The Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a left-wing minor party in New Jersey, will field candidates for United States Senate and the 8th congressional district in 2024.
Joanne Kuniansky, who was the SWP’s nominee for governor in 2021 and has since run for Congress and State Senate, will this year be the party’s standard-bearer for the U.S. Senate seat held by Senator Bob Menendez. In the 8th congressional district, currently represented by Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City), the SWP will run Lea Sherman, a candidate for a different congressional seat in 2022 and for State Assembly in 2023.
In each of their campaigns, Kuniansky and Sherman have gotten negligible percentages of the vote. Kuniansky’s 2021 gubernatorial campaign received 4,012 votes, good for 0.2% of the vote and last place in a five-way field.
That track record is likely to repeat this year. In the improbable event that the Senate race ends up being extremely close, however, even a small number of votes received by Kuniansky could mean the difference between a Democratic and a Republican victory.
Kuniansky and Sherman’s announcement lists an unusual combination of foreign policy priorities, including supporting Israel’s war against Hamas, defending Ukraine from Russia’s invasion, and ending the United States’s “economic war” against socialist Cuba. They also decried a Colorado judge’s decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the primary ballot, saying that the decision is “the latest blow to basic freedoms carried out by Democrats.”
“Working people need to break from the capitalist parties – Democrats, Republicans, Greens and Libertarians – and build a party of our own that can lead the working class to overturn capitalist rule and use workers power to rebuild society from top to bottom and join the fight for a socialist world,” Kuniansky and Sherman said.