Tougher Than The Rest
A Brief Look at the Primary Across the Hudson
We’re two weeks out from election day, and the mayoral race feels suspended in midair. Every day, candidates launch new ads, make newsworthy statements, court new endorsements, and take all sorts of other actions that could plausibly move the needle. But since we haven’t gotten a single poll since Emerson’s May 28th survey showed Mamdani surging to 46% in the final round of RCV (still a loss but an intriguingly close one), we have absolutely no idea what is and isn’t moving that needle, in what direction, or by how much. Will Jessica Ramos’s voters (all 3.5% of them according to that poll, which isn’t nothing) flock to Cuomo as she instructed them to last week? Will Michael Blake’s fiery performance at last week’s televised debate earn him a bump that will make his final vote share slightly less embarrassing? Or will the reveal of his completely insane bagel order reverse any momentum he might have had? Does Mamdani actually have the juice? Will Adrienne Adams’s incredibly boring TV ad somehow awaken this heretofore absent coalition of professional class union members and Cuomo-skeptical Black moderates from their slumber and transform her at the last second into the electoral colossus that I and everyone else expected her to be? I’d love to tell you, but there are no polls.
Instead, we have to take tea leaves wherever we can find one. And one such tea leaf will reveal itself tomorrow, as voters in New Jersey head to the polls to choose their party’s respective nominees for the governor’s race this fall. Much as we might flatter ourselves, New Jersey Democrats aren’t so different from New York City ones, especially in a political climate that is so dominated by news at the federal level. Like the mayoral race we’ve been covering, the Democratic gubernatorial primary is bulging with candidates, each with a different core constituency, policy profile, style of governance and performance, and general theory of what this particular political moment requires from Democrats in local leadership positions.
I know about all of them, because I got a chance to speak to New Jersey Globe reporter Joey Fox last week. He gave me the full breakdown, with detailed, colorful insights into each candidate that you can really only get from doggedly covering local politics for many years, which Joey thankfully has. I’ve been a big fan of his work ever since he wrote what I still consider to be one of the all-time best Williams Record feature stories, about the many pairs of people on our tiny college campus who shared a first and last name, back in the spring of 2021. Since then, he’s covered local New Jersey politics, and some NYC politics too for good measure, and he’s currently based in DC where he covers New Jersey’s congressional delegation. You can listen to our conversation here, I really enjoyed it and I hope you will too.
Sadly for us in New York, it turns out the gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey do not map onto the mayoral ones here so easily. And this makes reading the tea leaves difficult. For example, the nomination of a moderate-ish navy pilot turned federal prosecutor turned congresswoman, if she wins, in a hotly contested, six-way first-past-the-post election, will not tell us all that much about the chances of a socialist upsetting a scandal-ridden but eerily charismatic former governor in the final round of RCV. Nevertheless, I’ll be looking at demographic swings, which groups turnout more or less than expected in what parts of the state, who they end up voting for, and whether or not there’s anything to conclude. My eyebrows would be raised if, for example, youth turnout is dramatically higher (or lower) than in previous cycles, or if New Jersey’s large immigrant population ends up voting in an interesting or unexpected way.
For now, I’ll leave you with a quick, somewhat superficial endorsement. If you are a) voting in the New Jersey Democratic Party primary for the 2025 gubernatorial race, and b) haven’t voted yet and don’t know who to vote for, and c) are somehow reading this blog, I’d love two things from you. First, please reach out to me at elimill317@gmail.com and let me know how you found this blog. Second, consider voting for Steve Fulop in tomorrow’s primary election. Here are four reasons why:
1. YIMBY King
The single biggest issue for the Democratic Party, both in New York City and in the areas where Democrats live more generally, is housing affordability. In New Jersey, more than half of all renting households report being cost-burdened, i.e. spending more than a third of the household income on rent. The solution is simple, if extraordinarily difficult politically: build a ton of new housing. And Fulop is the rare local executive with a proven track record here. From 2005 to 2023, Jersey City’s housing inventory has grown 43%, more than double the nationwide rate of 16%. Much of that has occurred in Fulop’s tenure, which began in 2013. Jersey City’s housing is the fastest growing in any city of its size in the state (and dramatically outpaces its neighbors Hoboken and Bayonne). For the past decade, New Jersey has built, on average, about 2,700 units of affordable housing a year. That’s less than the number of units added from Bayfront, just one of Fulop’s new mixed-income developments, which will add 8,000 units of housing, 35% of which will be affordable. According to one study, they are currently more than 200,000 units short of where they need to be to adequately meet demand for their low-to-middle income families. As Fulop explained on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, there is a lot of opposition to this kind of rapid development, both from local NIMBY’s and from corrupt party officials who want to make sure projects need their approval at various points so that they can keep their cozy relationships with their hand-picked developers. We need leaders who have experience fighting this kind of opposition and winning.
2. Immigration
Jersey City and Newark both have some of the strongest sanctuary laws in the country, and their mayors Ras Baraka and Steve Fulop (both candidates in this race) have both been outspoken critics of ICE and their illegal abduction campaigns. One way to prove their credentials is that they’ve both been sued by the Trump Administration, a distinction that our own mayor has not earned. Fulop (and Baraka) have not wavered; “Our policies protect families, reflect our values, and have led to record-low crime rates” Fulop told the New Jersey Monitor. This is in sharp contrast to Mikie Sherrill, for example, who opposes the state’s pending Immigration Trust Act that would allow immigrants to more easily interact with state government services without risking deportation. Sherrill also abstained from the Laken Riley Act, a law that has made it easier for the federal government to detain and deport people arrested of low-level offenses like shoplifting.
3. Spoiler Concerns Partially Obviated
In a first-past-the-post primary without ranked choice voting, it’s important to think strategically, and not waste your vote on a spoiler who has no chance. In this election, the stakes of this are incredibly high, because SALT cap champion, conservative Democrat Josh Gottheimer looms on the right-most side of the primary, ready to swoop in with his “moderate” credentials and complaints about property taxes. Priority number one for liberal New Jerseyans should be ensuring that he does not win, and if he were more of a contender, I’d advise them to vote for whoever has the best chance of beating him (Sherrill in this case). However, while polling has been scant and inconsistent, Joey gave me the impression that the conventional wisdom on the ground has the Gottheimer campaign flailing without any serious momentum going into election day. Fulop, instead, seems to be the candidate with the second-best chance of winning. Joey said over and over that everything was very uncertain and anything could happen and it wasn’t his job to make predictions so I want to exonerate him completely from this, but my own prediction is that Gottheimer is TOAST!!! He’s FINISHED!! So go vote for Fulop with a clean conscience!
4. Electability in the General
Sherrill’s case is that her brand of liberal-ish, moderate common sense Democrat makes her the most viable contender in what will be a bruising election against Republican Jack Ciattarelli, who came within only three points of winning in 2021, in a state that has become much more purple since then. And she’s secured weak front-runner status on the back of her deep ties to the state party machine, and in particular, to incumbent governor Phil Murphy. But Murphy and the machine are both quite unpopular, and at the risk of employing a reductive and overused analogy, Sherrill’s establishment connections risk bringing her into the Kamala Harris zone of charismatic, tactically moderate insiders succeeding unpopular incumbents and promising more of the same. Fulop, on the other hand, has fiery, anti-machine credentials. He fought with Senator Andy Kim to end the state’s absolutely bonkers “county line” system, which essentially allowed local party officials to anoint winners with ballot design choices, and he fought to enact strict limits on special interest spending on public officials, something that the state government then undermined with a more forgiving statewide law, because New Jersey politics are wild. Fighting the machine in New Jersey is correct and important on its merits. In a tough fight for the rightward leaning median voter of the upcoming general election, it might be the kind of thing that pushes a candidate over the top, while allegiance to the machine might prove an Achilles heel. The Ghost Runner editorial stance is firmly against political machines, (but in favor of compost machines), so if you can vote in this primary, consider passing on Mikie Sherrill, the machine candidate, so that Fulop can blow that machine up.