State Sen. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon) has won the race for New Jersey’s open 9th congressional district, the New Jersey Globe projects, keeping the Passaic and Bergen County seat last held by the late Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson) in Democratic hands – though not by an overwhelming margin.
As of 1:22 a.m., Pou leads Republican Billy Prempeh, a U.S. Air Force veteran from Paterson, by just under five percentage points, 50.6% to 46.2%. That could still shift slightly as the remaining votes are counted, but if the results hold, it would be a dramatic underperformance for Democrats in a district they typically carry by high double digits.
Pou, a 28-year veteran of the state legislature who will soon become the first Latina to ever represent New Jersey in Washington, has had an unusual path to Congress, to say the least.
For most of the year, Pascrell, a feisty former mayor of Paterson first elected to the House in 1996, was running for re-election to a 15th term, and there seemed to be little that could stand in his way. Pascrell had easily defeated Prospect Park Mayor Mohamed Khairullah, who ran a heavily Gaza-focused campaign in a district with a substantial Palestinian American population, in the June Democratic primary, and few believed he was in any danger of losing the general election against Prempeh.
But in July, the 87-year-old Pascrell was hospitalized with an illness that would ultimately prove fatal. He died on August 21, prompting an outpouring of tributes from New Jersey and Washington – and creating a thorny situation for local Democrats in the 9th district.
Because of the timing of Pascrell’s death, there was no time to hold a special election for his seat; instead, local Democrats had to hold a convention to choose a new nominee who would replace him on the general election ballot. And they had an incredibly short timeframe to do so, with an August 29 state deadline for substituting nominees looming. (Had Pascrell died just a couple of weeks later, after the deadline to replace him on the ballot had passed, Democrats may have been forced to campaign for his posthumous re-election.)
The day after Pascrell’s death, no fewer than six candidates either launched campaigns or began telling allies they were interested in running: Pou; her two state legislative running mates, Assemblymembers Shavonda Sumter (D-North Haledon) and Benjie Wimberly (D-Paterson); Paterson Mayor André Sayegh, who had mulled a primary challenge to Pascrell earlier in the year; Bergen County Commissioner Tracy Silna Zur (D-Franklin Lakes); and Assemblyman Clinton Calabrese (D-Cliffside Park).
Each of the candidates had real bases of support among the several hundred Democratic county committeemembers who would choose the new nominee, creating the prospect of a hectic convention where longtime alliances were tested and where the Bergen and Passaic County Democratic organizations would be pitted against one another.
Party leaders in both counties were keen on avoiding that, creating pressure for them to find a compromise candidate all of them would be amenable to supporting. They found one in Pou, a 68-year-old liberal Democrat who had made few enemies in her time in Trenton and who, as a Hispanic woman, fit the plurality-Hispanic 9th district well.
Once the three county Democratic chairs in the district had endorsed Pou, all of her declared and prospective opponents ended their campaigns, and she won the convention to take Pascrell’s place on the ballot unopposed.
The chaos surrounding Pascrell’s death, and the fact that Pou had just two months to build up a general election campaign before Election Day, could have in theory provided an opening for Republicans to make a play for the district. Prempeh had run against Pascrell in both 2020 and 2022, and his surprisingly small 11-point loss in the latter year made the 9th district the second-closest Democratic-held district in New Jersey.
But seeing little hope in such a historically blue district – part of the reason for Prempeh’s success in 2022 was low turnout in Paterson and Passaic that was unlikely to be replicated in a presidential year – state and national Republicans bypassed the race, leaving Prempeh to fend for himself; he ultimately raised just $40,000 for his campaign while Pou raised $420,000.
Given the ultimate closeness of the race, that may have been an unwise decision on their part.