A New Jersey primary night with lots of intrigue but few upsets

Has New Jersey ever had a congressional primary election quite like this? Lots of wide-open races, millions of dollars of super PAC money flowing in, and, of course, no more county lines to helpfully tell voters just how party bosses want them to vote.

But for all the intrigue, most of tonight’s most important contests went the way they were largely expected to, including in the closely watched 7th and 12th district Democratic primaries, where frontrunners Rebecca Bennett and Adam Hamawy won convincingly. New Jersey politics has grown more chaotic, but the usual rules of the road still apply.

Hamawy’s victory has perhaps the widest reaching implications of any result in the state. A surgeon and Army veteran with little local name ID but lots of national progressive support, Hamawy found his left-wing lane early and pushed it hard with the help of a well-funded super PAC; the result was 28% in a 12-candidate field, with no one else breaking 15%.

And it’s clear in retrospect – it was clear before votes even started coming in, really – that his opponents never had a plan for how to stop him anyways. Moderates and pro-Israel Democrats who condemned Hamawy’s stances on the Middle East couldn’t came up with a viable alternative; county party organizations were too busy feuding with one another and backing their hometown candidates to notice that Hamawy was positioned to trample all over them.

The party establishment did get its way in the neighboring 7th district, where Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot, got 46% in a four-way primary with the backing of most local Democratic organizations. Some of Bennett’s foes tried to outflank her on the left – a super PAC with probable GOP ties even spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to reinforce that message – but it never caught on.

Why wasn’t Bennett hampered by her relative moderation like Hamawy’s foes were? The likeliest answer is tactical: the 12th district is safely Democratic, but the 7th district is a swing seat held by Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), and Democratic voters were highly receptive to electability-based arguments. Bennett argued she was Democrats’ strongest nominee, and she got corroboration of that once Republicans got involved to try and prevent her from winning.

The same calculus held true in the 2nd district; Cape May Mayor Zack Mullock was neither the best-known nor the best-funded Democrat in the race, but he still won on the message that he’s best positioned to defeat Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) in November.

On the GOP side, voters seemed more attuned to what their county party organizations encouraged them to do. Election maps of the two most interesting contests – for the potentially competitive 9th district, where Clifton Councilwoman Rosie Pino narrowly beat attorney Tiffany Burress, and for the U.S. Senate, where former Tabernacle Committeeman Justin Murphy won a mild upset over three opponents – essentially boiled down to diagrams of party endorsements.

Two Democratic incumbents, Reps. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) and Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch), both fell below 70% support: Menendez beat Mussab Ali 69%-31% in a race that drew some attention, but Pallone’s 66% against two unheralded foes is much more surprising and may signal broader voter disillusionment with older incumbents. (Rep. Analilia Mejia, running for her first full term, got a healthier 81% in her primary.)

On the county level, Democratic organizations had a mixed bag, beating back a serious challenge in Passaic County but losing one commissioner seat apiece in Mercer, Essex, and Cumberland Counties. Countywide offices have historically been harder for insurgent candidates to break into than any other type of office, since they’re where county parties are the strongest, but that seems to be starting to change.

And municipal results, too, were all over the place, as they’re apt to be. Progressives beat party-backed candidates for a single council seat in Piscataway and Bloomfield, for example, but fell short of their goals; renegade Dover Mayor James Dodd’s slate lost to foes backed by the Morris Democratic organization; and former Assemblyman Christian Barranco’s comeback effort to become mayor of Jefferson fell flat.

The most obvious takeaway from the night’s contests is that party endorsements are simply one helpful factor in a successful campaign, not the only one. A candidate like Bennett, who ran a smart campaign that capitalized on every advantage she had, got a lot of mileage out of being the “party’s choice,” but other party-supported candidates without the same kind of game plan fell short.

Another key lesson is that outside money, once only really a factor in New Jersey general elections, is now here to stay in primaries, too. Bennett and Hamawy were greatly aided by outside spending from super PACs with few ties to New Jersey, as was Mejia back in February, albeit in a more roundabout way; it may be that one can’t win a highly competitive New Jersey primary anymore without a super PAC on your side.

But above all: every race is different, and every voter reacts differently to the specific candidates put before them. Bennett and Hamawy – and Pino, and Murphy, and Mullock, and Nakia White Barr and Deborah Engel and Eric Wilsusen and every other victor tonight – won because they were the right candidate with the right resources at the right moment in time. County lines once masked that reality, but with them gone, state politics truly is a free-for-all.

In earlier eras, New Jersey primary nights could be easily summarized, usually with the party establishment as the clear victor. Not anymore.