A series of political earthquakes have shaken New Jersey’s Democratic machine to its core over the past year, as a new generation of leaders seeks to bring change to the Garden State.
It’s a moment that has been building for years.
Since October, prosecutors have indicted two of the state’s most powerful Democrats: South Jersey political boss George Norcross and Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). The pick of the state’s Democratic establishment, First Lady Tammy Murphy (D), has dropped out of the Senate race. And a federal judge rejected a voting model, colloquially called “the line,” that upheld the power of the state’s political machine.
“2024 was the year of the most significant change in politics in New Jersey in the last 50 years,” Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop (D) told The Hill. “There has been a huge weakening of who controls the system and there is pressure on the State machines.”
The changes are rooted, at least in part, in a generation of younger Democrats who have sought to challenge the party’s old guard. This is perhaps best accomplished by Rep. Andy Kim (DN.J), the underdog candidate who won his party’s Senate nomination earlier this year. Now, this new generation is looking to flex its muscles beyond 2024.
“In New Jersey there was a machine that was very powerful and if you faced it, you lost. Through the Norcross loss of power, the county court case and the Menendez indictment… all of these events have created this window, and people are stepping into it,” said Julia Sass Rubin, a political science professor at Rutgers.
A day after the New Jersey U.S. attorney announced an indictment against Menéndez for bribery, including accepting gold bars, Kim, who won a congressional district from Trump during the 2018 “blue wave,” said he would run to replace him. it.
According to Fairleigh Dickinson University researcher and professor Dan Cassino, having a Democrat with widely recognized name announce a primary challenge against Menendez in the state was “unprecedented.” Menendez faced a corruption trial during former President Trump’s tenure in the White House, but it ended in a mistrial, with Democrats largely supporting him.
“I really reached a breaking point,” Kim told The Hill. “I just wasn’t sure anyone else would do it. I saw what happened last time, when Senator Menéndez was indicted and the party protected him or rallied around him. I didn’t want to see the same thing happen again.”
“I learned that this would probably end my political career,” Kim added.
Did not happen.
Kim is now the Democratic nominee in the 2024 race, and the Democratic Party has isolated Menéndez.
New Jersey is the only state in the country that does not use official voting, where all candidates for a race are listed in a specific order. Instead, each county’s Democratic or Republican party decides — through a convention or by county party leaders — on a line of candidates on the ballot. Generally, in large counties the chairs decide the candidates, while smaller counties have open conventions.
“The county ballot, the line, attracts attention and makes it much easier from a cognitive standpoint to pick candidates who are at risk and makes it harder to pick candidates who are out of line,” said Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience at Princeton. University who wrote about the power of line.
Conducting a statistical test, Wang found that the party’s endorsement gave the candidate a 17-point advantage. With the line, the person had a 38 point advantage.
“The political machine in New Jersey was full of bravado and based on perception, because they did a very good job of avoiding the primaries,” Fulop said of the power of the line in the state.
Murphy, the first lady, quickly accumulated the endorsement of county chairmen in some of the state’s most populous counties, and those chairmen decide who gets the line. According to Henal Patel, director of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, the appearance of Murphy rigging the race in his favor quickly “sparked outrage,” and Kim took legal action to end the row.
“I never liked it,” Kim told The Hill. “This seemed like a place where I could get to the heart of much of the problem. It’s not just about the county line – in terms of the problems we have with politics in New Jersey and the rise of corruption and cronyism – but it’s a big part of it. Here was a situation where I felt like I was going to be able to take it apart and take it apart.”
According to Cassino, an increasingly insurgent movement of New Jerseyans disillusioned with the state’s Democratic Party politics has gained a strong enough foothold to fight the state’s Democratic establishment.
“The party was able to protect Menéndez and ensure that no Democrat ran against him [in 2018],” Cassino said. “They no longer have the power to do that, and the fact that the party was unable to convince Andy Kim not to run is a strong sign that the party was losing strength.”
Although Kim threw his name into the race against Menendez, he was building on the work of activists who organized across the state for more than a decade to change state policy.
According to Hector Oseguera, a 2020 primary challenger against former Rep. Albio Sires (DN.J.), Trump’s election in 2016 galvanized many in the state to become more interested in politics and activism.
“The traditional story I hear from people is that they started paying more attention after Trump or moved to New Jersey from somewhere else,” he said. “For many of them, they find [a] local issue they want to deal with and they look for the local person who would take care of these things. Then they discover that what they learned in civics classes about how government works is actually not how it works in New Jersey.”
“Actually, the way things work is that there is a kind of powerful intermediary, a political boss somewhere. This is the person who determines how things happen through government in the state of New Jersey, and they are very disgusted by this and decide to start organizing locally,” he adds.
Cassino said progressive power has also grown in the state. Along with the state’s growing diversity — New Jersey is the fourth most diverse state in the country — the machine’s power was waning.
The recent indictment of Norcross, a man who never held elected office in the state but was “treated like a demigod” who was “invincible,” according to Rubin, further underscores the changes taking place in the Garden State.
“What we’ve seen is that New Jerseyans haven’t given up on democracy,” said Sue Altman, executive director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance and Democratic candidate for New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District. “After years of organizing, we have laid the groundwork to overturn the last remnants of Tammany-style politics in the state.”
“This is where the rubber meets the road,” said Stephanie Schmid, former Democratic candidate for New Jersey’s 4th Congressional District. “This is where we see if this was a fluke or if this was part of a big moment to fight corruption, if this disappears in 2025 and 2026, or if this is the beginning of a radical change.”
According to Matt Krayton, a Democratic political strategist in the state, “the jury is still out on the full impact of these changes.”
“I don’t think we’ll have a complete picture until the governor’s race [in 2025]where we will have a crowded field with several candidates with good resources and money to run real campaigns, potentially without limits,” he said.
“This will be the first true test of this new system.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
