What might New Jersey politics look like if the county organizational line, the ballot design system that helps political parties consolidate their power in the state, is struck down for good? The Democratic primary for Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown)’s open House seat could provide a roadmap.
When Kim announced last fall that he would run for U.S. Senate and leave his House seat behind, the standard New Jersey process followed. Several candidates jumped into the race and began competing for party endorsements at the 3rd congressional district’s three county conventions; all three were ultimately won by one candidate, Assemblyman Herb Conaway (D-Delran).
In another election year, that might have been the end of it, and Conaway would be on the glide path to Congress now. But thanks to a lawsuit brought by Kim, a federal judge struck down the county line for this year’s Democratic primary, and all four of Conaway’s opponents – Assemblywoman Carol Murphy (D-Mount Laurel), civil rights lawyer Joe Cohn, businesswoman Sarah Schoengood, and teacher Brian Schkeeper – chose to stay in the race through the June 4 primary.
The resulting race is something that’s common to the rest of the country but unusual for New Jersey: multiple qualified candidates fighting it out on an even playing field where money and campaign grit matters more than endorsements or ballot designs. Conaway, who has benefited from some outside spending, seems to have an edge, but Murphy and the others are giving him a serious challenge, and no one’s willing to say anything for sure.
The eventual winner will have to take on the Republican nominee – probably physician Rajesh Mohan or businesswoman Shirley Maia-Cusick – in the November general election, and it won’t necessarily be a slam dunk. The 3rd district, based in South Jersey’s Burlington County and covering parts of Mercer and Monmouth Counties, isn’t as competitive as it was before the 2021 redistricting cycle, but Republicans did make a serious play to flip it in 2022.
For now, though, it seems quite likely that the Democratic nominee will go on to be a member of Congress. It’s up to each of the five candidates running to convince voters that it should be them – and it’s up to the three county parties in the 3rd district to prove that they can still win primaries even in a post-line world.
Differences in experience, not in policy
Ask any of the 3rd district Democratic candidates what their differences are from one another, and they’ll largely point to their life experience and their goals in Congress, not any broad ideological divides.
“There’s not a lot of daylight and difference,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “We’re not expecting huge differences in the way they’re going to vote in Washington.”
As other states around the country are riven by intra-Democratic battles over progressive-versus-moderate, then, the race for the 3rd district will be driven more by the candidates convincing voters that they, personally, are the right fit for a congressional seat.
For Conaway, that means leaning into his lengthy career in politics and elsewhere. An Air Force veteran and physician who holds both an M.D. and a J.D., the 61-year-old Conaway was first elected to the Assembly back in 1997, and is now the chairman of the Assembly Health Committee. Conaway said that his decades-long experience fighting for expanded health care access, abortion rights, and more should make the voters of the 3rd district trust him above anyone else.
“It is being on the ground, working hand-in-hand with constituents, addressing their needs in law, in legislation,” Conaway said. “I have been doing that for 26 years, I know how to do it, I’ll know how to do it if I enter Congress… Do you hire someone to build a house who’s never built one before? That’s the question that people are rightly asking themselves.”
(Conaway ran for the same congressional seat once before, in 2004, when it was a substantially more Republican district held by then-GOP Rep. Jim Saxton. It didn’t go well – Saxton won 63%-35% – but because the district has changed so much since then, that result probably shouldn’t be seen as indicative of anything.)
It’s precisely Conaway’s long tenure, though, that is the subject of criticism from his opponents. The 61-year-old Murphy has represented the same legislative district as Conaway (legislative districts in New Jersey elect two assemblymembers simultaneously) since 2018, and she argued she’s managed to build up as much influence in those six years as Conaway has in 26. Her effective advocacy, she said, is why voters should send her to Congress.
“I’ve dedicated myself to making sure that I am that leader that my constituents need,” Murphy said. “Having been an independent legislator, I can tell you that my whole thing is that if I expect my constituency to invest in me, I’m invested in my constituency, and that’s where my loyalties lie.”
Murphy’s campaign has also leaned in heavily to the fact that, if elected, she’d be the first-ever woman to represent South Jersey in Congress, a distinction that also applies to Schoengood. Conaway, meanwhile, would be the first Black member of Congress to hail from South Jersey, which until Kim won his first race in 2018 had never elected anybody other than a white man to the House.
Schoengood, for her part, said her message to voters is that she’d be a fresh new voice in Congress, in contrast to the longtime legislators at the front of the pack. The 30-year-old co-owner of a seafood business, Schoengood – who was one of the co-plaintiffs on Kim’s anti-line lawsuit – has never run for office before.
“People want new blood,” she said. “I think that we need to have real conversations about the state of the Democratic Party. People are angry at the corruption we’re seeing in our politics, whether it’s here in New Jersey or the polarization in Congress. People are very turned off, and we need to really try to do better and get people engaged again.”
That’s a message that, perhaps more than anyone else in the race, echoes what Kim first brought to the table in 2018. When Kim launched his campaign in 2017, he was a 34-year-old ex-State Department official with no experience in electoral politics and with a message about fighting against politics-as-usual. It clearly worked out for him.
The other two candidates in the 3rd district race, Cohn and Schkeeper, also don’t have any history of running for elected office, but Cohn has been around politics for a long while. As a top staffer at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Cohn cited his experience working with both Republicans and Democrats to get civil liberties protections passed around the country.
“I’ve never wanted to run for office,” he said. “I’m not running because I have a burning desire to see Joe Cohn as a congressman. I’m running because I don’t think the country can afford to have people with my experience and my focus sitting on the sidelines. There are plenty of members of Congress whom I agree with entirely on their voting records, but who are not doing a great job of taking the temperature of the country down.”
As for Schkeeper, he got in the race later than any other candidate, and is probably the least likely to win of the five Democratic contenders. But he said that his life story as a teacher and a foster parent has given him the ability to connect with 3rd district voters.
“I have this unique collection of experiences that allows me, when I’m sitting in a room with people who are making decisions, to say, ‘Hang on a second. This is not some abstract number we’re talking about. These are real people, and here’s what this means,’” he said. “Washington needs politicians who have that experience, rather than people who have been professional politicians for my entire adult life.”
A line-less world
The fact that all five candidates are able to make their cases to voters at all is largely thanks to one man: U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi, who issued the decision eliminating the county line for Democrats this year. Had the line – which puts party-endorsed candidates together in the same row or column, a major advantage – remained in place, Conaway would be heavily favored, some of his opponents might have dropped out of the race, and no one would be paying much attention to the 3rd district.
Because of the particular nature of the case, Quraishi’s decision doesn’t apply to Republicans, and it doesn’t apply to any future election years, either. But most New Jersey politicians are treating it like a done deal that the line will eventually fall, since Quraishi is also the presiding judge on a longer-term case over the line’s constitutionality.
The 3rd district, then – as New Jersey’s lone open congressional seat this year – is a good test case of what that eventual line-free world might be like.
Without the line, there seems to be a new political king in town: money. In a truly open primary, where voters may not have heard of many candidates and where they aren’t being nudged one way or another by the design of the ballot, things like TV ads and mailers can take on a hugely outsized role.
On that front, Conaway has a clear advantage. The assemblyman has raised $471,000 since launching his campaign last year – not a colossal sum, but far more than any of his opponents. Murphy has raised $169,000 and Cohn has raised $140,000; trailing far behind are Schoengood with $33,000 and Schkeeper with $15,000.
Conaway has also been the beneficiary of outside spending, something of a rarity in New Jersey primaries that’s likely to become more common if the county line stays dead. Three outside groups, two of them pro-veteran PACs and one of them a PAC dedicated to supporting scientists and physicians, have spent a combined $500,000 on ads boosting Conaway and introducing him to the many voters who likely had never heard his name before this year.
No similar spending has come in for any other candidate, even though Murphy has surely wanted it to. She has the endorsement of EMILYs List, which will often spend huge sums to elect female Democratic candidates, and also may have been hoping for an assist from South Jersey Democratic power broker George Norcross – but neither have come to her financial aid so far, and the clock is running out.
In other words, the advantage that might have been conferred on Conaway by the line in past years is instead coming via money, both that which he’s raised and that which has come from outside New Jersey to help him. That’s part of why, even with the line gone, most observers still view Conaway as the odds-on favorite to succeed Kim.
Indeed, both public polls of the race have shown Conaway with a lead: one from Murphy’s campaign that put Conaway at 22% and Murphy at 18%, and another from a pro-Conaway group that gave him a 25%-11% lead over Murphy, with Schoengood at 8%.
And even if the line is no longer a factor, the county party endorsements Conaway won this spring do still matter, as evidenced by a recent mailer from the Burlington County Democratic organization that promoted the party’s endorsed candidates on an “official sample ballot” and blurred out all other options. The mailer drew blowback from the other 3rd district candidates, who said it would confuse voters.
(Murphy does have some notable endorsers, too, including Assemblywoman Andrea Katz, who represents the southern parts of Burlington County not covered by Murphy’s legislative district, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.)
Conaway’s challengers argue that no matter what the assemblyman’s advantages may be, they have the grassroots support that will ultimately prove their naysayers wrong.
“There’s a real energy right now amongst Democrats, particularly in New Jersey, who are disillusioned by the way the party machine has been operating,” Cohn said. “I think that they’re recognizing that if the solution were career politicians, that would have already been reflected in Congress, which is full of them.”
“[Voters] want to hear from the candidate,” Schoengood agreed. “They want to speak to the candidate. Every conversation I have, that’s what they appreciate. They don’t care who’s backing me or who’s endorsing me.”
The question is whether that style of campaigning can overcome the basic advantages that money and endorsements provide. According to Rasmussen, who lives in the 3rd district himself, the campaign has been a sleepy one at the ground level – which likely benefits Conaway, whose spending has allowed him to reach many more voters than his opponents.
“The race has been invisible,” Rasmussen said. “It’s absolutely been invisible. It’s been a non-factor… Under one year of the new map, [Andy Kim] was certainly getting himself out there. I don’t see the same level of activity yet from the candidates who are seeking to replace him.”
The fight for Andy Kim’s legacy
One person who has stayed almost entirely out of the 3rd district fray? Andy Kim himself, who may be the most popular political figure in the district but who has not let any of his potential successors take up his mantle quite so easily.
Not that they haven’t tried; Conaway, Murphy, and Schoengood in particular have all worked to cast themselves as the true guarantor of Kim’s legacy in the 3rd district. In fact, both Conaway and Murphy have specifically cast doubts on whether the other is really as ardent of a Kim fan as they claim to be.
Conaway noted that back when Kim was still in a tough Senate fight against First Lady Tammy Murphy (no relation), Carol Murphy wobbled on her support for Kim and seemed to leave the door open to switching her endorsement.
“When you run for office, you have to be ready to take a stand, stand your ground, and defend it,” Conaway said. “If you do things like changing who you’re with based on political expediency, I think people will question whether you’re ready to stand up for them when the going gets tough.”
Murphy, meanwhile, accused Conaway of not taking a strong enough stand on the county line, which she has said needs to be permanently overturned – a top priority for Kim as well.
“He’s still arguing for the line,” Murphy said of Conaway. “He believes the line should be there. He believes that this idea that everybody’s able to vote on a box ballot is wrong. That’s his opinion, that’s fine, but on the other hand, I believe that every voice matters and that we should have an open and fair process in the primary.”
(Asked for his thoughts on the line, Conaway didn’t specifically call for its removal, but he said he was “fine” with switching to office-block ballots.)
Kim’s real 3rd district legacy, though, will not be in who succeeds him – it will be in his lawsuit that changes how the race to succeed him will go down. Kim’s decision to seek a U.S. Senate seat created the 3rd district race in the first place, and then his lawsuit changed the rules mid-game, allowing for the kind of genuinely competitive election Kim and other anti-line advocates have called for all across New Jersey.
Whether Conaway can win anyways, whether county parties can maintain their power in a lineless world, whether outside spending truly now reigns supreme – all of that will be seen when primary day arrives on June 4.
“It’s a test case on whether or not the county Democratic organizations are going to miss a beat as we go to this new system with no lines,” Rasmussen said. “They’re either going to miss a beat or they’re not. This is the first indication we’re going to have as to which one it is.”