Most Republican voters in New Jersey are fans of Donald Trump, but they defied the former president tonight in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, nominating hotelier Curtis Bashaw over Trump-endorsed Mendham Mayor Christine Serrano Glassner, the New Jersey Globe projects.
As of 12:42 a.m., Bashaw has 46% of the vote to Serrano Glassner’s 39%. Two other candidates, former Tabernacle Committeeman Justin Murphy and U.S. Navy veteran Albert Harshaw, have 11% and 5%, respectively.
As predicted, Bashaw is doing best across South Jersey, where he had institutional GOP support across the board; Serrano Glassner is winning the North Jersey counties where she had the county line, but nowhere else.
Bashaw, a Cape May-based developer on his first run for public office, will now go on to a general election against Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown), who won tonight’s Democratic Senate primary in a landslide. Incumbent Bob Menendez is also looming; the Democratic senator, who is currently on trial on federal corruption charges, announced yesterday that he plans to run for re-election as an independent.
By most traditional measures, Bashaw went into the Senate primary well ahead of Serrano Glassner. Despite getting in the race several months later than her, Bashaw outraised Serrano Glassner $1.4 million to $475,000 – both totals which include substantial self-funding – allowing him to get his message out to a wider array of voters.
Bashaw also had the county organizational line in 11 counties, giving him preferential placement on a majority of New Jersey Republicans’ ballots. (The federal court decision temporarily abolishing the county line only applied to the Democratic primary; the Republican line remained in place in all but four counties.)
But when Trump came to Wildwood for a rally on May 11, he reshaped the race by endorsing Serrano Glassner, whose husband, Michael Glassner, is a longtime Trump campaign aide. Trump dismissed Bashaw, who was in attendance at the rally and who has endorsed Trump for president, as “a Christie person,” a cutting insult in an era where New Jersey voters of both parties largely dislike the former governor.
After Trump’s endorsement, a whole host of other Trump-affiliated figures from around the country, among them several sitting senators, added their names to Serrano Glassner’s endorsement list. But Bashaw held steady, recognizing that Serrano Glassner would only benefit from the endorsements to the extent that she was able to broadcast them to enough voters across the state – and evidently, she wasn’t able to do so.
Bashaw now enters the general election as someone who has carefully avoided committing to the kind of conservative stances that might make him unpalatable to the New Jersey electorate. At a New Jersey Globe candidate conversation last month – Bashaw had previously ducked out of a head-to-head debate against Serrano Glassner – he said that Joe Biden was the duly elected president and declined to take a strong stand one way or the other on abortion, for example.
But his fight against Kim will still undoubtedly be an uphill one. Kim, having avoided a competitive primary of his own, has more than $4 million on hand to defend a Senate seat in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to the Senate in more than 50 years.