Parts of this story were originally published on February 29; they have been edited and republished here.
The cliché in politics is that this year – every year – is the most important election of our lifetimes. Well, this weekend – every weekend – was the most important set of Democratic county conventions for New Jersey’s U.S. Senate seat of our lifetimes.
So far, Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) has been on a roll against First Lady Tammy Murphy. Four counties (Monmouth, Burlington, Hunterdon, and Warren) have held secret ballot votes so far to determine the county organizational line – the powerful institution in New Jersey politics that groups party-endorsed candidates together on primary ballots – and Kim has won all four resoundingly. He also easily won a convention in Sussex this weekend, but while Kim can use the county organization slogan, Sussex is one of two counties (Salem is the other) that utilizes office block ballots.
Murphy has the lines in Passaic and Union counties, but those were awarded by fiat rather than by a proper convention.
The big test in the Senate race comes tonight, when Democrats in colossal Bergen County will meet for their convention. Murphy has the public endorsement of practically every notable Democrat in the county, but both campaigns are acting like the convention will be competitive; if Kim somehow pulls off an upset win, that would be a grievous blow to Murphy’s campaign.
Now, this could all be moot if a lawsuit filed by Kim earlier this week to bring down the county line is successful. Should U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi decide to take a hatchet to New Jersey’s political system, Kim and Murphy may be competing for lines that won’t exist anymore by primary day.
There’s not much they can do about that right now, though. The Bergen convention has the potential to reshape the state of the race long before the lawsuit is settled; here’s what to expect.
When Bergen Democratic Chairman Paul Juliano endorsed Murphy last year, that seemed like the end of the story in Bergen County. It’s been a long, long time since county committee members in Bergen bucked the will of their chairman, and there was initially little reason to believe Murphy would have any trouble winning the county line.
But Bergen Democrats do hold a proper convention with secret ballots, giving Kim a fighting chance. And after Kim’s resounding victories at the year’s first three county conventions, it seems increasingly possible that he could win, or at least come much closer than insurgent candidates typically get.
As the convention in Monmouth showed, though, whip counts and endorsements aren’t always a reliable indicator of how people actually intend to vote. Local Democrats have plenty of incentive to lie to Murphy, who is of course closely tied to Gov. Phil Murphy, the most powerful Democrat in the state; one clearly observable phenomenon this year has been county committeeemembers saying one thing to the Murphy campaign and doing something else in the privacy of the voting booth.
Bergen Democrats allow a wide array of people to participate as voting delegates in their conventions: all county committeemembers; all municipal chairs; all county, state, and federal Democratic elected officials who live in the county; all Democratic mayors and local officeholders, including those elected in nominally nonpartisan towns; all members of the county Democratic Executive Committee; and bonus delegates awarded to towns that meet certain vote thresholds from the last general election.
All in all, it’s a universe of 1,306 delegates, making the Bergen convention by far the largest of any convention in the state. (Each delegate gets one vote regardless of how many of the eligible positions they hold; Paul Sarlo is a state senator, Wood-Ridge mayor, municipal chairman, and county committeemember, but he’ll only be able to vote once.) In the event of absent delegates, alternate delegates chosen by municipal committees may vote in their stead.
The towns that are set to have the biggest delegations at Monday’s conventions are Hackensack, Teaneck, and Fort Lee, each of which has at least 50 eligible delegates – though Bergen County is so splintered that even they each make up less than 5% of the overall convention electorate.
If the convention follows similar patterns to previous votes, Murphy will likely do best in the more urban, heavily Democratic parts of the county, while Kim’s support may come more from Republican-leaning areas and from towns with large Asian American populations. (Two other Senate candidates, Campos-Medina and Larry Hamm, won’t be competing at the convention; neither will indicted Senator Bob Menendez, who hasn’t said if he’s seeking re-election.)
Kim would be the nation’s first Korean American senator if elected, and Bergen County has a large Korean American population concentrated in towns like Palisades Park and Fort Lee. Then again, the Fort Lee Democratic chair, Fort Lee mayor, and Palisades Park Democratic chair – all white men – have endorsed Murphy; so too have two Korean American Fort Lee councilmen and Assemblywoman Ellen Park (D-Englewood Cliffs).
Potentially throwing a wrench in the proceedings is Kim’s anti-line lawsuit, which if successful would hobble Democratic organizations’ ability to influence primaries in their favor. Kim said that he’s heard from many county committeemembers who privately want to do away with the line; a few notable figures like Burlington County State Sen. Troy Singleton (D-Delran) have said the same thing publicly.
“A lot of the rank-and-file in these committees – they can’t stand the line,” Kim said. “They really can’t, because it just constantly hangs over their head… Even elected leaders, a lot of them don’t like it, because it makes them beholden to other people. It makes them always have to watch their back and watch their votes. This is not something that is universally loved amongst the committee.”
But that may not hold true in places like Bergen County, where the county Democratic organization serves in part as a massive patronage operation, wielding the power of state, county, and local government to award jobs and contracts to loyal allies. (Bergen Democrats hold all countywide offices, control most of the county’s largest towns, and count among their numbers the State Senate Budget Committee chairman and the State Assembly Appropriations Committee chairwoman.)
Municipal chairs – again, the vast majority of whom are publicly supporting Murphy – would also lose a substantial amount of power if the line was eliminated, since the ability of municipal parties to maintain control over their local governments depends in part on their power to award the county line for mayor and council.
In other words, many of the voting delegates at Monday’s convention have a political and financial stake in the existence of the county line and the continued reign of the Bergen County Democratic organization. Murphy, the choice of the county party leadership, is a safer bet for those delegates than Kim, who wants to undermine a key source of their power.
Kim has also claimed that Bergen Democratic leaders have put up obstacles for him that they haven’t put up for Murphy, saying that they only offered him a chance to speak in-person to the full county committee after the convention was already over.
But ultimately, the Bergen convention is lower-stakes for Kim than it is for Murphy. If Kim loses it, that simply confirms what people have long assumed about Bergen politics. If Murphy loses it, on the other hand, it would be a political earthquake that may prompt serious discussions about whether she should remain in the race.
Without Bergen in her corner, Murphy’s primary math gets shaky. The county accounts for a little over 10% of the statewide Democratic primary vote; without it, Murphy could end up running on the line in as few as seven counties (Camden, Essex, Gloucester, Hudson, Middlesex, Passaic, and Union), accounting for a little over half of the Democratic electorate. Given the enthusiasm and polling edge Kim has had so far, Murphy likely needs more than a 50-50 county line split to win statewide.
A loss in Bergen would force the Murphy campaign to make some hard decisions. Without a heavy line advantage on Murphy’s side, how can she close the gap against Kim? Does she dip into her own substantial fortune – something she initially said she wouldn’t do – to flood the airwaves with ads? Do other Murphy-supporting county chairs around the state start to get cold feet?
Fortunately for her and for the Bergen Democratic organization, a Murphy victory is still more likely than not. For Kim to win, he’d need a big percentage of public Murphy endorsers to be private Kim supporters – not unthinkable, but a tough climb.
After the Bergen convention is over, the Senate candidates will have to leap right into the next pair of conventions, Cumberland and Somerset on March 7. Somerset is especially interesting because while it’s a demographically favorable county for Kim, its convention will not be held by secret ballot, meaning that Somerset Democratic Chair Peg Schaffer – a vociferous Murphy supporter – will get to see every delegate who does and doesn’t side with her.
But the Bergen convention, much like the Monmouth convention last month, is so all-important right now that anything that comes afterwards is dependent on its results. Tammy Murphy has a chance to right her campaign’s ship and notch a definitive win; Andy Kim has an outside shot at delivering his most devastating hit yet.