Voter turnout in Tuesday’s special election for Congress in New Jersey’s 10th district was about 6.6%, with Rep.-elect LaMonica McIver (D-Newark) winning with the fewest total votes in a New Jersey House race since 1918. Congressional districts back then had populations of roughly 212,500; now, they’re around 774,000.
As of 4 PM, McIver has 26,269 votes (81%) to Republican Carmen Bucco’s 5,126 (16%); that’s a lead of 21,143 votes.
There are roughly 1,647 uncounted vote-by-mail and provisional ballots and less than 200 outstanding cure letters. In Jersey City, where McIver received 85% of the vote, one memory stick is missing from the 99 voting machines deployed for the September 18 election.
Even if every uncounted ballot is accepted, and in the unlikely event Bucco receives every vote, McIver’s victory will remain solid.
It’s still unclear when McIver will be sworn in. There is some precedent for the House moving faster than local boards of elections. In 2012, Donald Payne, Jr. (D-Newark) was sworn in nine days after winning a special election to replace his late father; the results were uncertified.
Bucco, who faces a rematch with McIver on November 5, supports the congresswoman-elect taking her seat as soon as possible in a district that has not been represented in the House since April.
“Absolutely she should,” Bucco told the New Jersey Globe. “To me, it’s all about doing the right thing.”
McIver accomplished something no Democrat seeking federal office has ever achieved: she won Essex Fells, albeit by ten votes.
Essex Fells was the last of the three Essex towns carried by Barry Goldwater in 1964 to finally support a Democrat; the others—Glen Ridge and Millburn—are now Democratic strongholds in federal elections.
In state elections, Essex Fells has gone Democratic twice: Brendan Byrne carried it when he ran for governor in 1973, and Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo won it in 2018.
One last bid of 1960s Essex trivia: Johnson won Essex County by 160,870 votes (70%) and won nineteen towns. In 1960, John F. Kennedy took Essex by 50,030 votes (55%) but won only five towns: Newark, Belleville, Orange, Irvington, and West Orange; Richard Nixon won the other seventeen municipalities, including East Orange.