Some notes on the numbers in the 27th district

The race for State Assembly in the 27th district wasn’t terribly close – Livingston Councilwoman Rosy Bagolie won by 28 percentage points – but Democratic county committee members, aka party insiders, cast more than one-third of the votes for an insurgent candidate.  That’s slightly unusual in Essex County.

This was also the first significant vacancy to be filled under a new law passed by the legislature in June and signed by Gov. Phil Murphy in July that moved the deadline to replace a candidate on the ballot from the second week in September to August 31.

Democrats admittedly worried about making getting a quorum tonight to fill the Senate vacancy created by Richard Codey’s sudden decision to retire after fifty years in Trenton.  Late August vacation schedules were a problem.

The magic number was 146; that’s the number of county committee members who needed to be present in the West Orange High School cafeteria at 6 PM on Thursday for the vote to take place.  That’s half of the total number of eligible county committee votes.

Among the red flags: 64 of the 356 county committee seats are vacant, about 18%.  Almost two-thirds of the empty seats (42) came from Clifton.  The high vacancy rate in Clifton made a winning alliance with Montclair mathematically impossible; if all the seats were occupied, that would have been 52% of the total vote.

By the time voting began, 166 county committee members were in attendance, clearing the quorum hurdle with twenty to spare.

Clifton, the largest municipality (and the only one in Passaic County) in the 27th district, delivered 25 votes.

In Essex, 52 came from West Orange, 36 from Montclair, 32 from Livingston, 16 from Millburn, and 5 from Roseland.

Bagolie emerged last week as the choice of Essex County Democratic leaders who determined that the three largest towns in their part of the district, Montclair, West Orange, and Livingston, would get a seat on the legislative ticket.

John McKeon won the Senate nomination by acclamation, as expected.  After the stunning announcement that Brendan Gill would not run for the Assembly and that his wife, Alixon Collazos-Gill, would remain the nominee, the focus moved to a contest for McKeon’s Assembly seat.

Craig Stanley, the assemblyman from the next-door 28th district for fourteen years before losing the 2007 Democratic primary, sought a political comeback this year as an off-the-line candidate in the 27th after switching his residency from Irvington to West Orange.

Stanley received 1,595 votes (6%), trailing McKeon by 8,669 (39%) and Collazos-Gill by 8,029 votes (37%).  Another candidate, former Montclair school board member Eve Robinson, ran 3,206 votes ahead of Stanley (18%).

In an unexpected challenge on Thursday, Bagolie defeated Stanley by 48 votes, 107 to 59, a margin of 64%-36%.

While the margin was formidable, there was an early period of tension for Bagolie as she joined Stanley at the table to count the paper ballots.  West Orange voted last, and it appears its ballots were atop the first of two boxes that were counted.  The first ten were all for Stanley before a vote went Bagolie’s way.