Hold the phone. I’ve been following NYC metro area politics for more than 20 years, having lived and grown up here. Democrats outnumber GOPers in NJ and NY and have done so for decades. They have built in advantages in the numbers. It would take a sea change to overcome that.

And yet, NJ is a dead heat between an incompetent Democrat who’s outspent his opponent by a 3-1 margin using his personal wealth to do so. That has more to do with the dead heat than anything the GOP is doing nationally.

GOP candidate Christie Christie can’t keep up with the attack ads against him. That’s killed his lead in the polls, even though many NJers want to see Corzine gone because he’s gone back on his promises for property tax relief, all while increasing other taxes and fees and increasing the size and scope of the state workforce.

Corzine is also irresponsibly calling for municipalities to curtail pension payment obligations, saddling those municipalities with a bigger tax bill down the road - all to get this year’s budget done. He’s contributed to making the structural deficits worse in the state.

But Corzine can gloss over everything and paint Christie as a Bush-wannabe. That’s the subtext of all the ads he’s running. They’re not painting him as a knuckle dragging far right wing nutter or a Palin-follower or a creationist.

They’re blaming Bush in NJ. And it’s worked to narrow the gap, which speaks volumes about the way people in these parts despise Bush and are willing to tar anything that even remotely is associated with him - whether it’s warranted or not.

And Daggett is seen as a stalking horse to draw votes from Christie - that he’s running to hit Christie, and isn’t a viable alternative to Christie in the GOP. Christie’s credentials are considerable - and the corruption busting hits home here in NJ because of all the corrupt politicos he’s put away - he has a 100% conviction rate on those cases, and has gotten a bunch from the most recent major bust to already enter guilty pleas.

As for the upstate NY-23 race, it’s a mess because the state and local GOP is in utter disarray, and Hoffman got support from outside the establishment (which isn’t saying much given how incompetent the NYS GOP has been for years on end). Gov. Pataki, the last GOP governor, was as fiscally irresponsible as they come, and when he was gone, the state GOP was left in a mess from which it may not recover for years.

If NJ goes to the GOP, it’s got nothing to do with the national sentiment, but the locals being fed up with the totality of Democrat feckless policy in Trenton. It would be a slight rebuke to Obama and all the other high profile Democrats who have come into NJ to stump for Corzine (Obama 2x, Biden and Bill Clinton 1x each), but the anger is directly mostly at Corzine who has failed miserably and has tried to cover for them through throwing money (taxpayers’ money at that) at the problems with no effect except to soak taxpayers in the state.

If the NY-23 goes to Hoffman, it speaks to the GOP candidate’s miserable handling of her campaign, and the attention on the race that it has brought.

The NYS State GOP has to clean up its act if it wants to improve matters into 2010. The NY-23 race should be the clarion call, but I doubt it will be answered.