florio said. “It’s something that’s not as far-fetched as it used to be. Name identification, which he obviously has, is significant. And I assume he has access to money.”

Many New Jersey political insiders are convinced he’s just in it for publicity. But Piscopo says he’s serious, and is hesitant to commit for fear of triggering campaign finance laws and prematurely losing his morning talk radio show.

Piscopo has until the June primary to turn in his ballot petition if he does decide to run.

“I love the state enough to be a sacrificial lamb. Do I get slaughtered along the way? Maybe. But someone’s got to step up out of the two party system,” he said.