NJ governor wants to legalize sports gambling

[The Buzz]

A few months after Delaware Governor Jack Markell expressed his interest in legalizing sports gambling in his state, his counterpart just north has expressed the same.

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine says that he wants his state to legalize sports gambling to generate revenue.

ESPN.com did a survey of 728 random New Jersey residents to ask them what they thought about the issue. Luckily, Buzzy has an Insider account, and here are the results:

Of those polled, 63 percent favored legalized sports betting at casinos, with 32 percent saying no thanks. The numbers were roughly the same when people were asked about having sports betting at racetracks. The gap closed -- 48 percent to 43 percent -- when the question was whether betting should be allowed at OTBs. And the opinion completely flipped when the issue was making sports betting legal over the phone or online, with 66 percent opposing Internet gambling and only 26 percent approving. By the way, when it came to gender, 69 percent of men and 58 percent of women favored legalized sports betting.

[Anthony]

People have been constantly hearing about the "evils" of onling gambling, it is a well known fact we are all terrorists. So it's not surprising there would be limited support for onliine gambling at the same time there is overwhelming support for land based gaming.

[pgavin]

I don't know why they have giving online gambling such a black eye. I worked in the secondary ticket market for a few years and it was similar to online gambling. They thought we were all crooks and stealing tickets from the every day consumer. If there is a demand for product, then we should be able to supply it. Gambling on sports or online gaming is going to happen either way. They should support it and take the benefits of the revenue we can drive for the economy. Hopefully Barney Frank will get the bill passed to legalize online gambling again in the US.....only time will tell.