Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) has won renomination in the 8th congressional district, the New Jersey Globe projects, defeating Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla after a bruising, expensive campaign that focused heavily on the federal corruption charges against the congressman’s father.
As of 12:58 a.m., Menendez leads Bhalla 54%-36%; a third candidate, real estate lender Kyle Jasey, has 11%.
As expected, Bhalla is doing well in the district’s Jersey City and Hoboken portions, but Menendez is winning everywhere else: Newark, Elizabeth, and North Hudson towns like Union City, North Bergen, and West New York.
The 38-year-old Menendez was first elected in 2022, after Rep. Albio Sires (D-West New York) chose to retire from the heavily urban, majority Hispanic 8th district. Menendez was, at the time, an appointed Port Authority commissioner who had never run for public office before – but he was also the son of Senator Bob Menendez, and that was enough for local Democrats to clear the field and make sure he had a glide path to Congress.
Those family connections flipped from a benefit to a liability, however, when the elder Menendez was charged with bribery last fall. While the younger Menendez was not implicated in the indictment in any way, his associations with his father – not to mention their shared name – put a huge target on his back.
There was a period where it was unclear whether Hudson County Democrats, the most powerful party organization in the 8th district, would stick with the younger Menendez at all. They ultimately decided that they would, but that didn’t stop anti-establishment Democrats from wondering whether Menendez would still be vulnerable in a Democratic primary.
Enter Bhalla. Elected in 2017 as one of the first Sikh mayors anywhere in the country, Bhalla was for many years a relatively loyal Hudson Democrat; when Menendez first ran for Congress two years ago, Bhalla was among the many local Democrats who endorsed him (though he’s since said he was pressured to do so). But when he launched his campaign last December, the mayor quickly made it clear that he’d be running as a reformer against the entrenched status quo.
The Bhalla campaign’s biggest focus, naturally, was on Menendez’s biggest vulnerability: his father. Bhalla repeatedly tied the two together, saying that it was time for New Jersey voters to reject the entire Menendez family once and for all; one ad from an outside PAC declared that the younger Menendez’s unwillingness to condemn his father proved that he’s “rotten to the core.”
But Menendez hit back with attacks of his own, noting that Bhalla had been censured by the New Jersey Supreme Court for his conduct as an attorney and that he has his detractors at home in Hoboken. In fact, the race became something of a proxy war within Hoboken, with Bhalla-aligned city councilmembers endorsing the mayor and Bhalla skeptics backing Menendez.
And unlike many past New Jersey primaries, both candidates had plenty of money to get their messages out. As of May 15, Bhalla had spent $1.6 million and Menendez $1.3 million, colossal sums in a part of the state that almost never witnesses competitive primaries.
That’s not even accounting for the outside money that poured into the district; per OpenSecrets, a mix of independent expenditure groups spent at least $1.8 million on the race, around three-quarters of which was used to boost Menendez and bash Bhalla.
The biggest investment came from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s BOLD PAC, which was intent on ensuring that New Jersey didn’t end up without a Hispanic member of Congress for the first time since 1992. Another $200,000 in pro-Menendez spending came from Protect Progress, a cryptocurrency-focused PAC that often plays in Democratic primaries.
In March, Bhalla’s campaign got some good news when a federal judge struck down the Democratic county line for this year’s primary, meaning that Menendez’s support from the county organizations in the 8th district would no longer give him favorable positioning on the ballot. Bhalla was and is a strong proponent of permanently abolishing the line, aligning himself with Rep. Andy Kim (who declined to make an endorsement in the 8th district race).
Just because the ballots were made fairer, though, didn’t mean that the county organizations’ endorsements were rendered meaningless. Menendez was still the beneficiary of a huge amount of campaign efforts from his local backers across the district, especially in the heavily Hispanic towns of northern Hudson County, where Union City Mayor/State Sen. Brian Stack commands an indomitable get-out-the-vote operation.
Ultimately, Menendez’s strength in North Hudson and in other largely Hispanic parts of the 8th district proved to be enough to win against Bhalla. And Menendez is all set for November, too; Republicans nominated Anthony Valdes uncontested in their primary, but the 8th district is one of the most safely Democratic congressional seats in the state.
But while Menendez may be out of the woods electorally, his father isn’t making it so easy to escape his shadow. The elder Menendez filed to run for re-election as an independent yesterday, creating a tough choice for his son: stay loyal to his dad, or join the rest of the New Jersey Democratic Party in supporting Andy Kim, who won the Democratic nomination for Senate tonight in a landslide?