6/4 Primary Preview Part I

DC and New Jersey

This is Part I of today’s primary preview; for Part II, covering Iowa, Montana, and New Mexico, click here.

DC Council

At-Large

Robert White (i) vs. Rodney “Red” Grant

Result: White 83.0%, Grant 17.0% | White wins

We're still convinced that Robert White would be mayor right now if unions and progressive groups had realized he was viable and began their push for him just a week or two earlier. We think he shares a similar perspective that his loss was attributable to voters not knowing who he was until the last minute, because he's running TV ads in a reelection campaign where his only opponent is Rodney Grant, the idiosyncratic former independent mayoral candidate who got 15% of the vote, most of which, we're willing to bet, was voters who wanted to vote against Muriel Bowser, and found the other two choices, a Republican and a Libertarian, unacceptable.

Ward 4 (Northwest)

Janeese Lewis George (i) vs. Lisa Gore vs. Paul Johnson

Result: Lewis George 66.4%, Gore 28.3%, Johnson 5.3% | Lewis George wins

Janeese Lewis George pulled off a historic feat in 2020 when she defeated incumbent Brandon Todd in a major upset. Fueled by DSA and progressive groups, Lewis George was able to successfully portray Todd as an ally of Mayor Muriel Bowser in all the wrong ways, fighting on her behalf to weaken or kill progressive bills and initiatives. Lewis George’s 55%-43% election immediately made her the most left-wing voice on the Council, which remains the case to this day, even after another DSA-aligned councilmember was elected in 2022 (Ward 5’s Zachary Parker). Lewis George, a proponent of police defunding during her 2020 campaign, has remained a critic of DC’s turn toward increasingly authoritarian policing, and was the only vote against the DC crime bill passed this year designed to crack down on drug users and reduce police oversight, including the return of police being allowed to use strangleholds.

Centrists and business interests are attempting to use Lewis George’s criminal justice stances to unseat her, and their candidate is Lisa Gore. You may remember Gore from her 2022 run for City Council At-Large against Anita Bonds, perhaps the most conservative member of the body. Progressives mostly lined up behind Gore, who sounded at the time like she was interested in voting more like the median member of the Council. Surprise! Turns out Gore doesn’t actually have any beliefs and is opportunistically glomming onto whatever ideological movement needs to put someone on the ballot. Joke’s on us, we guess. Gore, now campaigning on her decades in law enforcement (as a probation officer) is attacking Lewis George for being soft on crime and has the endorsement of the Washington Post*. For any conservative who doesn’t trust Gore after she her 2022 campaign, there’s always Paul Johnson, who, unlike Gore, isn’t trying to sugarcoat his aversion to progressive politics, but his incompetent campaign (the man is going around the distinct taping up typo-filled 8 x 11 sheets of paper he presumably printed off at home) suggests he’s not getting far.

*because they default to whoever the rightmost candidate is in every DC election, up to and including Republicans. Their 2022 November endorsements literally included more Republicans than Democrats, because the number of Democratic endorsements was zero. Their endorsements are dismal, and the word’s out on whether this is because they’re owned by the richest man in America, because none of the editorial board actually lives in the city (which they seem to despise), or just because some intangible force that leads the most head-up-ass grouchy conservatives to even want to be on editorial boards in the first place. This concludes our biennial rant about how much the Washington Post sucks.

Ward 7 (Northeast)

Kelvin Brown vs. Wendell Felder vs. Nate Fleming vs. Ebony Payne vs. Veda Rasheed vs. Eboni-Rose Thompson

Result: Felder 23.7%, Thompson 20.2%, Payne 20.2%, Rasheed 10.0%, Brown 9.3%, Fleming 8.8% | Felder wins

Former mayor and current councilmember Vincent Gray is retiring, resulting in the only open seat on the Council this year. While other recent open seats created clear two way progressive vs center contests, Ward 7 has been more muddled. The favorite is ANC Commissioner and Ward 7 party boss Wendell Felder. Supported by Gray, The Washington Post, and business interest group Opportunity DC, Felder is predictably moderate, supporting city financing of private sports stadiums, and opposing both reducing cars’ share of roads, and congestion pricing. The unexpected components of his coalition are progressives: the SEIU and DSA-affiliated city councilmember Zachary Parker are both among his endorsers. We have to assume this comes from a pessimism about Ward 7 electing anyone much better than Felder, but a knowledge they could do worse.

“Worse” is Veda Rasheed, a charter school flak who otherwise seems like she’s running to the left of every issue we just dinged Felder on. However, charter school advocates have so thoroughly demonstrated they are not to be trusted—“charter school fan gets elected as Democrat in a safe blue urban legislative district, get so mad at other Democrats for supporting public schools she defects to the GOP” isn’t even specific enough a description to refer to only a single example this year—that Rasheed is clearly the boogeyman other groups are trying to stop.

Eboni-Rose Thompson, who represents Ward 7 on the DC State Board of Education (yes, DC has a state board of education) is the more progressive option…probably. Few of the actual progressive groups are actually getting involved with her, and the only unions that endorsed her are the teachers, AFSCME, and firefighters. While the Washington Teachers Union has clearly positioned itself against the business-friendly center of DC politics, they could also be endorsing just because she’s a board of ed member; and neither AFSCME nor the firefighters are known as particularly good indicators of a progressive candidate. Her other big endorsement is urbanist magazine Greater Greater Washington, who gave her a shrugging, “well we gotta pick someone” endorsement. The reality is that despite being on good terms with a lot of activist groups, Thompson’s campaign itself has struck a vaguely anti-establishment tone without really pushing progressive policy. The result is that not many progressives are convinced she’ll be better enough than Felder to be worth endorsing.

Also probably more progressive than Felder, but in a way progressives don’t actually want to align themselves with, is Ebony Payne. Payne is an ANC commissioner who’s raised more than any other candidate and counts many members of Congress among her endorsers, which makes more sense when you realize she’s married to Democratic political consultant Chuck Rocha. While Payne has a solid platform and speaks passionately about how she finds the other candidates insufficiently engaged, she’s become what Washington City Paper has termed “the favored punching bag” of the rest of the field. Payne is not only an outsider in the sense she has more ties to federal than local politics, but in the sense she’s from the wrong part of the district. Ward 7 (like Ward 8) has historically been composed of territory east of the Anacostia River, sometimes abbreviated EOTR because the river represents a significant geographical and political boundary beyond which decades of systematic (and ongoing) disinvestment have lead to poverty rates much higher than the rest of the city. In the most recent redistricting, a few thousand people in the yuppie Capitol Hill area were added to even out the district’s population, and that’s where Payne, the candidate who’s raising money through her DC consultant husband, lives. You can see why feathers have been rankled.

Ward 8 (Southeast)

Trayon White (i) vs. Salim Adofo vs. Rahman Branch

Result: White 51.9%, Adofo 27.9%, Branch 20.3% | White wins

Trayon White, known to most of the country as “the Jewish weather machine guy”, survived the controversies of his first term and won reelection in 2020 by a sizable 58%-27% margin. His 2022 mayoral campaign, otherwise a massive flop, saw him nearly outpacing incumbent Muriel Bowser in Ward 8, taking 33% of the vote despite clearly not being a viable candidate. He’s probably set for reelection, and it doesn’t help that his opposition is divided. High school principal Rahman Branch is running to White’s right. While White’s best known for his relentless focus on crime, he also does represent an extremely poor ward and votes like he wants to do something about it. Branch’s campaign boldly asks “what if White didn’t even get that basic redistribution stuff right?” Naturally, he’s endorsed by the Washington Post. Progressives don’t exactly have a candidate here, but tenant organizer and ANC Commissioner Salim Adofo is at least a potential councilmember who won’t constantly say insane things and beat the crime drum.

New Jersey

NJ-Sen

Andy Kim vs. Patricia Campos-Medina vs. Larry Hamm

Result: Kim 74.8%, Campos-Medina 16.1%, Hamm 9.1% | Kim wins

Welcome to the Senate race that never was.

After the (second) indictment of U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, ambitious New Jersey Democrats scrambled behind the scenes to line up support from party bosses. In keeping with the state’s tradition of opaque, boss-driven politics, most candidates kept their ambitions private so that whoever the bosses decided on could present a unified front to replace Menendez. However, one prominent candidate didn’t play along—and he just may have upended the state’s entire political system.

Rep. Andy Kim wasn’t anybody’s idea of an anti-machine crusader before he launched his Senate campaign, the day after Menendez was indicted. Kim had previously won three terms in Congress with the blessing of the South Jersey Democratic machine, two of those terms in a Trump-voting Jersey Shore district. His voting record is, sure, not terrible, but it isn’t great, either. And Kim is well-known as a mild-mannered nice guy, not a political brawler. But it soon became clear Kim wasn’t waiting for anybody’s permission or taking orders from the bosses in his Senate campaign when the machine finally presented its own candidate over a month after Kim’s launch. New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy entered the race with near-unanimous support from Democratic elected officials and labor unions, and endorsers flocked to her side in the hopes of currying favor with Gov. Phil Murphy, who energetically supported his wife’s Senate campaign. Hers was an old-school New Jersey primary campaign: she focused on consolidating the early support of party machines in the state’s populous urban centers, securing the coveted party ballot line in counties home to about 60% of New Jersey’s Democrats. In the face of Murphy’s machine-conferred advantages, Kim didn’t back down; instead, he took aim at the machine itself, transforming his campaign into a referendum on the politics of patronage and bossism for which New Jersey is notorious. He called for the abolition of the county line, and joined a federal lawsuit seeking to have the line ruled unconstitutional. He also played the inside game, trying to win the county line in counties which award their lines through open, small-d democratic conventions, and was largely successful in doing so, starting with an upset of the first lady in the Murphys’ home county of Monmouth and following with Kim landslides in eight more counties. With Kim appearing far stronger than the machine had accounted for—and his lawsuit appearing surprisingly likely to succeed—the machine had its come-to-Jesus moment right before the filing deadline. The Murphys called a meeting of Democratic county bosses in the Newark offices of politically-connected law firm Genova Burns, where they broke the bad news: Tammy Murphy was withdrawing from the race and would not appear on the ballot. While this was a body blow to machine power in New Jersey, it provided a glimmer of hope for the survival of the county line: with Murphy out, Kim no longer faced an opponent who had the line anywhere, and plans were underway to replace Murphy with Kim on the line in most counties. That hope was extinguished days later when federal judge Zahid Quraishi issued an injunction against the use of the county line, finding that Murphy’s exit from the race didn’t change the fundamental unfairness of the system, which organizes ballots around machine-backed slates of candidates rather than listing candidates by office. While Quraishi’s decision is preliminary and only applies to this year’s Democratic primaries, the judge who will be rendering a final decision will also be Zahid Quraishi (and if proponents of the line try to appeal a final decision, they’ll have to contend with a Third Circuit that already rejected their appeal of the injunction.) In short, it appears that New Jersey’s unique primary ballot design is on its way out, and the bloodless coronations it facilitated will become a lot less common.

Ironically, the man who killed the line is now set for a bloodless coronation of his own. Labor leader Patricia Campos-Medina and former Newark school board member Larry Hamm are both running to Kim’s left, and both oppose the line as well; Campos-Medina even went mildly viral when Camden County Democrats physically barred her from entering their convention (where party leaders officially crowned Murphy as their endorsed candidate.) She’s also affiliated herself with downballot candidates in Camden County and the Middlesex County city of Perth Amboy. But Kim—who has far more money, far more name recognition, and now the diehard support of activists grateful for his anti-machine maneuvering—is going to coast to an easy victory; the only question is how overwhelming his margin will be.

NJ-03 (Burlington County, Hamilton, Freehold, Manalapan)

Joe Cohn vs. Herb Conaway vs. Carol Murphy vs. Brian Schkeeper vs. Sarah Schoengood

Result: Conaway 49.6%, Murphy 25.3%, Cohn 11.7%, Schoengood 10.0%, Schkeeper 3.4% | Conaway wins

Assemb. Herb Conaway is the favorite to succeed Andy Kim in the House by every metric. Before the line was struck down, he won the endorsements of all three county parties covering the 3rd congressional district, and he’s also maintained a wide lead in fundraising. Conaway has also been boosted by hundreds of thousands of dollars in support from various super PACs, while none of his opponents have been so fortunate. But Conaway’s opponents aren’t hopeless; Carol Murphy, his Assembly seatmate (no relation to the governor), has the backing of the Philadelphia Inquirer and is running a spirited campaign, and she’s trying to position herself as a more independent alternative to Conaway despite her closer ties to South Jersey boss George Norcross. Sarah Schoengood was a co-plaintiff on Andy Kim’s successful lawsuit and is the candidate who most credibly claims the good-government mantle; Schoengood is a small business owner from Freehold who has been partially self-funding her campaign. Attorney Joe Cohn, who works at the libertarian “campus free speech” group FIRE, is also running as an outsider, and like Schoengood, he made appearances at Democratic county conventions to argue against the county line system. (Schoolteacher Brian Schkeeper is a late entrant to the race and hasn’t made as much of an impression as the other four candidates.) Conaway is likely to coast, but not guaranteed, and at least one of his opponents (if not two or even all three) should put up a double-digit vote share. Policy has, sadly, been left by the wayside in this race, as good-government issues and anti-corruption sentiment have sucked up all the oxygen in New Jersey politics (but this did, at least, lead to both Conaway and Murphy voting against a bill which will gut the state’s public records law if Gov. Murphy signs it as expected.) There is a historic nature to this election as well: Conaway would be the first Black representative from South Jersey, and either Murphy or Schoengood would be the first woman to represent South Jersey.

NJ-06 (Coastal Monmouth County, Edison, Woodbridge, New Brunswick)

Frank Pallone (i) vs. John Hsu

Result: Pallone 84.0%, Hsu 16.0% | Pallone wins

John Hsu is a progressive activist and former Sanders delegate from Edison who’s running in an informal alliance with Senate candidate Larry Hamm. Frank Pallone will be absolutely fine, but his support for Tammy Murphy was plenty embarrassing enough to warrant a protest vote for Hsu.

NJ-08 (North Hudson County, Jersey City, Elizabeth, Newark)

Rob Menendez Jr. (i) vs. Ravi Bhalla vs. Kyle Jasey

Result: Menendez 52.0%, Bhalla 37.5%, Jasey 10.5% | Menendez wins

Rob Menendez Jr. has lived a pretty charmed life. His father was elected mayor of Union City when Rob was just a year old; before Rob’s eighth birthday, his father was a congressman; and before he graduated college, his father was a U.S. senator. After college, Rob got a cushy job with politically-connected law firm Lowenstein Sandler, then in 2021 an appointment to the board of the notoriously corrupt Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Mere months after his appointment, his father’s successor in the House of Representatives, Albio Sires, announced he would retire in 2022 and back Rob as his successor. A few phone calls from Senator Menendez later (or perhaps earlier, we can’t be sure Bob didn’t force Sires out to get his kid into Congress—Sires didn’t really retire, he went back to his old job as mayor of West New York), and the stage was set for the second generation of a new Menendez dynasty. Virtually every Hudson County politician who might want the seat endorsed Rob instead, before Rob even announced his campaign. With the field cleared, Rob waltzed into Congress without a serious challenge in the primary. It was classically New Jersey: the voters of the 8th district were assigned a new representative months ahead of the primary by a small and secretive group of party insiders, and the new representative just happened to be the son of the U.S. senator who once represented Hudson County in the House.

As Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla would tell it, “voters have an opportunity now to correct the wrong that was done to them two years ago.” That’s a line from the Jersey Journal’s endorsement of Bhalla, but it might as well be his campaign slogan, too. Bhalla has sought to make the primary a referendum on the Menendez family and machine politics—a bold move in Hudson County, and bolder still because Bhalla himself was one of those early endorsers for Rob Jr. two years ago. It’s one of several ways Bhalla is an imperfect messenger for the anti-machine, anti-Menendez message. He also has a spotty bar disciplinary record in both New York and New Jersey and a fraught relationship with his own city council, members of whom allege corruption, intimidation, and the use of city resources for political purposes. (Some of the allegations, which originate from a lawsuit filed by former Hoboken city employee Leo Pellegrini, seem highly doubtful even at a glance; for example, the claim that Bhalla intervened on behalf of Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop to clear the way for a marijuana dispensary in a building co-owned by Fulop’s wife was met with laughter from Fulop, who said he’d welcome any inquiry. The dispensary has yet to receive a license to operate.)

The ensuing campaign has been nothing but negative, and it has become increasingly evident that the enmity between the two men is very, very personal. This has managed to shine through in just about every aspect of this campaign, from the candidates’ personal tweets to their ads to a debate hosted by Hudson Media Group. To say the debate was heated would be an understatement, and both candidates had an irritating-to-watch habit of attacking their opponent instead of answering the question asked of them. The debate did manage to elucidate some policy divides anyway: Bhalla opposes the widening of a stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike located within the district (and he is correct, urban highways are bad) as well as the proposed bill to gut the Open Public Records Act, while Menendez supports the Turnpike widening and absolutely refused to take a stance on OPRA even when pressed directly by Bhalla. Menendez also refused to back Andy Kim when Bhalla pressed him on the matter, feigning outrage and saying Bhalla was erasing Patricia Campos-Medina and Larry Hamm; in an earlier interview with Business Insider, Menendez uncomfortably danced around the question of his father’s potential candidacy as an independent in November’s Senate election. The Senate question is now a live one thanks to Bob Menendez’s filing as an independent candidate yesterday—and it’s just about the worst headline we could imagine on the night before the primary as the younger Robert Menendez desperately seeks to separate himself from the older Robert Menendez.

The campaign has also been very expensive; both Menendez and Bhalla have raised (and spent) well over a million dollars, and super PACs have been spending heavily on both sides of this contest. The pace of spending has actually ramped up in the closing days of the race, particularly from Menendez’s side; BOLD America, a super PAC funded in part by the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (SMART), rushed to put down a last-minute TV ad buy worth six figures attacking Bhalla. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus PAC had previously dropped six figures into ads boosting Menendez, New Jersey’s only Latino representative; while incumbent defense is standard practice, we’re sure the CHC is keenly aware that NJ-08 is majority Latino and loath to lose the seat to a non-Latino candidate. And if Bhalla wins, he’ll likely do so by running up the score in the parts of the district which are mostly non-Latino: Jersey City, his home city of Hoboken, and perhaps Bayonne and Weehawken. Menendez will be relying on huge margins out of North Hudson, the ultimate stronghold of machine politics. (No city in North Hudson has more than 70,000 residents, but between North Bergen, Union City, Guttenberg, West New York, and Weehawken, more than 200,000 people call North Hudson home, the vast majority of them Latinos.) It’s more of an open question how the remainder of the district will vote: western Hudson County is less connected to the machine than the more populated eastern section, and the Menendez-supporting party machines of Newark and Elizabeth are a lot more atrophied than those in Hudson County.

Real estate businessman Kyle Jasey, the son of former Newark Assemblywoman Mila Jasey, is the third candidate in a two-way race. If we had to guess, he’ll probably perform best in Hoboken with voters who dislike their mayor for local politics reasons but aren’t willing to pull the lever for a Menendez.

NJ-09 (Paterson, Passaic, suburbs)

Bill Pascrell (i) vs. Mohamed Khairullah

Result: Pascrell 76.1%, Khairullah 23.9% | Pascrell wins

At 87, Rep. Bill Pascrell will become the oldest member of the House next year. That’s not at all related to why he has a primary. Pascrell’s primary is all about Israel’s war on Gaza, because his district is a center of the Palestinian-American community and the Arab and Muslim American communities more broadly.

Twelve years ago, when redistricting double-bunked Pascrell with ardently pro-Israel Rep. Steve Rothman, Pascrell won over Muslim leaders in Paterson and Clifton by promising to be more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinian people than Rothman would be, and they showed up for him on primary day. Now that Passaic County’s Palestinian community is reeling from the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, Pascrell is nowhere to be found, backing the Biden administration’s pro-Israel policy to the hilt. Muslim leaders in the district are enraged and feel betrayed, understandably so, and they’re backing Prospect Park Mayor Mohamed Khairullah in protest. Pascrell hasn’t spent like he’s scared, and he doesn’t have much reason to be: even if Muslim voters’ anger allows Khairullah to win Passaic County outright (which is improbable), the district’s sections of Bergen and Hudson counties have far fewer Arab and Muslim voters and are likely to deliver big margins for the congressman against Khairullah.

NJ-11 (Montclair, Morristown, Parsippany)

Mikie Sherrill (i) vs. Mark DeLotto

Result: Sherrill 93.6%, DeLotto 6.4% | Sherrill wins

Mark DeLotto will be lucky to crack double digits against Rep. Mikie Sherrill, but rarely do you get a man whose campaign site is a substack with a catchphrase (“it’s go time!”) who’s running on a flat tax but also Medicare for All.

NJ-12 (Trenton, Princeton, Plainfield)

Bonnie Watson Coleman (i) vs. Daniel Dart

Result: Watson Coleman 86.8%, Dart 13.2% | Watson Coleman wins

Bonnie Watson Coleman is, hands down, the best member of New Jersey’s congressional delegation. Watson Coleman is a Congressional Progressive Caucus member with a voting record better than almost every Democrat not associated with the Squad. If something is a progressive priority, she supports it; if a clump of Democrats are breaking away from the party from the left on a floor vote, she is likely one of them. In the absence of a successor who can match or exceed that excellent performance, Watson Coleman deserves another term. Ex-Republican self-funder Daniel Dart, a former member of the Princeton school board, is most definitely not that successor.

Passaic County Sheriff

Jerry Speziale vs. Thomas Adamo

Result: Adamo 57.6%, Speziale 42.4% | Adamo wins

On January 23, 2024, Passaic County Sheriff Richard Berdnik died by suicide at a restaurant in Clifton. The sheriff’s sudden and tragic death necessitated a special election to replace Berdnik as the top cop for this county of more than half a million residents, centered on the city of Paterson. Normally, this would be an orderly affair: party leaders in the Democratic-leaning county would screen a handful of potential replacements, make their pick, and roll them out as the presumptive nominee. This is not a normal year in New Jersey.

Before party leaders even got around to selecting a replacement, former Sheriff Jerry Speziale jumped into the race, eschewing the insider process altogether. Probably because he left office on bad terms with the local party bosses after accepting a job with the Port Authority, allegedly as part of a plot by then-Gov. Chris Christie to help Republicans win the sheriff’s office. And probably because he had to be pressured out of challenging Berdnik in 2019. Speziale, currently the director of the Paterson Police Department, is a colorful presence with an affinity for publicity, having invited reality TV cameras along for the ride several times during his law enforcement career. (Yes, he’s been on Cops. Repeatedly.) Fittingly, he might be on track to blow up Passaic County’s Democratic machine and weaken their grip on county government; he’s running an affiliated slate of county commission candidates, including a Biden elector and the son of a county commissioner, to challenge the machine’s slate.

Speziale was going to be a formidable threat even if the line had stayed in effect. He’s well-known; he has a financial advantage over Adamo; he won the backing of organized labor, which is usually a central component of the machine’s GOTV operation; and machine pick Thomas Adamo is a flawed candidate as the recently-registered-Republican son of a Republican county commissioner. Without the line, we kind of want to call him the favorite to win.

Passaic County Commission (3 win)

John Bartlett (i) vs. Cassandra “Sandi” Lazzara (i) vs. Rodney De Vore vs. Sean Duffy vs. Pedro Liranzo vs. Derya Taskin

Result (~95% in): Lazzara 21.6%, Bartlett 19.5%, De Vore 18.6%, Duffy 16.2%, Liranzo 12.2%, Taskin 11.8% | Lazzara, Bartlett, and De Vore win

County commissions in New Jersey are low-profile bodies that dole out hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts and salaries to well-connected firms and patronage hires. Political machines value and protect them immensely, which is probably why Jerry Speziale recruited a slate to square off with the county party. Speziale’s strategy appears to lean heavily on his hometown of Paterson, because all three of his candidates work for the city in some capacity. While Sean Duffy lives in the suburb of Wayne, where he once served on the Board of Education, he is a captain in the Paterson Fire Department (and the son of County Commissioner Terry Duffy, who is not up for reelection this year.) Businesswoman and Biden elector Derya Taskin is on the board of commissioners of the city’s public library and once served as a deputy mayor. And business owner Pedro Liranzo, also a former deputy mayor, sits on Paterson’s planning board. While the line is gone, all three are running with the ballot slogan “Team Speziale Democrats,” so their fortunes will be tied to Speziale’s to some degree.

Passaic County Democrats’ slate consists of their two incumbents, John Bartlett and Sandi Lazzara, as well as educator Rodney De Vore, a former aide to Paterson Assemb. Shavonda Sumter. (The third seat up for election this year is held by Republican Nick Gallo, who snagged Republicans’ lone seat on the board in a fluke driven by abysmal turnout in Passaic County’s Democratic cities and awful results for Democrats across the board in 2021.) The race between the machine and Speziale slates has gotten just as ugly as the top of the ticket, and Passaic County Democrats are in for an awkward few years if the machine’s slate doesn’t sweep.

Essex County Sheriff

Amir Jones vs. Gary Nash

Result: Jones 83.2%, Nash 16.8% | Jones wins

If the line stays dead, elections like this one will become a relic, and thank goodness for that. Sheriff Armando Fontoura announced his surprise retirement at the last minute, allowing Essex County Democrats to install county boss LeRoy Jones’s son Amir Jones as the party pick so late in the game that only one candidate, retired sheriff’s captain Gary Nash, even had time to get on the ballot. Jones has every conceivable advantage, and Nash’s performance will largely be a reflection of anti-machine sentiment.

Camden County Clerk

Pamela Lampitt vs. Rebecca Holloway

Result: Lampitt 60.2%, Holloway 39.8% | Lampitt wins

At their county convention, Camden County Democrats swapped incumbent Joe Ripa (who is actually Kelly Ripa’s dad for some reason) out for Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt. The South Jersey Democratic machine is one of the few that has done more than coast on the county line for the last twenty years; they have a vaunted vote-by-mail operation that consistently produces the state’s highest turnout of mail ballots, and their candidates routinely beat back spirited if underfunded challenges from the South Jersey Progressive Democrats by wide margins. This year, the South Jersey Progressive Democrats are running local activist Rebecca Holloway, one of their candidates for county commissioner in 2022, but there’s nothing to indicate that the South Jersey machine is slacking off this year, and that should mean a result in line with past battles between the South Jersey Progressive Democrats and the Camden machine.

Camden County Commission (3 win)

Al Dyer (i) vs. Melinda Kane (i) vs. Jeffrey Nash (i) vs. Elton Custis vs. Susan Druckenbrod vs. Kyle Irwin

Result: Nash 23.5%, Kane 23.4%, Dyer 20.1%, Irwin 12.1%, Druckenbrod 11.3%, Custis 9.5% | Nash, Kane, and Dyer win

Like in the county clerk’s race, this is a battle between the Camden County Democrats and the South Jersey Progressive Democrats, with the county party running a slate of incumbents Al Dyer, Melinda Kane, and Jeffrey Nash. The progressives are former Camden mayoral candidate Elton Custis, Cherry Hill activist Susan Druckenbrod, and Collingswood activist Kyle Irwin. Unfortunately, the Camden machine has its shit together, and they’ve repeatedly proven they know how to not just win but win by landslide margins.