Assemblyman Andrew Zwicker’s (D-16) skin of his teeth victory in 2015 now puts him in battle mode as he wades into his home 16th District amid the quirkiness of 2017, any expectation of a post-Christie Democratic Party avalanche undercut by an absolutely flat political atmosphere, Central Jersey suburbia a thicket of dented mailboxes and barred doors with people inside under the private hoods of their gadgets and zonked in front of the screens of their machines.

Always at risk of being too smart for politics, Zwicker, a Princeton plasma physicist by trade, has the added headache of a Democratic Party dumbing itself even further down in this cycle, its leaders insisting on samurai sword skirmishes with one another rather than training their fire on the enemy, a dynamic that has allowed Republican gubernatorial nominee Kim Guadagno to seemingly creep back into the race.

On Tuesday night a bewildered Democratic Party operative seethed about a culture whose population witnesses the biggest gun massacre in American history at the beginning of the month, then watches helplessly as Guadagno makes a play for gun money to inflate a statewide campaign maybe mortally wounded by Chris Christie, but twitching just enough to be a nuisance.

And to cause panic in LD16.

Zwicker told InsiderNJ he’s not focused on any of that as he simply puts his head down and, like state Senator Kip Bateman (R-16) on top of the opposing ticket, radiates his own message to voters.

“My comfort level is never going to be great,” Zwicker told InsiderNJ. “I’m running as if I’m behind. A lot of knocking on doors. My goal, of course, is to win by more than 78 votes this time. It’s a strange cycle. We have this craziness with the president exhausting everybody. People’s view of government is at an historic low.”

So he’s talking more about his own scientific approach to solving affordability problems more than he is the merits of his party.

“We have to grow businesses and economy,” he said. “Our single-most underused resource in this state is innovation. That message cuts across party lines. There’s no reason New Jersey can’t be in same breath as Silicon Valley.”

At the top of the Democratic ticket, gubernatorial candidate Phil Murphy’s making that same case, and Zwicker loves the connectivity factor. But suburban Dems are also fearful of what they consistently size up as a statewide campaign whose overall message keys into urban GOTV more than suburban taxpayer dread.

Still, the Democratic assemblyman hoping to check a come-backing former Assemblywoman Donna Simon (R-16), who’s on the ticket with Bateman, stays positive.

“I’m really happy to hear him talking about next generation wireless,” Zwicker said of Murphy. “We need to look at a revitalization of the economy in suburbia. I have hundreds of high tech companies in my district and there’s a real opportunity.”

At the moment, the assemblyman wants to remind voters of how he’s revitalized the scientific method in an atmosphere otherwise almost wholly dominated by a culture of wind-up tough guys in too tight suits who have seen the movie Goodfellas too many times to count. Somewhat the victim of a leadership fight that ripped his old operative pal Mark Matzen away from LD16 and relocated him at the side of Speaker Vincent Prieto, the Assemblyman Craig Coughlin for Speaker-backing Zwicker, for all his scientific sophistication, just wants to make sure the clerk counts his vote total over that of old rival Simon.

And it would be nice, he admits, to nudge that number past 78 votes.