Although the deadline appears to have passed, the fledgling New Jersey Moderate Party today asked Secretary of State Tahesha Way to reassess her rejection of Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) as their candidate for Congress in New Jersey’s 7th district.
The Moderate Party had pledged to go to court to contest the constitutionality of New Jersey’s ban on fusion voting after Way determined on June 8 that state law prohibited the Democratic congressman from appearing on the ballot twice for the same office.
The five week delay had led some to speculate that the fight was just a publicity stunt to remake Malinowski as a centrist in a newly-drawn district that is decidedly more Republican than the one he flipped four years ago.
Richard Wolfe, a Republican township committeeman from East Amwell and a founder of the Moderate Part, disagreed.
“I don’t have the time to get involved in stunts,” Wolfe said. “I really do believe we could create a usable option for moderate voters.”
But the timeline for a legal challenge – whether Way changes her mind or not – remains extraordinarily narrow, if not impossible. County clerks must begin sending out vote-by-mail ballots on September 24. Even in a state where judges often view election deadlines as fungible, it might be tough for a Superior Court judge to ignore a federal law that requires military ballots t go out 45 days before Election Day.
Still, the organizers of the group – independent candidates for Congress needed just 50 signatures to qualify for the ballot in a redistricting year, so it’s not clear if the Moderate Party is a party or just a group of people in a diner booth – still think they can win in court despite taking a month just to ask Way to take a second look.
“The lawsuit is pretty much teed to go,” Wolfe said. “Do we want good or do we want fast? A strategic decision was made that we are going to strive for good.”
Malinowski’s Republican opponent, former Senate Minority Leader Thomas Kean, Jr., says that the congressman’s record is in “unabashed service to the far-left wing of the Democratic Party.”
“If he contends to be a lifelong progressive Democrat, he should be proudly running on his record rather than trying to subvert century-old election laws that New Jerseyans support, to benefit only himself,” Kean said. “At a time when the issues we face as a country are so great and differences between the paths forward are so stark, make no mistake: Tom Malinowski is no moderate.”
In a New York Times Op-Ed earlier this week, Malinowski promoted the virtues of fusion voting as a way for some Republicans “fed up with the extremism of a party led by Donald Trump” as a way to offer “their members the option to cast tactical votes for a major party candidate under a banner that better reflects their values.”
“A centrist fusion party could restore to Americans in the middle some of the leverage they have lost,” stated Malinowski. “We’re hoping New Jersey will be a test case for national reform.”
Malinowski says he represents “the median congressional district in America.”
Half the districts are more Democratic, and half more Republican,” he wrote. “The voters I meet every day in my district have views that defy tribal party stereotypes, no matter which party they have registered with.”
Fusion voting was legal in New Jersey until 1921, when leaders from both parties pushed through legislation to limit independent challengers.
Republicans, who controlled the legislature at the time, were still reeling from losses suffered in 1912, when the independent Bull Moose candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote and led to Woodrow Wilson, then the governor of New Jersey, to defeat President William Howard Taft. The Bull Moose party recruited multiple legislative and local candidates that year.
Over 100 candidates in New Jersey have run with the support of more than one political party before the practice was banned about a century ago. Among them was Republican Mahlon Pitney (R-Morristown), who won re-election to a Morris County-based congressional seat in 1896 by 2,977 votes against Augustus Cutler (D-Morristown), who had been a two-term congressman in the 1870s. Pitney was also on the ballot as the candidate of the “Sound Money Democrats.”
In 1912, President William Howard Taft nominated Pitney to serve as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
A comeback for fusion voting will take a judge’s order, and then withstand what would clearly become a series of appeals, all within the next 78 days.
In New Jersey, a state appellate court is still three weeks away from the end of the briefing period on a challenge to eligibility of candidates for the Republican township council primary in Howell Township. The primary was held on June 7, and the court ruling could mean a new primary.
But that hasn’t dissuaded Wolfe, who formed the Moderate Party with another Hunterdon County Republican who supports Malinowski, former Alexandra Mayor Michelle Garay.
“I really do believe in what we’re doing, Wolfe said.
