No New Jersey House member has lost renomination to a non-incumbent challenger since 1958, and the 2026 primary elections didn’t change that. Four Democratic incumbents faced at least one intraparty challenger last Tuesday, though, and while they all won, the results still provide an interesting window into a restive Democratic electorate’s views on their representatives.
The biggest surprise came in the 6th district, where Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) got around two-thirds of the vote against two unheralded challengers. Pallone has long been a formidable political force in both New Jersey and Washington, but the result reveals a not-insignificant contingent of voters that may be looking for new representation.
In the 8th district, Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) faced what seemed to be the most serious primary challenge of the year but won fairly convincingly, while in the 11th district, Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-Glen Ridge) overwhelmingly beat a trio of opponents in the first big test of her month-old congressional career. (The fourth primary campaign, between 10th district Rep. LaMonica McIver and unknown foe Lawrence Poster, was an unremarkable blowout.)
Here’s a closer look at how Pallone, Menendez, and Mejia won.
NJ-6: Pallone’s surprising underperformance
It’s fairly easy to get on the ballot in New Jersey, even after petition requirements were recently raised, meaning that every year there are a few primary challengers who make the ballot without a prayer of winning. Pallone knows that well, having faced obscure Democratic foes in most recent cycles and winning handily each time: he got 86% of the vote in 2018, 79% in 2020, and 84% in 2024.
His 2024 foe, activist John Hsu, returned this year for a rematch; also on the ballot was Katie Bansil, a first-time candidate. Both argued that the district needed younger and more progressive representation than Pallone, but few in the media or in state political circles paid them any heed.
Some voters, though, were clearly listening. Pallone ended up with less than 66% of the vote, his lowest share in a primary election since 1992, when his district was drastically redrawn and he had to beat back a challenge from then-Assemblyman Bob Smith (D-Piscataway). Hsu won 27% of the vote, and Bansil got the remaining 8%.
Pallone’s weakness wasn’t clearly tied to any one geographic or demographic area. He tended to do better in his home of Monmouth County than in more distant and diverse Middlesex County, but the one town he outright lost to Hsu, Union Beach, is in Monmouth; he got 64% of the vote in Piscataway (a recent progressive hotbed) and Edison, 63% in Asbury Park, 59% in New Brunswick, and just 56% in Highland Park.
What made so many voters turn away from the congressman they’ve been re-electing for nearly 40 years? According to Hsu, it’s because voters were looking for someone to take bolder left-wing stances, especially on the issue of Palestine. “I’m not going to congratulate Pallone at this time – we’ll give him time to become a better representative if he so wishes, but we should not normalize the denial of genocide,” Hsu said in a post-election video.
But like dozens of other Democratic incumbents around the country, Pallone may have had a more intangible factor working against him: his age. Joe Biden’s fall from grace in the summer of 2024 left its mark on many Democratic voters, and there have been countless examples since then of older incumbents struggling against younger foes; the 74-year-old Pallone, in office since 1988, remains sharp but can’t escape that reality.
The question now is whether this year’s race was a blip on the radar or the first sign of deeper political problems for Pallone. He’s a Congressional Progressive Caucus member with good relations in all wings of his party, so he’s not exactly at the top of any progressive organization’s target list. But if someone more formidable than Hsu decides to step up in 2028, that may not be enough to save him from a serious fight for his seat.
NJ-8: Menendez locks down Hudson County
Two years ago, Menendez faced then-Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla in an expensive and vituperative contest that revolved around Menendez’s father, ex-Senator Bob Menendez, who was on trial for corruption. Menendez won 52%-38% thanks to overwhelming support from Hispanic voters, but he got destroyed by Bhalla in Hoboken and Jersey City, the progressive gentrifying heart of the district.
Menendez’s primary challenger this year, former Jersey City school board president Mussab Ali, tried to build on Bhalla’s coalition with an even more left-wing message, one that focused on Menendez’s connections to pro-Israel groups and the tech industry rather than his father. A genuine progressive, Ali argued, was what the 8th district Democrats were yearning for.
Instead, Ali got handed a 69%-31% defeat, a far more thorough drubbing than befell Bhalla. Menendez retained his huge margins out of places like Union City and West New York, where State Sen. Brian Stack is the undisputed vote-getting king, but he also made massive inroads in the towns that most firmly rejected him in 2024, winning Jersey City by three percentage points and Hoboken by a whopping 35. Ali’s only real base was the most progressive pockets of downtown Jersey City, as well as the city’s Asian American communities.
That may have come about in part because Ali wasn’t able to keep up with Menendez on a basic campaign infrastructure level. He raised barely one-tenth of what Bhalla raised two years ago, and Menendez got an extra $900,000 worth of help from a pair of AI and cryptocurrency industry PACs, support that Ali tried to make a campaign issue to no avail.
But it also speaks to Menendez’s success at convincing progressives to look past his last name and recognize the work he’s done in Congress, particularly on immigration. He got some key endorsers, like Senator Andy Kim and Hoboken Mayor Emily Jabbour, to validate him in the eyes of voters who have long viewed him skeptically.
There may always be a slice of the 8th district electorate that distrusts Menendez too fully to vote for him, and that anti-Menendez faction may keep on producing primary challengers year after year. But their current message evidently won’t get them anywhere close to a majority, and Menendez will come out of the 2026 cycle in a stronger political position than he’s ever been in before.
NJ-11: No anti-Mejia wave in sight
When Mejia, a through-and-through progressive, won the February special Democratic primary for the 11th district in an upset, her detractors liked to point out that she only got 29% of the vote in a splintered field. Had more moderate voters coalesced behind one alternative candidate, they argued, Mejia could have been beaten.
That wasn’t just idle speculation. One of Mejia’s opponents in February, former Lieutenant Gov. Tahesha Way, considered running again, as did a local assemblywoman, Rosy Bagolie. Both of them opted against it, however, and Mejia was left with three far less well-known opponents on June 2: Chatham Councilman Justin Strickland, who got 2% of the vote in the February primary; former Morristown Mayor Donald Cresitello, who has been seeking elected office since the 1960s and has lately become a gadflyish perennial candidate; and newcomer Joseph Lewis.
None of the three attracted any attention to their campaigns or stood any shot of beating Mejia, who took office in late April. But the primary still presented an important test for the new congresswoman: how many voters were so committed to opposing her that they’d vote for literally anyone else instead?
Not many, as it turns out. Mejia won 82% of the vote districtwide, while her three opponents each earned fractions of the remaining 18%. She won massive landslides both in towns that supported her in February, like Glen Ridge and Bloomfield, and those that didn’t, like Montclair and Madison.
Two towns stand out as exceptions: Millburn, where Mejia got 67% of the vote, and Livingston, where she got just 55%. If that sounds familiar, it’s because those two towns, both major hubs for North Jersey’s Jewish community, swung dramatically against Mejia in the April special election, too. Among wealthy Jewish suburbanites in particular, there does seem to be a thriving anti-Mejia contingent that doesn’t exist in the rest of the electorate.
But overall, Mejia should feel emboldened by the results, and her critics will have to think hard about whether they want to try to take her down in two years (as some have been mulling). If Mejia had shown more obvious vulnerabilities in last week’s primary, it could have provided a base for a future challenger to build off of; instead, less than one-fifth of the Democratic electorate appears to be deadset against her, which isn’t an auspicious starting point for a primary challenge.