Democrat Analilia Mejia has won a special election for New Jersey’s 11th congressional district, the New Jersey Globe projects, keeping Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s old seat under Democratic control and handing a huge win to the insurgent progressive movement that powered Mejia’s campaign.
As of 10:57 p.m. and with nearly all of the vote counted, Mejia leads Republican Joe Hathaway by a 60% to 40% margin, 77,620 votes t0 52,122.
Mejia’s win does not come as a surprise: the 11th district, which includes famously liberal North Jersey towns like Montclair and Maplewood as well as more conservative suburbs to the west, leans definitively towards Democrats, and neither party ever showed signs of believing the race was competitive. Democrats also went into today’s oddly timed Thursday election with an essentially insurmountable lead among mail-in and early voters.
When all votes are in, Mejia will have overperformed Kamala Harris’s nine-point win in the district by around 12 points, give or take, another positive sign for Democrats ahead of this year’s midterms; other special elections around the country have seen Democratic overperformances of between 13 and 25 points. But while Mejia did far better than Harris in many towns, especially majority-minority ones, the parts of the district with the largest Jewish populations actually swung dramatically against her.
Regardless of the final margin, though, the fact that Mejia is going to Congress at all is a momentous event for progressives in New Jersey and nationwide, who will replace the fairly moderate Sherrill with one of their own in a wealthy suburban seat that was held by a Republican (under different lines) less than a decade ago.
“To all those assembled here, to everyone in this incredible district, I want you to know that I will fight for you every single day,” Mejia said at her victory party in Montclair. “I did not come to play, my friends. I came to fight for what is right. It is not about left or right. It is about right and wrong.”
Hathaway, who will likely face Mejia again in November, conceded to the congresswoman-elect in a statement but said he will work to hold her “accountable for the votes she casts and the policies she supports.”
“I still believe the broader electorate in NJ-11 is looking for balanced, pragmatic leadership, not the kind of far-left policies embraced by Ms. Mejia,” Hathaway said. “That conversation is not over.”
If prior special elections are any indication, Mejia is likely to be sworn in quickly, perhaps as soon as next Monday, April 20. The 11th district has been vacant since Sherrill resigned in November, and Mejia’s arrival on Capitol Hill will give House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries another vote to fight against Republicans’ extremely narrow majority (though whether Mejia supports Jeffries himself remains something of an open question).
Mejia’s arrival in Congress will mean that for the first time ever, a majority of New Jersey’s House and Senate seats will be held by people of color; the state was still just barely majority-white as of the 2020 Census, but that’s probably no longer true. It’s also the first time that a New Jersey congresswoman has been succeeded by another congresswoman, rather than by a man.
Mejia had never run for elected office before this election, but she’s far from a newcomer to New Jersey politics. She got her start in union organizing before becoming executive director of the New Jersey Working Families Party, then moving on to work as Bernie Sanders’s national political director and briefly serve in Joe Biden’s administration.
When she entered the race late last year after Sherrill was elected governor, Mejia was considered a distinct underdog against several better-known and better-funded contenders; one early poll from a rival campaign found her with just 20% name recognition among Democratic voters. As local parties and politicians made their endorsements in the truncated campaign, most went with one of former Rep. Tom Malinowski, former Lieutenant Gov. Tahesha Way, or Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill instead.
But Mejia had national progressives like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on her side – Sanders came to Wayne for a rally shortly before the primary – and, more importantly, a devoted network of local grassroots groups, re-energized by the demise of the county line two years ago, committed to getting her elected.
Perhaps the most critical moment of the primary, though, had little to do with Mejia at all. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee made a fateful determination that Malinowski, a broadly pro-Israel Democrat, was an unacceptable choice, and spent more than $2 million bashing him; AIPAC donors also funneled millions more into a group supporting Way.
The expenditures, which far outpaced what any individual candidate spent on the race, succeeded in bringing Malinowski down, but not in elevating Way in his place. Instead, it was Mejia, a vocal Israel skeptic, who narrowly defeated Malinowski 29% to 28%. (Way got 17%, Gill got 14%, and a whopping nine other candidates on the ballot received less than 3% each.)
More than any other candidate, Mejia recognized the importance of the majority-white district’s voters of color in towns like Belleville and Bloomfield, which she won overwhelmingly. But her progressive populist message – abolishing ICE, raising the minimum wage, implementing Medicare for All – found purchase across the district, even in whiter towns and ones considered to be more moderate.
The GOP primary was quite a bit quieter: Hathaway was the only Republican to express any real interest in the seat, and he quickly coalesced local party organizations behind him. A councilman and former mayor in Randolph, a suburb in the western part of Morris County, Hathaway pitched himself as a moderate Republican, one willing to buck President Donald Trump on issues like the Gateway Tunnel.
Mejia, Hathaway argued after the primary was over, was an unacceptable radical, one who would send the 11th district down the same path as New York City when it elected Zohran Mamdani as mayor. Hathaway made a concerted effort to win over moderate Jewish voters in particular, saying that Mejia’s stance on Israel was dangerous for the Jewish community.
Mejia hit back that Hathaway, regardless of his feints to the center, remained a Trump supporter and a loyal Republican, two devastating insults in New Jersey’s liberal suburbs. She also took care not to tip too far to the left in a district with plenty of Republicans and moderate Democrats: she rejected the term “socialist” for herself, expressed support for the SALT deduction, and disavowed those on the left who peddle in antisemitism.
Many voters, though, likely cast their ballots without any of those nuances in mind; several voters who spoke with the New Jersey Globe outside an early voting location in Madison couldn’t name the Democrat they had just voted for. Neither campaign spent a huge amount of money raising awareness of the race, and other than one pro-Hathaway super PAC that spent around $200,000, outside groups steered clear as well.
The 2026 elections aren’t over for Mejia or Hathaway, since both are also running for a full term this year. None of Mejia’s main Democratic foes from February are running again, but she’ll still face three minor opponents in the June primary; assuming she wins that, she’ll be in for a rematch with Hathaway in less than seven months. When she declared victory tonight, Mejia told her supporters that she intends to fight for them through November and beyond.
“I asked everyone I met, ‘What can I do to be of service to you? What is the first thing that you want me to tackle? What is the thing that you desire most from your next representative?’ And what I mostly heard from people was, ‘Remember us. Think about us. See us. We are human. We have needs. We have concerns. Do not hide. Do not turn away. Do not slip from your positions. Stand bold. Be brave. Stand up for what is right,’” she said. “And I make that commitment tonight, and every single day, to you.”
Democratic State Chairman LeRoy Jones, Jr. said that Mejia “has always been on the frontlines fighting for our Democratic values as a volunteer, an organizer, and a believer in what we can accomplish when Democrats stand together.”
“Her victory tonight is a testament to what can happen when we believe in ourselves and remain true to our values, and when we simply refuse to back down,” he said.
This story was updated continuously, including with comments from Mejia and Hathaway.