When the New Jersey Globe ran a story in June 2025 about who might replace Mikie Sherrill, then the newly anointed Democratic nominee for governor, in the 11th congressional district, no fewer than 18 Democrats were mentioned as potential candidates.
The winner of last week’s Democratic primary, and likely the district’s next congresswoman, was not among them.
Analilia Mejia’s rise from well-respected but little-known progressive operative to (assuming she wins the April general election) a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a rise that took just ten weeks in total, will go down as one of the most remarkable sagas in recent New Jersey political history. And – like so many other New Jersey election results that have taken the state’s political class by surprise in the last few years – it signals a sea change in how Garden State voters are approaching politics in the modern era.
Here are 14 takeaways on how Mejia’s victory came to be, and what might come next.
Mejia saw a path to victory that her doubters couldn’t. There are certain factors that politicians and journalists alike typically look for in determining who might win an election. How much money have they raised? How many endorsements have they gotten? How well do the voters of the district already know them?
Mejia, who raised less money than her top opponents, got few local endorsements, and had no prior electoral experience, certainly didn’t seem like a frontrunner based on any of those categories. A Malinowski internal poll from the beginning of the campaign put Mejia at 20% name ID districtwide, and while later (unreleased) polling showed her beginning to surge, she still seemed like the underdog.
“It may be an upset to some, what has happened here today,” Working Families Party state director Antoinette Miles said after Mejia declared victory. “But for those of us who have known Analilia for a long time … this was not an upset. This is exactly who Analilia is.”
The New Jersey progressive movement got its biggest win yet. National reporting on Mejia’s win has focused, not unreasonably, on her ties to prominent progressives around the country like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. Mejia may end up becoming the newest member of “the Squad,” and coming from a suburban, majority-white district, no less.
But her victory is even more meaningful for the state progressive groups that have toiled away for decades, typically running up against the wall of New Jersey’s robust but faltering political machine. Although some members of the state’s congressional delegation (like Senator Andy Kim) won against the wishes of party leaders and others (like Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman) have become close progressive allies, Mejia is the first member of the delegation, and one of the first New Jersey politicians period, to be a product of the movement that’s reshaping state politics.
And that manifested on the ground over the course of the ten-week sprint to Election Day. CWA, SEIU, the Working Families Party, Make the Road Action NJ – they were out in force to elect one of their own, creating one of the most impressive get-out-the-vote operations the state has seen.
And Democratic voters seem to be receptive to their policy platform. It’s been clear since the beginning of the second Donald Trump administration that Democrats want self-identified fighters: people who will stand up to Trump, push back against ICE, and generally give the political status quo hell. Every Democrat running for the 11th district tried to harness that energy in their own way, but it’s clear that Mejia harnessed it the best.
She did so while running on policies that many other Democrats have been more hesitant to adopt, like abolishing ICE, implementing Medicare for All, and hiking the minimum wage to $25. A victory for one candidate is not always a ratification of all of their policy proposals, and Mejia won’t be able to implement everything she wants to do in Washington, but her success in energizing voters can’t be divorced from the progressive platform she presented them with.
AIPAC gave itself a black eye. The story of the 11th district primary is incomplete without mentioning the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC went nuclear against Tom Malinowski – it spent more than $2 million on anti-Malinowski attack ads because, it claimed, he was too hesitant to support unconditional aid to Israel – only to see a more left-wing candidate who said Israel was committing genocide in Gaza win instead.
Can Mejia’s victory be attributed to AIPAC’s spending? Given how close it was, probably; Malinowski is only losing by a little over a thousand votes, and he did much better among voters who voted the earliest, before AIPAC’s onslaught began. If AIPAC had stayed out of the race entirely, it might have at least ended up with someone “who would have picked up the phone when AIPAC called,” Seth Mandel wrote this week in the Jewish magazine Commentary.
Regardless, AIPAC came nowhere near the outcome it was actually hoping for, which was a victory by Tahesha Way (or, if not her, then Brendan Gill). And in the process, it alienated many Democrats who have otherwise been allies, or at a minimum not been enemies.
“They pissed off a lot of people, including me,” said Andy Kim, a Malinowski supporter. “[Malinowski] shouldn’t have been treated that way, and it just shows the dirty tactics they’re using. I hate it, and it boils my blood.”
The clearest example of this is Way, who benefited from more than $2 million in outside spending, a near-unprecedented independent expenditure outlay in a New Jersey primary. The spending certainly made Way a better-known figure across the district, but it never made an entirely coherent case for why voters should opt for Way instead of one of her opponents, and the result was a fairly distant third-place finish.
And neither are local endorsements. On January 15, Gill scored something of a coup: every member of the township committee in Maplewood, a deeply progressive suburb that formed a natural base for several of his opponents, was endorsing him. On February 5, voters revealed just how much stock they put in those endorsements: Gill got fourth place in Maplewood behind Mejia, Malinowski and Way, earning just 8% of the vote.
That is, in microcosm, a good representation of just how little relevance endorsements have in an expensive, high-profile race where voters are able to make up their own minds. Local elected officials around the district made endorsements, almost entirely for candidates other than Mejia, that were roundly ignored; Mejia was the only one of the four top Democratic candidates who had no official party support in any of the district’s three counties, but it didn’t matter.
It should be noted that even if the county line still existed, it wouldn’t have affected Thursday’s primary, since the line only came info effect in elections with more than one race on the ballot. But the increasing irrelevance of the local endorsements that used to be New Jersey politics’ bread and butter still feels like a downstream effect of the county line’s abolition – and Gill’s campaign, which most closely followed the older playbook of party-based politics, had the furthest to fall.
No one but Mejia comes out looking like a winner. Tom Malinowski, who moved halfway across the state to run for the 11th district after previously losing re-election in the 7th, has likely reached the end of his electoral journey. Brendan Gill, who’s been laying the groundwork for a congressional campaign for years, may have to let that dream die. Tahesha Way is considering whether to keep her campaign going through June, but she’d be in for a difficult race if she does.
And you wouldn’t know it from looking at the coverage of the race, but no fewer than nine other Democrats were also on voters’ ballots, seven of whom were still running active campaigns on Election Day; they combined for just over 11% of the vote, barely one-third of Mejia’s total. In short, there aren’t a huge number of silver linings for anyone but Mejia.
Still, though, the example of Andrew Zwicker could provide some hope. Zwicker finished in a distant last place in the 2014 Democratic primary for the 12th congressional district, only to flip a State Assembly seat the next year. Could one of the newcomers in this year’s race who failed to catch on but still impressed local Democrats, like Beecher, Cammie Croft, or Anna Lee Williams, have a similar trajectory in their future?
Democrats will crawl over frozen glass to vote. Final turnout in the Democratic primary looks like it will land at a little over 65,000, or around 29% of the district’s registered Democrats.
That may not sound impressive, but to put it in perspective, just 51,848 people voted in the 2024 Democratic primary for the same seat, when it was held on a regular Tuesday in June. This time, Election Day was on a freezing-cold Thursday in February, but voters were raring to turn out all the same.
In 2025, unexpectedly elevated turnout in the June primary presaged a massive turnout boost in November, when voters of both parties – but Democrats in particular – turned out at remarkable rates to choose the next governor. If Thursday’s bizarrely timed election is any indication, that enthusiasm hasn’t abated ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Black and Hispanic voters are showing their political muscle. Mejia won voters of all stripes across the 11th district, but her strongest support came from voters of color, who make up around 40% of the district’s population. Majority-Hispanic Dover, for example, gave her 45% of the vote – even though Malinowski once represented it in Congress.
Black and Hispanic Democrats, often seen as a more moderate force in the Democratic Party, are increasingly looking like the vanguard of New Jersey’s progressive movement, at least when the right candidate shows up to compete for their support. Ras Baraka, the most left-wing candidate in the 2025 governor’s race, rode a wave of Black and Hispanic support to a second-place finish, and Mejia has now done the same (in a whiter electorate) to win the 11th district nomination.
And the state’s congressional delegation is set to be more diverse than ever. A few decades ago, Black and Hispanic representation was confined to two majority-minority North Jersey districts, but if Mejia wins, eight of the state’s 14 members of Congress will be people of color, including several from majority-white constituencies.
Mejia was still far from a majority. Any triumphant statement on Mejia’s victory would be incomplete without noting that more than 70% of voters still opted for someone else. Mejia, like anyone else who might have emerged from such a crowded primary, will have to win over a lot of Democratic voters who didn’t vote for her.
Given that Mejia was the field’s left-most candidate, it’s easy enough to write a take about how a consolidation of the “moderate” field might have been enough to beat her. But that would certainly be oversimplifying things, given that everyone in the race ran as a progressive to some degree, and Mejia perhaps had more overlap with the reform-minded Malinowski than anyone else.
One race’s results aren’t necessarily generalizable. This bears repeating any time an election result catches people by surprise: elections are the product of a huge number of disparate factors coming together, and any one election result is not always replicable in different contexts.
Mejia ran a remarkable campaign that other progressives can and should learn from, but she also benefited from a variety of stray advantages: the AIPAC onslaught that nuked her closest competition, the tragic ICE shootings in Minneapolis that focused attention on what was already her signature issue, even her favorable placement on the primary ballots themselves (she was listed first in Essex County and second in Morris County, a not-insignificant leg up when there are 13 names on the ballot).
Would Mejia have won without all or any of those things coming to pass? It’s entirely possible – but they’re still a key part of the fabric of the election that can’t just be transposed into other races around the state or country.
The June primary could be interesting, but would-be challengers will face enormous headwinds. Almost immediately after it became clear that Mejia had won, speculation began about whether she’d face another challenge in the June primary for a full term; the filing deadline to do so will arrive on March 23.
Would Way keep running? (She hasn’t said anything one way or the other, but sources close to her say she’s thinking about it.) Would any new contenders jump in? (Assemblywoman Rosy Bagolie considered it, but decided against it.) Would AIPAC try to defeat the woman they just accidentally helped elect? (They said they’ll be “closely monitoring” the June race.)
The biggest problem for any challenger, though, is timing. Mejia will be the Democratic nominee in a closely watched special election for the next two months, making it all but impossible for a fellow Democrat to actively campaign against her. By the time Mejia is (presumably) elected to Congress, her challenger would then only have a month and a half to articulate why voters should throw her back out again.
And there are already strong signs of Democratic consolidation behind Mejia. All but one member of the state’s Democratic congressional delegation are already saying they’ll support her in both the April special and June primary elections; if anyone does run against her, they’d have to do so against the full weight of the New Jersey Democratic establishment.
Republicans will try to at least make the April general election competitive. All of this has operated on the assumption that Mejia is going to Congress, and she likely is. The 11th district was drawn to reliably elect Democrats under almost any circumstance, and given Democratic overperformances in other special elections around the country, it would be an enormous shock if the district were to flip.
That said, Republican nominee Joe Hathaway, the mayor of Randolph, has to like the narrative Democratic voters have handed him. A Democrat significantly more progressive than the district’s past representation wins a contentious and splintered primary with less than one-third of the vote, and faces the immediate prospect of a primary challenge for a full term – that’s not a bad set-up for the GOP.
Still, the district voted for Kamala Harris by nine percentage points even in the bad Democratic year of 2024, so the seat has strong Democratic DNA. In the coming months, expect at least a handful of headlines along the lines of, “Could Republicans score an upset against this progressive Democrat?” The answer is “it’s not impossible,” but they have a long way to go to make that a reality.
We don’t yet know what Congresswoman Mejia will look like. Mejia has held many roles over the course of her career: union organizer, progressive activist, campaign staffer, Biden administration official. One thing those jobs have never required her to have is a voting record – but that’s about to change.
If and when she arrives in Congress, Mejia will have to make some early and important choices about how to remain faithful to her progressive roots while also representing a suburban district that’s not seen as a left-wing hotbed. It’s not an impossible task, and other progressives around the country have managed it, but it’s one that may make for some tough votes at times. As is ever the case, winning is one thing; governing is another.