Here’s why New Jersey’s Sore Loser Law didn’t apply to Craig Stanley

New Jersey’s Sore Loser Law didn’t prevent Craig Stanley from taking a second shot at the Democratic nomination for State Assembly in the 27th district, even though he lost the June primary.

That’s because the 1998 law only applies to direct petitions, not filling vacancies.   It was passed to prevent candidates defeated in primaries from becoming general election spoilers by running as independents.

So, while Stanely could not have run as an independent after losing the primary, there was no legal obstacle to again trying for the Democratic nomination.

The circumstances were unusual: he lost the primary to John McKeon and Alixon Collazos-Gill.  He ran again after McKeon surrendered his place on the general election ballot to seek a Senate seat after Richard Codey decided not to run for re-election earlier this month.

Still, election laws are frequently fungible in New Jersey, and sometimes, the ruling depends on the judge.

After four-term Assemblywoman Arline Friscia was dropped from the Middlesex Democratic line in 2003, she ran in the primary and came within 735 votes of keeping her seat.

Then, Republicans recruited her to switch parties and seek re-election on their slate.

Democrats went to court, arguing that Friscia was violating the Sore Loser Law.   A judge ruled that Friscia was eligible to become a replacement candidate for the winner of the Republican primary; her Hail Mary bid to keep her seat failed in the Democratic-leaning 19th district, and she lost by about 3,200 votes.

But a fickle judiciary went the other way in 2018 when an East Rutherford councilman who lost the GOP primary was offered an open slot on the Democratic ticket.  The judge, Estela De La Cruz, found that the Loser Law applied and wouldn’t permit Jeffrey Lahullier to run as a Democrat.  (The following year, Lahullier ran for mayor as a Democrat and won.)

Last year, a judge in Monmouth County found that an unsuccessful write-in candidate in a Colts Neck GOP primary could not file as an independent.

New Jersey election laws are screwy, which might account for a sloppy take on the Sore Loser Law in a recent Gothamist story on the 27th district race.   That report inaccurately stated that State Sen. Nia Gill, who lost a redistricting-forced Senate primary to Codey in June, could not have challenged McKeon for Senate as a replacement candidate but would have been permitted to run as an independent.

Indeed, it is the opposite.  Like Stanley getting a second bite at the apple, Gill could have run for Senate this week – just not as an independent.

Talk about Trump and Sore Loser Laws

Sore Loser laws have received some attention this year amid speculation that Donald Trump might mount a third-party bid if he loses the Republican nomination.

In an article published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy published in March, four lawyers found that Sore Loser laws in 28 states – including 20 that Trump carried in 2020 – would prevent the former president from getting on the ballot at all.  But, they believe New Jersey’s law would not apply to presidential candidates.

It’s unclear how a pending lawsuit to overturn New Jersey’s 102-year-old ban on fusion voting might affect the Sore Loser Law.

Fusion voting was legal in New Jersey until 1921 when leaders from both parties pushed through legislation to limit independent challengers.

Republicans, who controlled the legislature at the time, were still reeling from losses suffered in 1912 when the independent Bull Moose candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote and led Woodrow Wilson, then the governor of New Jersey, to defeat President William Howard Taft.   The Bull Moose party recruited multiple legislative and local candidates that year and cost Republicans congressional and legislative seats.

Over 100 candidates in New Jersey had run with the support of more than one political party before the practice was banned about a century ago.  Among them was Republican Mahlon Pitney (R-Morristown), who won re-election to a Morris County-based congressional seat in 1896 by 2,977 votes against Augustus Cutler (D-Morristown), who had been a two-term congressman in the 1870s.   Pitney, who later served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was also on the ballot as the candidate of the “Sound Money Democrats.”

In New York, one of three states where fusion voting is legal, the law cost Democrats a U.S. Senate seat for eighteen years.

Four-term U.S. Senator Jacob Javits had lost the 1980 Republican primary to Alphonse D’Amato by eleven percentage points, but Javits remained in the general election as the Liberal Party candidate.  He won nearly 665,000 votes (11%), enough to cost Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman the seat; D’Amato beat Holtzman by 1.3%, a margin of about 81,000 votes.

D’Amato held the New York Senate seat until Democrat Chuck Schumer defeated him in 1998.