Julie Roginsky, a Democrat, and Mike DuHaime, a Republican, are consultants who have worked on opposite teams for their entire careers yet have remained friends. Here, they discuss the week’s political events with Star-Ledger editor Enrique Lavín.
Q: Let’s start with the renewed calls for transparency in the Epstein investigation. Democrats are urging the Department of Justice to release transcripts from interviews with Ghislaine Maxwell. A YouGov poll shows 82% of Americans across party lines support full disclosure.
What are the political and legal stakes of releasing these transcripts?
Julie: It’s not just Republicans who are urging the release of the transcripts. Let’s recall that Donald Trump promised to release everything in the Epstein files when he ran. JD Vance said that the files should be released. So did Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. The more the Trump administration resists, the more we should be asking what this president is hiding.
Mike: This one’s not going away. It hurts Trump with his base who thought he would promote the transparency he promised, so someone must fear something worse than that disappointment if all files were to be released. There’s no way to know without a full release. It’s crazy that the guy who promoted conspiracy theories is now falling victim to them here.
Q: Why might the DOJ resist public pressure, despite bipartisan support? And could this transparency demand backfire politically for either party?
Julie: The refusal to release these files, despite the massive hit Trump has taken from his own base, begs the obvious conclusion that whatever is in there is so damaging to the president that he would rather have this scandal consume his presidency than come clean about what all this shows.
He has dispatched his own former criminal defense attorney and one of the highest-ranking officials in the DOJ to interview Ghislaine Maxwell and has actually floated pardoning her — despite the fact that she is a convicted sex trafficker who ensnared young girls into having sex with countless grown men and then threatened them with violence if they refused. The MAGA Speaker of the House sent his members home just to avoid forcing the DOJ to release these files. Unless you are so red-pilled that you injected bleach intravenously at Trump’s behest, you understand exactly why this is all happening.
Mike: Sometimes the most obvious answer is the answer.
Q: Texas Republicans have proposed a mid-decade redistricting plan to carve out five new GOP congressional seats. This is a rare move, especially outside the usual redistricting cycle. Could this trigger a wave of similar mid-decade redistricting efforts in other states? What does it mean for 2026?
Julie: Republicans are playing for keeps. They know they will get blown out next year if we had fair elections, so they are doing everything they can to tilt the playing field in their own favor. If Democrats don’t wake up and learn to bring a Bazooka to a knife fight, we won’t have a democracy left. Any Democratic state that has the ability to get partisan redistricting on the map for 2026 should move to do that immediately.
Mike: All the mid-decade redistricting is terrible for democracy, simply a partisan game premised on gerrymandering. None of this is in the interest of the voters who will find themselves in new districts.
Q: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick declared that the “Trump Economy has officially arrived” after a 3% GDP growth report — despite signs of weak business investment. Economic reality or political branding?
Julie: I love that Lutnick has branded this the “Trump economy.” Trump’s numbers on the economy are cratering, and that’s before the worst of his tariffs go into effect. By Christmas, he will rue the day that he came up with that slogan. Since it’s the Trump economy, there will be no one else to blame.
Mike: The economy is never about stats. It’s about how you feel personally. Trump lovers and Trump haters would be cautious to overreact to too many stats.
Q: U.S. Sen. Cory Booker publicly criticized his own party on the Senate floor, accusing Democrats of being “complicit in not doing more to counter Trump.” What does this reveal about internal Democratic divisions heading into 2026? Could it hurt Dems in 2026?
Julie: Booker is right. Joe Biden got a lot of good bipartisan legislation passed and voters gave Democrats no credit for it. We are in a battle for the soul of our nation and for our very democracy. You don’t cut deals with people who are trying to destroy the republic. You let them fail and then remind the voters who was in charge when everything went to hell.
Mike: I thought it was great. Good for Cory for speaking truth to power to both parties. Where was that anger in 2020 when he could have been the nominee? The Democrats were looking for anger and passion more than unity and love. This Cory Booker can be a serious contender in 2028.
Q: I know you don’t like to talk about polls, but a new FDU poll shows Democrat Mikie Sherrill only 8 points ahead of Republican Jack Ciattarelli. Some 16% of New Jersey voters are undecided. What about that 16%?
Julie: Sigh… if I must answer polling questions, here is what I would say: These polls are making assumptions about turnout that I don’t think are necessarily accurate. They may not be inaccurate, but they necessarily base their sample on prior elections.
A lot has changed since the last gubernatorial race. You only need to look at the New York City mayor’s race and last year’s New Jersey presidential election numbers to understand that a large swath of voters is no longer reverting to form, while the right candidate can turn out a whole new set of people who never voted before.
Can Sherrill energize progressives and voters of color? Will Ciattarelli turn out Latino voters the way Trump did? Will that 16% that is allegedly undecided even bother coming out in an election where independent voters seem to hate both parties and partisan voters are either energized or depressed, depending on how they feel about Trump and Gov. Murphy? This is all to say that polling in this environment has become nearly impossible, as we continue to go through a seismic shift in voter attitudes. If you don’t believe me, just ask Andrew Cuomo.
Mike: It’s hard to get too worked up about any of these polls, but taken in totality it seems like there is general agreement that Mikie has an advantage in this race given Trump’s numbers and the Democratic advantage in voter registration. But all the polls also seem to agree that this is a close single-digit race that Jack can win. It’s too far from the election to read anything into it other than it should be a close race.
Q: Another FDU poll found about a third of New Jersey voters are concerned about someone close to them could be deported. And 55% say the Trump administration is doing “too much” to deport undocumented immigrants (10% say it’s not doing enough). The same poll showed 37% of voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. How will this playout in the gubernatorial race?
Julie: The question that this election will answer is whether New Jersey off-year elections are still about state issues or whether they, like everything else in the Trump era, are now nationalized.
Murphy thought he could answer that question by running against Trump in 2021 and he almost lost. But that was when Trump was out of office and voters did not think he was coming back. Clearly, voters are unhappy at the moment, but the question is whom they blame for their unhappiness: the Democrats who have run Trenton for eight years or Trump and his Republican allies, who have set the country – including New Jersey – on fire.
Mike: Great point by Julie. The old adage was “all politics are local.” With the demise of local newspapers and the dominance partisan cable television, that should change to “all politics are national.” However, it’s been 53 years since New Jersey has elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate, but in that time Republicans have won six times in races for governor. New Jersey voters have shown time and again they understand the difference between state and national elections.
A note to readers: Can Americans still have a sensible and friendly political discussion across the partisan divide? The answer is yes, and we prove it every week with this “Friendly Fire” conversation.
Mike and Julie are deeply engaged in politics and commercial advocacy in New Jersey, so both have connections to many players discussed in this column. DuHaime, the founder of MAD Global Strategy, has worked for Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and George W. Bush. Roginsky, a principal of Comprehensive Communications Group and author of the Salty Politics column in Substack, has served as senior advisor to campaigns of Cory Booker, Frank Lautenberg, and Phil Murphy.
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