Anti-Trump wave is Republican Hugin's biggest hurdle in U.S. Senate race

Robert Hugin, the Big Pharma executive with the big bank account, stresses he will be an independent, pragmatic voice if New Jersey voters send him to the U.S. Senate in November.

"If Governor Murphy or Senator Booker have a good idea that makes sense for New Jersey, I will stand up and support them,'' the Republican newcomer said Tuesday inside an Elks lodge in Springfield. "And if President Trump or any Republican has an idea or a view that’s bad for New Jersey, I will forcefully stand up and disagree with them.”

Yet, in recent years Hugin has been a loyal and generous member of Trump's partisan tribe. He pumped $100,000 into the Trump-aligned Super PAC for president. He was a Trump delegate to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

He flanked Trump at a meeting of pharmaceutical executives last year, and went on television to spin the image of Trump as a deep-in-the-weeds policy wonk, hard at work on the road to reform. Up until recently, he's been a Trump loyalist from a state where Trump is deeply unpopular.

"So, I have to tell you the president was incredibly substantive, engaged, constructive and solution-oriented," Hugin told Maria Bartiromo, morning anchor of the Financial Business Network. "And we are very encouraged to work with him and the administration and the Congress to get these reforms enacted."

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Hugin, 63, has spent much of his career in politics propping up Republicans, ranging from $43,500 to New Jersey GOP campaigns to $150,000 for House Speaker Paul Ryan's campaign account. Celgene, the Summit-based biotech firm he led until last month, has been closely allied with former Gov. Chris Christie. He gave $250,000 to a Christie-aligned Super PAC created for his 2016 campaign for president, according to OpenSecrets.org.

Hugin, who is facing a likely challenge in the June primary from Brian Goldberg of West Orange, has an impressive résumé for a New Jersey Republican Party that lacks a bench, money and registered voters. He's a Jersey-bred Horatio Alger who made his way from a blue-collar family in Union City -- the home turf of Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez -- who won a full scholarship to Princeton. After graduating in 1976, he joined the U.S. Marines and became an artillery officer.

Hugin got his start at J.P. Morgan and, he says, rescued the bio-tech company Celgene and turned it into a powerhouse that produces an array of cancer-fighting drugs. He looks like a candidate from central casting, handsome in the Mitt Romney, statesman-mold. He's got enough money to feed the cash-hungry Republican county committees and tell his story on the expensive New York and Philadelphia television stations.

And he is casting himself as the squeaky clean alternative to Menendez, fresh off a federal corruption trial where Menendez was accused of effectively being on the payroll of his his friend and longtime donor, Salomon Melgen, a Florida eye doctor.

The trial ended in a hung jury when 10 of the 12 jurors wanted to acquit Menendez, and the Justice Department decided not to retry him after the federal judge dismissed key charges against him. Yet, the trial produced a damning dossier that Hugin and his campaign team suggested Tuesday that they will recycle relentlessly in the coming campaign: Menendez's help in securing visas for Melgen's foreign girlfriends, his attempts to help resolve Melgen's $8.9 million billing dispute with Medicare, and his efforts to help Melgen with a port security contract in the Dominican Republic.

“New Jersey deserves better from our next senator," Hugin said. "New Jersey deserves a senator as good as its people, not one working to stay one step ahead of the law.”

It would be a compelling argument in any other political environment and it may still strike a chord with voters -- after all, 51 percent of New Jersey adults in a Rutgers-Eagleton poll last November said Menendez should not be re-elected, while 26 percent said he should. And by 49 percent said he should resign.

But Hugin has the misfortune of being a Republican running amid a rising anti-Trump wave. Trump is the president whose tax law has brought harm to homeowners, with its $10,000 cap on state and local deductions on the federal tax returns. He is the president who wants to drill for oil off the Jersey coast.

He is the president who wants to deport immigrants, a nativist policy that runs counter to the state's tradition of tolerance and diversity. He is a president that dog whistles almost on a daily basis to white nationalists in his base, a base that has a negligible presence in New Jersey. And women of all political backgrounds are furious and disgusted with Trump's past treatment of women and his sympathetic defense of a disgraced top aide accused of beating his former wives.

The looming anti-Trump wave already hounded U.S. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen into retirement despite his coveted and powerful post as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Veteran congressman Frank LoBiondo is also leaving Congress after his term ends next January. Cook Political Report, the Washington, D.C.-based handicapper of political races, now classifies the district as "leans Democratic" in November's election.

The re-election of U.S. Rep. Leonard Lance, a longtime central Jersey moderate who hails from a safe Republican redoubt, is in peril. And even Chris Smith, the longtime Fourth Congressional District Republican, whose district stretches from Mercer County to the shore and has coasted to easy re-election victories since the mid-1980s, is being targeted by the Democratic Congressional campaign committee.

Menendez, a tenacious campaigner and who enjoys widespread institutional Democratic Party support, will have to carry his baggage on the ballot, and there is still a Senate Ethics Committee investigation that could further wound him. But Hugin will have to prove that he's not fused at the hip with Trump's agenda. Menendez and the Democrats are banking on the belief that New Jersey voters are in no mood to send another Republican to join Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's thin majority in the Senate, another potential rubber stamp for Trump's agenda.

Chris Russell, Hugin's campaign manager and a veteran of New Jersey campaigns, frames the coming race as a choice between Hugin, the independent minded problem solver, and a disgraced Menendez. "This is not a referendum on Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell,'' he said. "This a referendum on Bob Hugin and Bob Menendez."

Hugin also described his role as the head of a successful profitable pharmaceutical company as a humane vocation, the CEO with a heart. The compassionate conservative, the Big Pharma version.

"Celgene changed my life," Hugin said. "It gave a new sense of mission and purpose of my life. You meet cancer patients, you know who you work for."

But there are competing corporate narratives that will likely dog Hugin in the coming months. Celgene, for example, reportedly increased the prices of cancer medications in 2017, when Hugin was chairman of the company’s board of directors. And last year, the company agreed to cough up $280 million to settle a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles alleging it committed fraud promoting two cancer drugs for unapproved purposes, according to published reports.

Still, if Menendez looks like he's going to lose and become a drag on other Democratic candidates on the ballot, the Democrats in New Jersey and Washington will ramp up pressure on Menendez to quit the race.

If that happens, they can install a replacement, as they did at the last minute in 2002, when then-Sen. Robert Torricelli withdrew from the race amid an ethical cloud. His replacement, former U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg, came out of retirement and cruised to an easy victory over Republican Doug Forrester, the wealthy owner of a pharmaceutical benefits management firm and who cast himself as the ethically sound alternative to Torricelli.

Lautenberg won when there were 260,500 more registered Democrats than Republicans. Democrats now have 900,000 more registered voters.

And Lautenberg didn't have the advantage of being able to paint his opponent as being a potential rubber stamp of Donald Trump.