Editor’s note: this story was updated at 4:30 p.m. to reflect the fact that Cumberland Democrats have moved their Senate endorsement vote to March 21.
On Monday, after Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) had won five successive Democratic county conventions for the U.S. Senate, First Lady Tammy Murphy finally got her first convention win in Bergen County.
The result was hugely important for symbolic reasons – Murphy urgently needed a win somewhere to prove her campaign’s viability in convention votes – and for mathematical reasons, since Bergen County is home to fully one-tenth of the state’s Democrats. Now, with four more county conventions on the immediate horizon, Murphy wants to continue that winning streak for as long as she can.
The counties that will hold votes in the upcoming days represent drastically different cross-sections of the state, from tourist-heavy areas of South Jersey to some of the state’s wealthiest towns in Central Jersey.
There are Mercer and Ocean Counties, two large counties that Kim either currently represents or previously represented in Congress; Kim is favored in both, though a wrinkle in the Mercer Democrats’ rules may make his win there less meaningful than elsewhere.
There’s Cape May County, a smaller county that’s part of the pro-Murphy South Jersey Democratic organization but which will nonetheless hold an open, competitive convention.
And there’s Somerset County, which will likely host one of the biggest clashes in the Senate primary thus far. Demographically, the county’s Democratic convention delegates should be Kim-friendly, but the county Democratic chairwoman has endorsed Murphy – and, unlike every previous convention up until this point, the vote will be done publicly rather than by secret ballot.
At stake in all four counties is the county organizational line, the unique New Jersey institution that lets county parties put their endorsed candidates together in the same row or column. Kim has filed a lawsuit arguing that the line is unconstitutional, but it won’t be resolved until after county convention season is over.
If Kim has a good few days, he could theoretically emerge next Tuesday with four new consecutive victories. Murphy can’t hope for the same thing – Ocean is almost certainly out of reach for her – but she could still come away with a series of wins that would blunt Kim’s momentum.
Two other candidates, Larry Hamm and Patricia Campos-Medina, may appear at some of the four conventions, while indicted incumbent Senator Bob Menendez almost certainly will not. But the race is really between Kim and Murphy regardless; here’s what to expect over the next few days.
Somerset County (March 7)
On the surface, Somerset County in the hills of Central Jersey should be extremely winnable territory for Andy Kim. It has got a progressive-leaning Democratic county committee; two former congressmen who represented parts of Somerset, former Reps. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) and Rush Holt (D-Hopewell), are on Team Kim; and there are a lot of demographic similarities between Somerset County and neighboring Hunterdon County, where Kim won the Democratic convention in a landslide.
But there’s one major factor working against him, and it may prove to be decisive: Somerset Democratic Chair Peg Schaffer.
Schaffer, who is also the state party vice chair, is a strident Tammy Murphy supporter – so much so that she sent a letter to convention delegates promoting Murphy’s campaign and bashing Kim. The letter even said the quiet part of New Jersey politics out loud by implying that the county’s support for Murphy (and, by extension, her husband, Gov. Phil Murphy) was important for getting patronage jobs and judgeships for the local party faithful.
“Due to the success of our organization we have worked with the administration and local officials to put many of our members on the Superior Court,” Schaffer wrote. “We have gotten our local members responsible, rewarding positions with State and County government.”
And unfortunately for Kim, Somerset Democrats hold their convention votes by raising hands or placards, rather than via secret ballot like most counties. When Somerset Democrats meet this evening in Manville, Schaffer, who commands a lot of respect among her county committee (if not necessarily their undying loyalty), will be able to see everyone who votes with her and against her.
Some Somerset Democrats have publicly called for a rule change to allow for secret ballots instead, which would almost certainly benefit Kim if it came to pass, though Murphy has done quite a bit of campaigning herself and should put up solid numbers even on a secret ballot. Before any voting begins tonight, there may be a procedural battle over the rules under which the vote will take place.
Assuming the vote remains public, Somerset – which is home to around 3.6% of the statewide Democratic electorate – will be the first county where Murphy’s and Kim’s coalitions will be visible for all to see.
Murphy expects to do better in the county’s Black and Hispanic areas like Franklin Township; it wouldn’t be surprising to see the county’s most prominent elected officials, like state legislators and county commissioners, stick with her as well. Murphy will likely also benefit from a rule that gives Schaffer the ability to appoint 25 bonus delegates, who will vote alongside the hundreds of county committeemembers, local electeds, and party officials that make up the core of the convention’s delegation.
Kim can probably count on higher support among Democrats from the county’s more exurban, Republican areas, as well as from deeply progressive Montgomery. Campos-Medina could draw a non-negligible share of the vote, too; her most prominent endorser, former Assemblywoman Sadaf Jaffer (D-Montgomery), remains the municipal Democratic chairwoman in Montgomery.
Kim has not been shy about casting aspersions on the Somerset Democratic operation. He’s specifically accused Murphy of colluding with Schaffer and “trying to do everything to prevent a fair vote”; don’t expect him to take a loss tonight lying down.
Ultimately, Somerset is the most important convention of the next week, but it’s also the hardest to forecast. A lot hinges on what happens with the public vote: does it remain in place? If so, how do county committeemembers behave under Schaffer’s watchful eye?
Cumberland County (March 21)
As stated earlier, the Cumberland Democratic convention was originally set for today, March 7, but the endorsement votes for Senate and House were pushed back to March 21.
There could be a few different reasons why Cumberland County has attracted almost no outside attention this convention season, including from the New Jersey Globe.
One is that it’s not very big; although Vineland is South Jersey’s largest city outside of Camden County, Cumberland County only makes up around 1.3% of the statewide Democratic electorate. Another is that it’s a fairly poor, significantly Latino county – not the kind of place many top media or political figures call home.
Perhaps most important, though, is the fact that the county is part of the South Jersey Democratic empire led by George Norcross, who is firmly backing Murphy this year. Norcross’s support for Murphy guarantees her the line in Camden and Gloucester Counties, and it’s easy enough to assume that his influence will extend to other counties in his South Jersey orbit.
But that might not be the case this year. When Cumberland Democrats meet in Vineland for their convention, they’ll decide their endorsement by secret paper ballot – and Kim has a very strong shot of winning.
Under newly elected Chairman Kevin McCann, who took over for the late Nancy Sungenis last year, Cumberland Democrats have an independent streak that doesn’t always align with Norcross and company. The low-level Cumberland committeemembers who will award the county line may decide they’d rather ditch Murphy and try to elect a South Jerseyan to the Senate for the first time since Robert Hendrickson left office in 1955. If Kim wins, it would be his first South Jersey county line besides his home of Burlington County.
Several competitive countywide offices, including that of Democratic Cumberland County Clerk Celeste Riley, will be up this year, so Cumberland Democrats have extra incentive to choose a candidate they think would benefit them at the top of the ticket. There’s been limited polling on that so far, but a Monmouth poll from yesterday suggests that Kim may be stronger in a general election than Murphy.
Cumberland Democrats will also get to vote in the multi-candidate field for Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis)’s 2nd congressional district, a Republican-leaning district that spans six South Jersey counties.
Four candidates are running: 2022 Democratic nominee Tim Alexander, self-funding tech entrepreneur Joe Salerno, 2022 Democratic runner-up Carolyn Rush, and former Coast Guard petty officer Brandon Saffold. Alexander, Salerno, and Rush have all gotten some notable local endorsements from a variety of Democratic politicians across the district; any of them would be the heavy underdog against Van Drew in the general election.
Ocean County (March 10)
When Kim and Murphy met on February 24 for the Burlington Democratic convention, both candidates acknowledged that Kim had a major home field advantage: he’s from Burlington County, and it’s been his political base since his first run for Congress in 2018. He won that convention with 90% of the vote.
Kim has never lived in Ocean County, but it’s looking like something similar could happen when Ocean Democrats head to Berkeley Township for their convention on Sunday.
For his first four years in Congress, Kim represented more than half of the deep-red Jersey Shore county in Congress; while he never won it in a general election, he developed close relationships with county Democrats. Redistricting shifted Kim out of the county entirely, but many Ocean Democrats still remember Kim fondly as the one Democrat who showed up in their towns during campaign season and delivered for them in Congress.
With all that in mind, it would be a shock if Kim lost the Ocean convention, or even came particularly close to losing. Ocean Democrats hold one of the most open endorsement processes of any county in the state, and Kim has endorsements from eight municipal Democratic committees and eleven Democratic clubs. (Ocean County has perilously few Democrats elected to office at any level, so local Democratic organizations are some of the highest-profile endorsements there are.)
Murphy could have some supporters in Lakewood, a heavily Orthodox Jewish town where Phil Murphy’s gubernatorial administration is popular among Jewish leaders. Ocean Democratic Chair Wyatt Earp, a top official in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, has not made any endorsement.
Come November, Ocean County will almost certainly vote Republican, which can lead to it being overlooked during primary season. But because it’s so large, the county still has nearly 100,000 Democrats, or 3.9% of the statewide total – more than there are in Somerset. A Kim win there isn’t just symbolic; it also carries with it quite a few potential votes.
A few towns in the county’s far southern reaches are also in the 2nd congressional district, so the Democratic primary for that district will officially begin on Sunday.
Mercer County (March 11)
Monday’s Mercer County Democratic convention at Rider University is a bit funny, because no one is really in doubt about the final result: Kim is very likely to win. But it matters quite a bit how much he wins by.
That’s because of a mechanism built into Mercer Democrats’ rules that allows any candidate who gets at least 40% of the convention vote to share the county line, though the official party slogan is only given to the convention winner. Since so much of the power of the line comes from the visual layout of the primary ballot, Kim will need to beat Murphy at the convention by a landslide to truly “win.”
Can Kim do it? He’s got a lot of factors working in his favor. For one, he currently represents a little under half of the county in Congress, including its largest town, Hamilton. For another, many of the towns that aren’t in his district – like Princeton, West Windsor, and the Hopewells – are chock-full of the type of white and Asian progressives who are the backbone of Kim’s coalition.
Case in point: the Princeton Community Democratic Organization, a major force in Princeton politics, held its endorsement vote last weekend, and Kim won with 91% of the vote. Murphy, who was not in attendance, got a single vote, putting her behind Campos-Medina and tied with Hamm for third.
But aside from the Princeton Community Democrats (and Holt, the Kim-endorsing former congressman), essentially all of the county’s other power players have remained studiously neutral in the race, at least publicly.
That includes top Trenton figures like Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora, Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson, and the husband-and-wife duo of Trenton Council President Teska Frisby and Mercer County Commissioner Sam Frisby; Hamilton figures like Mercer County Executive Dan Benson, Hamilton Mayor Jeff Martin, and Assemblyman Wayne DeAngelo; and a smattering of others like State Sen. Shirley Turner (D-Lawrence) and Assemblyman Anthony Verrelli (D-Hopewell).
And it includes perhaps the county’s two most powerful Democrats, Mercer Democratic Chairwoman Janice Mironov (also the mayor of East Windsor) and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), both of whom have declined to make any endorsement in the race.
Watson Coleman, though, recently expressed support for reforming the county line system, which aligns her (at least on that issue) with Kim. Mironov, meanwhile, is probably more pro-Murphy than not, though she hasn’t done much to convince her county committee one way or the other.
Mercer is a fairly big prize in statewide Democratic primary, representing 4.7% of the state’s Democrats. It’s also one of just two majority-minority counties to hold an open convention, making its results particularly meaningful as both candidates fight for support from voters of color. (Cumberland is the other; Middlesex has a convention, but it’s not fully small-d democratic.)
Mercer Democrats allow a wide variety of people to participate in their conventions: Democratic county committeemembers, elected officials who are from or represent part of the county, municipal Democratic chairs and vice chairs, Democratic club presidents and vice presidents, and more. Last year’s convention drew nearly 500 voting delegates; this year could exceed that total.
And prior conventions show that convention delegates are very willing to take risky votes. In 2023, they booted incumbent County Executive Brian Hughes in favor of Benson 78%-22%, and even kicked DeAngelo off the line for Assembly (though that was later rectified); in 2021, County Commissioner Ann Cannon (D-East Windsor) was dumped after 27 years in office.
All that should bode well for Kim – but whether it bodes well enough for him that he can push Murphy below 40% is anyone’s guess.
At the same convention, Mercer Democrats will also decide on their line for Kim’s open 3rd district congressional seat, where four candidates – Assemblyman Herb Conaway (D-Delran), Assemblywoman Carol Murphy (D-Mount Laurel), civil rights attorney Joe Cohn, and businesswoman Sarah Schoengood – are vying for party support.
Conaway overwhelmingly won previous county conventions in the 3rd district’s other two counties, Monmouth and Burlington; Murphy (who isn’t related to the first lady) came in second in both, while Cohn and Schoengood barely registered. Since those two counties make up three-quarters of the district, the two wins made Conaway the clear favorite to win the primary.
Murphy will probably do a bit better in Mercer County than in the prior two contests – but doing well enough to push Conaway below 40%, and thus fully off the line, seems like a tall task. The more realistic path to Congress at this point for Murphy, and for Cohn and Schoengood, relies on Kim’s lawsuit successfully striking down the county line; in fact, Schoengood is one of Kim’s co-plaintiffs in the suit. (So is Rush, one of the candidates for the 2nd district.)
Cape May County (March 11)
Cape May County, the state’s southernmost county and one of its smallest, is in a similar position to Cumberland County. It’s part of the South Jersey Democratic orbit, but has a somewhat independent-minded county committee that doesn’t always go along with what George Norcross dictates from on high.
Cape May Democrats will be meeting simultaneously with a much larger county’s convention (Mercer), so none of the Senate candidates are likely to head to Cape May Court House on Monday afternoon. Since Cape May is only home to 0.7% of the state’s Democrats, it’s not a hard choice to make.
It’s possible that the county will decide not to award a line at all. With relatively new Chairwoman Marie Blistan (a former leader of the New Jersey Education Association) at the helm, Cape May Democrats are considering awarding the line to both Murphy and Kim or ditching the line entirely for the U.S. Senate, essentially abdicating any stake in the contentious primary.
But if local Democrats do choose to award a line, the convention fight between Kim and Murphy is expected to be competitive. (Well, technically not a convention; in Cape May, they call it a special meeting of the full county committee.) With a secret ballot and a progressive-leaning set of convention delegates – echoing other local parties in red counties – Kim stands a very good shot of winning.
That speaks to a fundamentally unusual part of this year’s primary: Kim’s chances in a given county are based heavily on the type of convention the county holds, rather than on geography or other political alliances.
Typically, competitive New Jersey primaries tend to break down on regional lines; the 2000 Democratic primary for Senate between Jon Corzine and former Gov. Jim Florio, for example, was starkly polarized, with Florio on the line in the south and Corzine on the line in the north. That seems to be repeating itself in this year’s GOP Senate primary, where Mendham Borough Mayor Christine Serrano Glassner is a more northern-focused candidate and developer Curtis Bashaw is more southern-focused.
This year, though, Kim has shown an ability to compete in and win conventions in all sorts of different places – as long as they hold real, open votes.
Cape May Democrats are additionally set to award their line in the race for the 2nd congressional district on Monday evening. Two of the four candidates, Salerno and Rush, are Cape May Democrats themselves, which could give them a home-field advantage; once Ocean and Cape May have made endorsements, the Democratic race for Van Drew’s seat should come into clearer focus.
Nearing the end
At this point in convention season, both top Senate candidates have already made it through their biggest test, the one on which the rest of their campaign hinged.
For Kim, it was Monmouth County, the year’s first convention; Kim needed an early win somewhere to prove to delegates in other counties that he was worth their time and effort, and he got it. For Murphy, it was Bergen County, where a loss would have scrambled her statewide math and prompted doubts about her viability from some of her top supporters; she worked hard to get a big win there, and she was successful.
These last two weeks of convention season, running through Middlesex County on March 14, Morris County on March 16, Atlantic County on March 17, and Cumberland County on March 21 (and technically Salem County after that, but it’s tiny and doesn’t have a line), are more of a grind. Each candidate is trying to get as many wins and claim as many county lines as possible before the two-and-a-half-month sprint to the June 4 primary election begins.
Of course, the line itself could be struck down thanks to Kim’s lawsuit, but even without the line, county party endorsements can be meaningful. Kim’s success at a variety of conventions has prevented the full force of the state Democratic Party from coalescing around Murphy; even when individual politicians endorse Murphy, their endorsement matters less if their local county party isn’t backing them up.
That was visible in this week’s Somerset texting snafu, when Somerset Democrats sent out texts in support of Murphy and then had to refund them, since they haven’t endorsed her yet. If Kim wins the Somerset convention today, it would permanently forestall any future efforts from the Somerset County Democratic Committee on behalf of Murphy (or, at least, it should).
Just about everyone – journalists, party leaders, the candidates themselves – is growing tired of convention season at this point; rarely before has one election cycle hosted so many competitive conventions in a row, each with its own quirks and expectations.
Soon, the candidates will be able to pivot to the real primary season, where actual primary voters get a say. Right now, though, all eyes turn to Somerset, Ocean, Mercer, and Cape May Counties, and the few thousand convention delegates who will decide Kim’s and Murphy’s fates.