Republicans in New Jersey’s 8th congressional district failed to get their own candidate on the ballot in next week’s primary, so they’ve switched to Plan B: backing an independent campaign against Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City).
Aristotle Eliopoulos, a teacher and union official from Jersey City, filed to run for the district today with the support of the GOP county chairmen in Hudson, Essex, and Union Counties. Eliopoulos is a registered Republican, but he won’t appear on the November general election ballot with any party affiliation at all.
Hudson GOP Chairman Jose Arango, whose county makes up the bulk of the 8th district’s vote, said that given the strong Democratic lean of the 8th district, he and his fellow chairmen decided to test how well a conservative independent is able to do.
“We knew, filing a Republican, we weren’t going anyplace,” Arango said. “My idea was to go with an independent candidate, and some people were against the idea because I’m the Republican chairman. [But] sometimes you have to come up with new ideas.”
GOP officials in the district had originally backed Jashan Lucas, a social worker from Elizabeth, as their candidate for the 8th district, a majority-Hispanic seat that’s been represented by Democrats for decades. Due to a “blunder,” however, Lucas couldn’t get the 500 signatures needed to make the ballot, and no other Republicans were interested in seeking the seat.
Local Republican leaders did have the option of putting forward Lucas or someone else as a write-in candidate for next week’s primary; if a candidate gets more than 500 write-in votes, they can qualify for the November ballot. But the county chairmen opted for the independent route instead, and there’s no evidence anyone else is running a write-in effort without them.
That means that Menendez is set to become the first New Jersey member of Congress to go without a major party opponent since 2006, when Rep. Donald Payne Sr. (D-Newark)’s only foe was the Socialist Workers Party nominee.
Six other independent candidates have already filed for House and Senate this year, and more will likely be added by the time the independent filing deadline arrives on Primary Day. Independents only need 250 valid signatures to make the general election ballot, half the number required for major-party candidates to get on primary ballots.
All of those candidates, however, will be competing against two major-party nominees who will likely hoover up the vast majority of votes. Eliopoulos’s campaign is an interesting case study: how far can an independent candidate get when they’ve got an actual party apparatus behind them?
“This was a calculated move,” Arango said. “We needed something different. We see in the polls, nobody is happy with either party.”