>> From NJ PBS studios, this is NJ Spotlight News with Briana Vannozzi.

>> Hello and thanks for joining us tonight.

I'm Briana Vannozzi.

Coming up, after an intense summer of rain and extreme flooding in North Jersey last weekend, what should we expect for the fall and winter?

Plus, New Jersey's graduation rates may be high, but when it comes to basic math skills, many students are falling behind.

Joanna Gagis has a look at a new alarming report.

First, though, we take a look at the latest polling on the race between Democrat Rebecca Bennett and incumbent Republican Congressman Tom King Jr.

My all eyes are watching this battleground district.

That's next.

Funding for NJ Spotlight News provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

Learn more at RWJBH.org.

If Democrats are going to make gains in the House this midterm cycle, then New Jersey's 7th congressional district is considered the seat to watch.

And a new poll shows just how competitive that race could be, putting Democrat Rebecca Bennett narrowly ahead of Republican Congressman Tom Kane Jr., 47 to 42 percent.

The district has become known as a battleground, offering an early window into the broader fight for control in Congress.

But are the numbers signaling a bigger shift like the blue wave we saw in 2018 or just another tight race?

Veteran pollster Patrick Murray, owner of StemSite Research, conducted the poll along with Insider NJ and joins us now to explain.

Patrick, good to have you on.

Always good to talk to you.

We're talking about a five-point difference here, which is within the margin of error.

What's that really telling us about the state of this race?

Well, I mean, what it's telling you is we're looking at another close race in this district, but it was very different dynamics than we saw two years ago.

So looking past the horse race is really where the numbers that tell you the tale are.

Tom Kane ran ahead of Donald Trump when he ran for re-election two years ago.

If you look at their job approval ratings, Donald Trump's is underwater in this district but Tom Kane's is actually even worse.

So when you have six and ten voters in your district including some of your fellow Republicans who are saying I don't like the job you're doing, that makes it a tough bid for re-election here.

The key that we are seeing is that voters are saying that there are different issues that are important to them if you're a Republican or a Democrat, but among the core voters who are soft right now, either leaning towards Bennett, leaning towards Kaine, or undecided, it's the bread and butter issues.

This is, you know, table, you know, paying for your groceries, those kinds of things.

Those are the things that are going to determine what this margin is and which direction it goes.

Who do they feel can do a better job, if at all?

A lot of these voters sat out in 2024.

They tend to lean Democrat, and that's why we're seeing Rebecca Bennett with a slight edge this time around.

Yeah, I mean, when you talk about two years ago, Tom Kane winning the district by five points, the favorability ratings 37% to 55%, according to the poll.

Is that more than just a warning sign?

Is that something that he can turn around this late?

Not asking you to pontificate there, but historically speaking in an area where he is very well known, but a district that is extremely tight and has been tight for some time.

Yeah, it's tougher and incumbent to turn that around because they're well known, as you said.

And when we only have less than two months to go before the election happens, I think what we're seeing with that number, and that's different than what the challenger is facing.

The challenger is facing, you know, three in 10 voters just really don't have an opinion of her.

Others don't have a really firm opinion.

So it's a little bit more, it's a little easier to move opinion of her than of him.

But she's already starting out in a better starting spot than he is in terms of voter opinion.

What we're seeing is that this is a, remember this is one of the wealthiest districts in the entire country, the 7th district in New Jersey.

But that doesn't mean everybody's wealthy.

And the voters that we're looking at who are coming into this and leaning towards Rebecca Banna, these voters that I mentioned sat out in 2024, tend to be at the lower end of the affluence scale.

And I think that's why we're seeing these numbers.

They are really unhappy with the bills that they have to pay.

But there is also some Republicans in that mix.

And here's what we're finding when we look at national polling about this.

Both Republicans and Democrats are upset with the cost of living, they're upset with inflation, they're upset with a lot of things, and they blame Democrats and they blame Republicans.

But one thing is that Republicans don't blame is Donald Trump.

So they have to put the blame on somebody else.

So Tom Kane is the next person in line who's going to kind of suffer the consequences of Republicans being upset with whoever's in charge.

- Yeah, I guess the question is then how motivated are those voters, right?

I mean, you're cutting across both parties seeing those issues that the affordability in particular, what does either side show whether or not that the voters are more motivated to actually turn out?

Yeah, we're seeing, we're seeing significantly more, at least at this stage, significantly more enthusiasm among Democrats.

But I want to put a caveat on that.

We've seen that in past elections to where Democrats start out more motivated and Republicans catch up with them.

And so that is kind of the thing that you want to look at and keep in mind in terms of history.

But having said that, the Democrats are starting with a significantly more enthusiasm.

So even if Republicans catch up, they have more ground to catch up in this election than they have in prior elections.

Yeah, thinking about that history, I was thinking back, obviously, of course, to 2018, where we saw a massive sweep 41 seats gained by Democrats in the House, a huge sweep in that district, as well.

But even 2006, is it too early too early for the data to tell us whether or not we're going to have a you know, a wave of sorts, or maybe just a series of really competitive races?

Yeah, right now, I mean, the data, if you look at just this poll, I've been doing some other polling privately.

And we've also been looking at polling that's been done across the country.

There is clearly a swing towards Democrats in the poll, at least at this point in the campaign season.

And it's a fairly sizable poll.

But to your question about will we see a wave in terms of the House changing, you mentioned two elections, 2006 and 2018, in which there were entirely different maps.

These maps that we're fighting terrain on here in this election are significantly more rigged for one party or another.

So even if there is say an astronomical 10-point swing in the vote away from Republicans to Democrats nationwide doesn't necessarily mean we're going to see a huge number of pickups for the Democrats.

Yeah and as you always mentioned, polls are snapshots.

There's you know a cautionary tale when it comes to these things.

I want to ask you quickly though about whether or not there are implications here for this district when it comes to this ruling that SCOTUS made regarding restrictions to vote-by-mail balloting that the Trump administration was looking to impose.

That decision came down really handing the administration a blow.

I wonder how significant that could be politically based on the numbers that you're seeing in these tight margins where turnout and the way voters cast their ballots, their motivation to do so can be critical when it's so close.

Yeah, I mean, we don't know exactly what the numbers are for this election.

We do know that some folks have been switching from vote by mail, taking themselves off the list because of this threat.

Now this threat appears to be gone because of the Supreme Court decision, but Democrats were really sweating this out because almost always their margins are coming in by vote by mail that these voters and the question is if these voters had gotten there didn't get their vote by mail ballot because it wasn't sent to them or it wasn't returned would they have made the effort to go out and do something extraordinary by doing a provisional ballot and that's what they were really worried about.

So this does change the ballgame.

Can't tell you, can't give you a prediction on the what-ifs because it's a pure hypothetical, but there's no question that the Democrats were really, really worried about this and this does lift one of their big turnout problems off their shoulders.

Yep, always national implications here.

Patrick Murray, great to get your insight.

Thank you for sharing the poll numbers.

We'll talk to you soon.

My pleasure, Brie.

Well, if you were in North Jersey Sunday morning, you saw it.

Cars submerged nearly to their windows, stretches of highway closed, and half marathon runners waiting waist deep through the water.

The state's climatologist is calling it a once in a generation event for some towns.

Orodell topped the rainfall totals at more than five and a half inches and at least two inches fell in 11 counties.

Meanwhile, the UN is warning of a supersized El Nino.

The question now is what will it bring for this fall and winter?

Here to help us sort through it all is New Jersey State Climatologist, John Krasting.

John, good to have you on the show.

Thank you for giving us some of your time.

You described the latest rainfall as potentially once in a generation for some parts of New Jersey.

What made it so extreme?

Yeah, thanks.

What made this rainfall so extreme was the rainfall rate, just how fast the rain came down.

You know, it started to get very humid on Saturday afternoon.

The atmosphere was really all juiced up.

And then when it started raining, it just simply didn't stop across the northern part of the states.

And the biggest area that was hit hardest was Bergen, Passaic, and Essex counties.

Up there we saw generally four to five inches of rain.

Places like River Edge, North Halden, Hawthorne, Little Falls, all right around that four and a half to five inches of rain.

and a lot of that fell right between 7 a.m.

and 10 a.m.

So, and many places saw about four inches over that three hour period.

And we typically don't see heavy rainfall rates that are sustained for that long of a period.

Normally, there's sort of a brief burst, you know, you get 20, 30 minutes of heavy rain and the storm moves on.

But just for it to rain that intensely for a little over three hours was what we estimate to be about a one in 80 year event in this part of the country.

I mean, and as you know, lots of discussions around the fact that the one in 80 year, one in 100 year, one in a generation like storms or rainfall that we're seeing has become much more frequent.

What can we connect to that?

What we're seeing these storms capable of?

Yeah, we see this.

We posted a similar recap to our Facebook page for the state climate office on Sunday night.

We said similar things once in a generation event and people were commenting, well yeah, we had a one in a lifetime event last month and the month before.

And yeah, it seems to be that things are changing in this part of the country.

And a lot of it is due to the summertime moisture.

This August was one of the most humid months that we've seen in recent memory.

We had 103 hours where the dew point in New Jersey, that's a measure of the amount of moisture in the atmosphere was above 75 degrees.

Now that typically correlates with very oppressive conditions.

The average in August is about 40.

So we saw two and a half times the number of hours with this above normal humidity, the suppressive humidity.

And that provides the fuel for these storms when they train and they repeat over the same areas, that moisture gets wrung out.

And that's where we see that heavy rain.

Yeah, I know.

Certainly that was the discussion among lots of neighbors, how difficult the month was.

We're also though, John, in the heart of hurricane season, what are you watching for in the Atlantic and how concerned should residents be, if at all, about the potential for a storm to impact us?

Well, quite honestly, I'm looking for anything to happen in the Atlantic right now.

It's completely quiet across the Atlantic Basin.

In fact, this is the first season since we've launched weather satellites where we've made it all the way to September 15th without a hurricane in the Atlantic Basin.

We've only had five named storms, tropical storms, so far this month.

So it's very, very quiet across the Atlantic right now.

Noah, as we look ahead, says that this El Nino is strengthening and could become one of the strongest on record.

What does that actually mean for New Jersey?

What is El Nino and what's the impact here?

Sure.

So El Nino, we have to transport all the way over to the Pacific Ocean to understand El Nino.

El Nino is an area of above average sea surface temperatures or water temperatures in the tropical Pacific.

And we measure an El Nino when the anomaly or the warming in the Pacific goes above 2 degrees Celsius.

That's what we call a super El Nino event.

So an El Nino is a half a degree, super El Nino is 2 degrees.

And we just crossed that threshold of 2 degrees yesterday, officially according to NOAA.

So we're now into some elite territory in terms of El Ninos.

Previous El Ninos that we've had recent memories such as the 2015 to 2016, the 1997 to 98 and the 1982 to 83 El Ninos were also in the super El Nino category.

What does that mean then for what we should expect this fall and winter?

Are we talking about, you know, more coastal storms, more snow, all of it?

So the first thing to know about El Nino is that everyone, every El Nino has its own unique personality.

Just because we saw certain impacts during, say, the 2016 El Nino or the 1997-98 El Nino doesn't necessarily guarantee that we are gonna see that this time.

In fact, the estimates are, as you pointed out from Noah, that there's a 75% chance that this becomes the most intense El Nino that we've seen since at least 1950.

So that puts us into some uncharted territory.

So given the uncertainty that they're all sort of different and that we haven't seen potentially one this strong, it's a little bit hard to say for sure what kind of impacts we're going to see in New Jersey.

But what typically happens in an El Nino year is that we tend to have warmer conditions across the Northeast and here in New Jersey.

And we also have a strengthening, what's called a subtropical jet stream, which is to our South.

And that tends to bring in more moisture and the possibility of some more heavier rainfall and coastal storms.

Now there's no indication on the horizon of that just yet, but that's something we'll be watching as we get into November and December as this El Nino starts to ramp up.

- Yeah, and there's a lot to look for there.

Is there a bigger picture here though, John?

I mean, are we looking at these maybe too closely as similar issues or did we simply have, you know, an unusually wet and intense summer and now a very potential for some intensity this winter or is there a bigger climate bridge here signaling a connection?

- Yeah, there are a couple of different factors going on here.

One is that it was just a bit of an unlucky summer.

So we get periods where the atmospheric circulation just gets pretty stagnant.

And we get stalled out frontal boundaries and waves of low pressure that move overhead.

And that was really sort of the pattern we were in in the latter half of July, August, and leading up to this event just this past weekend.

But that's coming on the backdrop of a much bigger picture that's changing.

You know, I pointed out that there's a lot more humidity in the atmosphere, and that's leading to more intense rainfall events.

So when it does rain, it's raining harder across New Jersey.

The number of days since the 1960s where we see two inches of rain or more has increased by about 50 percent, according to researchers at NOAA and reported in the National Climate Assessment.

So we are seeing trends in climate change, and we're also seeing trends in impervious coverage and urbanization, which is making the floods a little bit more intense.

You know, when it's raining that hard, there's not anywhere for that water to go.

It's not able to make it into the soil.

There are a lot of different factors, both in terms of variability, the way that we're interacting with the environment, and of course, a longer-term climate trend on top of that.

New Jersey State climatologist John Krasting, thanks for helping us make sense of it all.

Good to talk to you.

Great, thanks for having me.

New Jersey's high school graduation rate is at a record high, but a new report warns that number may be masking a serious gap in math skills, with many students earning diplomas only to arrive at college unprepared.

Joanna Gagis spoke with our urban education writer, Julie O'Connor, about why the state's graduation requirements may be giving families a false sense of confidence as part of our Under the Dome series.

Julie, it's great to see you.

You recently interviewed an education analyst and the author of a report called False Hope New Jersey's Kids Aren't Ready for College.

His name is Chad Alderman.

What did this report say?

Officials often tout the state's over 90% average high school graduation rate and Alderman says you know that's really a mirage.

About 40 percent of the kids who get diplomas in New Jersey still can't do basic high school level math and what happens is they're showing up at schools like Rutgers and they're going straight into remedial level classes and he says it's just really demoralizing.

You know, he spoke to students and professors and it's a real problem, they said.

Okay, help us understand you and he talked about in this interview some of the changes that the state put in place that actually reduced standards for graduation.

Can you talk us through some of that?

One thing he says is that the state lowered the passing grade for the exit exam for graduation and they also expanded alternative pathways to graduate that are you know less rigorous.

I've spoken with other experts in New Jersey who say that for example the portfolio route can be closer to you know a few sheets of paper rather than what you might envision which is a portfolio full of work.

So schools like Rutgers then are having to grapple with an increasing number of freshmen coming in and going straight into remedial classes and just you know how to figure out how to teach those kids while also teaching other kids who are getting AP credits and are going into top-level courses.

It's a real divide, he says.

I want to just break that down a little bit.

When you say portfolio route, explain what you mean.

Well, that's just one of the alternative pathways to graduation.

Students can submit a portfolio of work and that gets evaluated, but I'm told that, you know, that may not be regulated sort of across districts or it may not be always what you might expect, which is, you know, a folder full of work might be less than that.

So in other words, there's no real standard and it's not standardized if you're going to go to that route or if a district is allowed to offer that route.

That's what Alderman says.

He wasn't clear on all of the details, but he got he gets the sense that it's not really standardized and that's something that I've heard from other experts in New Jersey.

So he points to these gaps at the college level really as starting very likely in he says K to 12 but as you spoke to him it seemed more at the elementary level.

Can you talk us through how the gaps first exist there and then perhaps widen as a student goes on through their K-12 career?

He says these gaps start as early as second or third grade and the problem is that when you're a student in math, you know, each class builds on the previous class and so if you fall behind at the beginning, those gaps only widen over time and he says we really can't wait until, you know, twelfth grade to address this and so he is suggesting two potential reforms that New Jersey could look at.

Yeah, I want to get to those reforms in a minute but I also want to look at the struggle and the impact it can have on students when they get to college.

You talked about the college perspective and how they have to try to teach kids who are, you know, students at all varying levels but what does this mean for someone who maybe has a field that they want to study, a major that they're working towards?

What is the impact when they get to college?

It causes them delays, you know, they have to go back and retake classes that they thought they did well in, you know, maybe they got A's and B's, you know, in algebra in high school or, you know, calculus and then they find they're retaking that class again at Rutgers.

So not only is it demoralizing, it delays their progress toward their future careers.

Did you get any clarity from anyone at the state level in terms of when or how or why they've changed these standards?

Well some folks argue there's a contingent of advocates who say that they feel that we shouldn't have you know the exit exam for graduation at all.

There's a pending state bill that would actually eliminate that exam and they argue that grades are actually a better indicator of how students will ultimately do in college.

But Alleman argues that we really need both measures because of grade inflation.

You know, sometimes standardized test scores can give a much more accurate or honest picture of where students skills actually lie.

So we have this debate going on about whether we should lower standards even further or raise standards and what standards we should be looking at.

What are his recommendations for the state in terms of how they either standardize this or other changes he would recommend that they make?

He recommends two things to address this.

One, he thinks we should be raising standards instead of lowering them.

As I said, he's against eliminating the exit exam for graduation.

He thinks that its standards should be more rigorous.

The second thing he recommends is for the state to release the results of the state tests that students take every spring a lot earlier, because if parents get these results in the fall, you know, that's really too late for them to ensure that kids are in summer programs that they may need to catch up.

So he says those two things might help address the issue.

Do you see any connection between the work that the state's doing right now with high intensity tutoring that's happening at the lower levels, right, grades three and up?

Do you see a connection there between this work and potentially closing those gaps as these students move on?

Yeah, you know, high quality tutoring is one of the strategies that experts have recommended to address gaps both in math and in reading.

I think the problem is that districts don't have equal access to those resources.

You know, some were able to get state grants to continue to offer high quality tutoring and others were not.

It was a competitive process and so I think that this is a problem that we'll continue to see throughout the state.

Yeah, and I know you'll keep reporting on it.

Julie O'Connor, our urban education writer.

Thank you.

Thanks, Joanna.

Under the Dome is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

That's going to do it for us tonight.

For the entire NJ Spotlight News team, thanks for being with us.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

NJM Insurance Group, serving the insurance needs of residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

(laughing) Is that... Wow!

[laughing] It's gonna be okay.

[LAUGH] [MUSIC] [MUSIC]