Rebecca Bennett has won the endorsement of the Union County Democrats, giving her the backing of the 7th congressional district’s largest and most formidable county party organization.
Under Union County Democratic rules, only the 12 municipal chairs from the 7th district are allowed to participate in the district’s endorsement votes. Bennett received six votes on the first ballot to Tina Shah’s four and Brian Varela’s two; on the second ballot, both Varela voters flipped to Bennett and gave her an 8-4 victory.
Three other candidates running to unseat Rep. Tom Kean (R-Westfield) – Michael Roth, Megan O’Rourke, and Beth Adubato – received zero votes. That’s despite the fact that Roth won a straw poll of local Democrats in the city of Summit prior to the vote; Greg Vartan, the Summit Democratic chair and a former 7th district candidate himself, voted for Bennett instead.
In addition to Summit, Bennett got the first-round votes of municipal chairs in Linden, Rahway, Westfield, Berkeley Heights, and Fanwood. Shah got votes in Springfield, Scotch Plains, Mountainside, and Winfield, while Clark and New Providence went for Varela before flipping to Bennett on the second ballot.
Senate President Nick Scutari (D-Clark), the chairman of the Union County Democrats and a 7th district resident, would have been able to cast a tie-breaking vote had one been necessary, but it was not.
Union County made up around 30% of the 7th district’s Democratic primary vote in past elections, and includes vote-rich towns like Westfield, Summit, Linden, and Rahway. Kean, the two-term congressman Democrats are raring to defeat, lives in the county, as do three of his Democratic opponents: Shah and Roth, both from Westfield, and Adubato, a New Providence resident.
Union Democratic endorsements have been known to make or break 7th district campaigns in the past. In 2018, Tom Malinowski defeated Linda Weber for the Union line after the Garwood Democratic chair, who had given positive signals to both campaigns, decided at the last minute to break for Malinowski and give him a 7-6 win; Weber dropped out shortly afterwards, and Malinowski went on to win two terms in Congress.
That, however, was in an era when the county line held tremendous sway over Democratic candidates and primary voters alike. Now that office-block ballots are the law of the land, all that the endorsement confers is a ballot slogan and whatever organizational support the party can muster, and most of the Democrats running for the 7th district this year are prepared to fight it out through June regardless of how the endorsements fall.
Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot, had previously won the backing of the Hunterdon County Democrats, while Varela has support in far smaller Sussex County. Somerset County Democrats are voting on their own endorsement tonight, and Warren and Morris will follow this weekend.
This story was updated at 8:13 p.m. with the full vote breakdown of the endorsement.