RETRACTED: Tom Malinowski wins 11th district primary, beating back crowded field and AIPAC onslaught

NOTE: At 10:32 p.m., following a surge of Election Day voters for Analilia Mejia, the New Jersey Globe retracted this call; the race between Mejia and Malinowski remains too close to call.

Tom Malinowski has won the special Democratic primary for New Jersey’s 11th congressional district, the New Jersey Globe projects, clearing the way for the former congressman to make a triumphant return to Congress – and notching a significant defeat for the pro-Israel group that spent millions to take him down.

Malinowski will face Randolph Mayor Joe Hathaway, who won tonight’s Republican primary uncontested, in the April 16 special general election to succeed Gov. Mikie Sherrill. The 11th district, located in the North Jersey suburbs of Essex, Morris, and Passaic Counties, leans distinctly towards Democrats and is unlikely to become a serious GOP flip opportunity.

As of 9:21 p.m. and with 66% of the vote counted, Malinowski has 31.8% of the vote, while Analilia Mejia, a former top campaign staffer for Bernie Sanders, is at an impressive 26.1% on her first-ever campaign for elected office.

Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill (D-Montclair) has 15.6%, and former Lieutenant Gov. Tahesha Way has 15.4%. None of the other nine Democrats on the ballot, two of whom had already ended their campaigns before today, received much support, even though many of them ran serious and well-funded campaigns.

The election was also marked by unusually high turnout for a special election primary. Many in the district wondered who would be showing up to vote on a frosty Thursday in February, but they needn’t have worried; the total number of ballots cast is likely to eclipse the number of voters who turned out to vote in the regularly scheduled 11th district primary in 2024.

Malinowski, a former State Department official under President Barack Obama, spent four years representing the 7th congressional district, which ranks as one of the nation’s most competitive. After Democratic mapmakers made the seat redder to shore up neighboring districts (among them the 11th), Malinowski narrowly lost re-election to Republican Tom Kean Jr. in 2022.

That earlier tenure, during which Malinowski became known as a moderate-leaning but doggedly anti-Trump Democrat with a focus on foreign policy, made Malinowski a broadly known and liked figure in Democratic circles. While few of Malinowski’s old constituents from the 7th district live in the 11th district he’s now set to represent, he began the special election campaign with sky-high name recognition and close ties to Senator Andy Kim, a leading figure among reform-minded Democrats.

Complicating Malinowski’s path to the nomination was the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel group that has been known to spend heavily on Democratic primaries.  Beginning in mid-January, AIPAC invested more than $2 million into an anti-Malinowski ad campaign that hit the former congressman over issues with his stock trading disclosures and a vote he took in 2019 that included funding for ICE.

The ads didn’t mention the Middle East, but AIPAC said that Malinowski had become a target because he opposed unconditional aid to Israel. Malinowski insisted that he was pro-Israel by any reasonable standard, and predicted voters would see through the ads; “If these assholes get away with doing this to me,” he said at a campaign event shortly after AIPAC’s campaign began, “they will do it to every Democrat they want to target in the country in the midterms.”

AIPAC’s preferred alternative in the race seemed to be Way, who served for eight years as New Jersey’s top elections official and for two as its lieutenant governor. Way also benefited from more than $2 million in outside spending herself, most of which came from a group dedicated to supporting Democratic lieutenant governors.

Mejia ran as the field’s most unabashed progressive, touting endorsements from a wide array of national progressives and bringing in Sanders, her old boss, for a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally in the district. And Gill, a longtime operative in state Democratic politics who already represents half of the district on the Essex County Board of Commissioners, had the backing of Gov. Phil Murphy and a huge number of local Democratic elected officials.

Also on the ballot were Passaic County Commissioner John Bartlett (D-Wayne), former Army paratrooper Zach Beecher, Morris Township Committeeman Jeff Grayzel, Chatham Borough Councilman Justin Strickland, former Obama administration official Cammie Croft, activist Anna Lee Williams, comedian J-L Cauvin, Maplewood Township Committeeman Dean Dafis, and former House staffer Marc Chaaban, who are collectively combining for 11% of the vote. (Dafis and Chaaban suspended their campaigns long before today, but Dafis is still beating out Cauvin.)

To some extent, the results tonight broke down on the expected regional lines: Malinowski had formal party support in Morris County, Gill in Essex County, and Way and Bartlett jointly in Passaic County, and each county did indeed vote disproportionately for its local party’s choice.

But Malinowski’s name ID and widespread popularity proved too much for any of his opponents to overcome; he currently leads in both Morris and Passaic Counties, while Mejia, riding a wave of Election Day votes, is narrowly carrying Essex County. Internal polling, most of it unreleased, consistently put Malinowski in the lead and more recently found Mejia surging into second place, and it seems to have been correct.

Malinowski’s vanquished foes will now have to decide whether they want to get another shot at Congress and continue their campaigns through the June 2 primary, or call it quits here and now. The primary filing deadline will arrive on March 23, long before voters will officially send Malinowski to Congress (or hand Hathaway a major upset victory).

As for Malinowski himself, assuming he wins in April, he’ll get to rejoin a body he left unwillingly just over three years ago, and he’ll retain some of his seniority in the process. Unlike his earlier terms, he and his fellow Democrats will be stuck in the minority for the year to come – but that could change come November, with Malinowski’s old 7th district at the top of the Democratic target list.