Matt Adams has dropped his bid to run for Congress as an independent in New Jersey’s 12th district after realizing the state’s sore loser law prevented him from running.
Last week, Adams placed eleventh in a field of thirteen candidates with 1,558 votes and 2.1%.
A former two-term Middlesex Borough councilman and retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve JAG Corps, Adams joined the race to succeed Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) four months ago but never caught on.
The New Jersey Legislature enacted a sore loser law in 1998 to prevent defeated primary candidates from competing again in the general election. That year, Carl Mayer lost a Democratic primary in NJ-12 and then sought to run as the Green Party candidate in NJ-6. Courts have upheld the law and enforced it against candidates who tried to switch to an independent candidacy after participating in a primary campaign.
Natalie Lynn Rivera faces a bid to remove her from the U.S. Senate ballot after GOP activist Timothy Walsh alleged that her bid for the Republican nomination earlier this year precludes her from running as an independent.
Walsh provided a letter from Rivera asking to participate in the Bergen County Republican Convention.
River ran an an independent for U.S. Senate in 2018 and in the 2020 Republican primary.
Administrative Law Judge Andrew Baron removed Peter Vallorosi from the ballot as an independent candidate for U.S. Senate because Vallorosi had initially sought the GOP nomination.
In 2023, Superior Court Judge Benjamin Morgan tossed Penns Grove Mayor LaDaena Thomas, an independent, off the general election ballot simply because she liked a Facebook post urging Democrats to write her in against their own candidate in the primary.
In 2022, Superior Court Judge Linda Grasso Jones found that a man who ran an unsuccessful write-in campaign for the Colts Neck Township Committee was ineligible to run as an independent in the same election.