Voters in New Jersey’s 10th congressional district, a deep-blue district based in Newark, have only been represented by three members of the House over the last 75 years. On Tuesday, they’ll go to the polls to choose who will be the fourth.
Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark) tragically died in April at the age of 65, leaving his majority-Black seat in the heart of urban North Jersey vacant and triggering a special election to replace him. No fewer than eleven Democrats filed to run, creating an unusual Democratic primary – the real contest in such a heavily Democratic seat – that has managed to be both chaotic and surprisingly low-profile.
The race has a clear frontrunner: LaMonica McIver, the president of the Newark City Council. McIver has the support of the Essex County Democratic Committee, one of the state’s most vaunted party organizations, as well as top Democrats like Senator Cory Booker and Gov. Phil Murphy.
“McIver’s got serious organizational advantages,” said Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “And we’ve seen – at least in this first lineless primary that we just had – that the organizations do retain the ability to marshal votes.”
In an oddly timed July special election where turnout may be dismal, however, nothing should be taken for granted. And a number of other candidates – most prominently Hudson County Commissioner Jerry Walker (D-Jersey City), former East Orange Councilwoman Brittany Claybrooks, Linden Mayor Derek Armstead, and state economic development official Darryl Godfrey – are making the case that they, not McIver, should be the voters’ choice.
The ideological and national stakes are relatively low, which is perhaps why the race hasn’t drawn much attention outside of New Jersey. All of the top candidates are running as liberal Democrats without a lot of policy differences among them, and independent expenditure groups – which have played a decisive factor in many House primaries this cycle, including in New Jersey – have completely ignored the race.
There’s also the odd wrinkle that while the special election winner will fill the remainder of Payne’s current term, it will be up to Democratic committeemembers to select the new nominee for the November general election when they meet for a convention on July 18, two days after the special primary. There will surely be pressure for them to choose the winner of the primary, but they won’t have to, potentially rendering the election largely moot.
Still, for the residents of the 10th district, who have spent several months without a House representative (and who won’t get one until the winner of the eventual special general election is sworn in in the fall), the stakes are undoubtedly high. Whoever wins on Tuesday will be tasked with continuing the Payne legacy in Congress – and could serve for decades to come.
The candidates
As is often the case in New Jersey politics, the single most important decision in the race for Payne’s seat happened months ago, when top party leaders in Essex County (the largest county in the district, which also includes parts of Union and Hudson Counties) gathered behind-the-scenes to decide on who they wanted to support for the seat. Their joint choice: McIver, the 38-year-old city council president from Newark’s Central Ward.
The unanimity was notable, in part because the two most influential Democrats in the district – Essex County Democratic Chair LeRoy Jones and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka – don’t always see eye-to-eye. (Baraka likely could have taken the seat for himself if he’d wanted it, but he chose to continue his campaign for governor instead.)
“I was impressed that the two of them sat down and actually came up with a strategy of how they would rally around one candidate,” said Jeannine LaRue, a longtime fixture of New Jersey Democratic politics who supports McIver.
LaRue also said she was happy that party leadership had rallied around a young, progressive woman of color for the seat, rebuffing potential criticisms of the state’s old boys club.
“There were so many opportunities where [the party] could have said, ‘We’ll just put a guy in here,’” LaRue said. “That’s the way politics works – it’s such a sexist, racist, sometimes homophobic system. The fact that they selected a woman who is young – I said, ‘You know what, I’m all for this.’”
From there, the floodgates opened for McIver, with Murphy, Booker, (a former Central Ward councilman himself), most local state legislators, the late Congressman Payne’s family, and the mayors of important towns like East Orange, Roselle, and Irvington coming out to support her. As many previous elections in New Jersey have shown, that kind of unified backing typically leads to victory.
“Getting the support of all those people and all the infrastructure that comes along with it is difficult to overcome in a very low-turnout, low-visibility election,” said Mo Butler, a Democratic strategist who is not closely involved in the race, though he has donated to McIver. “So she should have the resources and muscle to pull it out.”
That’s true even though the county line, the New Jersey ballot design system that groups party-endorsed candidates together and gives them an edge, won’t be in effect for this election. (The line was overturned for the June Democratic primary after a lawsuit, but that’s not why it won’t be around on Tuesday; rather, it simply only exists when multiple races are on the ballot, and the 10th district special primary is a standalone election.)
In the face of daunting odds, though, ten other Democrats still filed to run for the seat, including some notable names from different ends of the district.
Hailing from Union County is Armstead, who was elected as Linden’s first Black mayor in 2014. Union County makes up around one-third of the district, and Armstead has built a base of supporters in Linden, most of which is in the 10th district.
But what Armstead doesn’t have is the support of the Union County Democratic organization, which voted 5-4 to endorse McIver instead. And Armstead is also dealing with the fallout of a whistleblower lawsuit alleging antisemitism and discriminatory hiring practices, which may limit his appeal beyond his most loyal core of voters.
Up in Jersey City there’s Walker, a former college basketball star and county commissioner who has his own crew of supporters via his Team Walker organization. Hudson County Democrats chose to remain neutral in the race, but Hudson County Executive Craig Guy has endorsed Walker; Walker may be on track to carry his home city, but it only casts around one-seventh of the district’s votes.
Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, a 2025 gubernatorial candidate who hasn’t made any endorsement in the race, said that the two candidates he’s seen the most in his city are Walker and Claybrooks, who shares some of Fulop’s anti-establishment views. Claybrooks was elected to the East Orange City Council in 2019 at age 27, but was dropped from organizational support in 2023 after disagreements with local party leaders, among them LeRoy Jones; she later went on to work for Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown)’s Senate campaign.
“I’ve seen Brittany Claybrooks at a lot of events in Jersey City, and she’s been very outspoken,” said Fulop, who lives just outside the district’s boundaries. “She’s been the most impressive and vocal of the candidates.”
Then there’s Godfrey, currently the chief operating officer of the New Jersey Redevelopment Authority. Godfrey has never run for office before, but he’s used some of his own money to bypass much of the district’s typical political infrastructure, launching an early cable TV buy before any other candidate was able to get their own advertising off the ground.
Also running are six other candidates: Shana Melius, a U.S. Army veteran and activist who was a staffer in Payne’s office when the congressman died; John Flora, a Jersey City teacher who ran against Payne in 2020; college professor and former Newark mayoral candidate Sheila Montague; small businesswoman and activist Alberta Gordon; former school board candidate Debra Salters; and Eugene Mazo, a Rutgers law professor who has a habit of running for office as a way of testing state ballot access laws.
None are likely to win, but those who do relatively well could set themselves up for success later on. Melius, on her first bid for public office, is running a serious campaign and has reported raising more money than Claybrooks or Walker; Flora, too, has impressed some observers, though as one of two white candidates in the race (the other being Mazo), he’s not a perfect fit for the state’s only majority-Black district.
The campaign
The schedule for the special primary has been a hyper-accelerated one: Donald Payne Jr. died on April 24, Phil Murphy called a special election for his seat on May 3, and the filing deadline to run was May 10. From there, it’s been a two-month sprint to Primary Day, an incredibly short timeframe for modern political campaigns.
In its early weeks, the campaign was dominated by the rather prosaic issue of petition signatures. Claybrooks filed a challenge against McIver’s petitions, alleging that it was impossible that McIver’s mother had collected all 1,081 herself, as the petitions claimed; the New Jersey Democratic State Committee, in turn, challenged irregularities in Claybrooks’ petitions as well.
Both candidates were ultimately allowed to remain on the ballot, but not without some heartburn for McIver after one of her aides told the New Jersey Globe that he had collected some of her signatures, himself undercutting her claim that her mother had been the sole petition circulator. He later awkwardly recanted his statement, and his testimony was thrown out on technicalities, thus keeping McIver on the ballot.
The petition saga was perhaps the campaign’s moment of highest excitement; by all accounts, it’s been a fairly quiet race from then on.
As of this morning, just 7,586 Democratic voters had returned mail-in ballots, per the AP’s Ryan Dubicki – fewer than the 10,023 mail ballots returned at the same point prior to the regular June primary, in which Payne was posthumously running uncontested. Butler acknowledged that there hasn’t been much drama that he’s seen; Fulop said his constituents in Jersey City have only maybe gotten a couple of mailers.
“We know that there’s not a tremendous amount of interest,” Rasmussen said. “We know that it’s the summer; we know that we don’t have a culture of special elections in New Jersey. We know that, to a certain extent, it’s going to fly under the radar screen, and it has flown under the radar screen so far. So I’m not looking for any groundswell of voters.”
That’s probably good news for McIver. Her base – Newark and nearby towns like Irvington and East Orange – is the largest of any candidate running, and if the election comes down purely to who can turn out their own voters, it would be unwise to bet against the strength of the Essex County Democratic organization.
And McIver’s candidacy presents another opportunity for those organizations to test their mettle in a line-free world. Most party-backed candidates won their primaries in June even without the benefits of the line, and if McIver wins easily next week, that’s another victory to add to the tally.
The candidates have met together twice in person, for a forum in Newark hosted by the NAACP last week and another in Jersey City last night; most of them also responded to a candidate questionnaire sent out by the New Jersey Globe asking them about their backgrounds and their positions on key issues. (Salters, Armstead, and Mazo did not return the questionnaire; Salters also did not attend the Newark forum, while McIver skipped the Jersey City event.)
At the forum and in their questionnaires, the candidates expounded quite a bit on their own backgrounds and their priorities if elected, but did not draw especially clear ideological distinctions between themselves and their opponents. All of the candidates, for example, said they supported implementing Medicare for All and studying reparations for Black Americans, and all but two (Melius and Gordon) said they’d have supported an Israel foreign aid bill – three much-debated issues in the Democratic Party.
The lack of clear policy divides may be in part why most national groups, some of which spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in the primaries for two New Jersey congressional districts last month, have given the race a pass. McIver has the support of the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC and the Collective PAC, a group for Black candidates, but neither have gotten heavily involved; per OpenSecrets, the district hasn’t seen a dime of outside spending.
Donors, too, have not flocked to give gobs of money to any of the candidates running. McIver raised $91,000 as of June 26, and has likely raised quite a bit more in the weeks since then; she held several big fundraisers this week, including one hosted by Murphy advisor Mahen Gunaratna and his wife Erin that raised more than $20,000.
That’s certainly a solid total given the short timeframe of the race, but given how expensive congressional races can be in the modern era, it’s not an insurmountable lead in theory. None of McIver’s opponents, however, were able to match it; Godfrey reported raising $68,000 (though his reports are a mess and may be inaccurate), Armstead raised $51,000, Melius $13,000, Claybrooks $9,000, and no one else even filed fundraising reports.
In an election where turnout is both low and unpredictable, it’s wise to be cautious. Maybe Armstead or Walker will activate their hometown bases on Election Day and swamp the field; maybe Claybrooks or Melius will tap into a vein of discontent among tuned-in progressive voters; maybe Godfrey’s early spending will let him rise to the top. Stranger things have happened.
But almost everything throughout the 10th district’s two-and-a-half-month campaign has seemed to go McIver’s way, and none of her opponents have an obvious path to defeating her.
“People will look for signs of life from any of the other campaigns that would indicate something to change our priors,” Rasmussen said. “I don’t see the kind of insurgent campaign that could overcome the weight of the world that is behind the establishment, which is behind McIver.”
The convention
Whoever wins the primary on Tuesday will go on to face Republican Carmen Bucco in a September 18 general election; given that the 10th district is one of the most Democratic seats in the country, there isn’t any question of who will win. Once the election is certified, the winner will be able to take office, probably in late September or early October.
But the term they’ll be sworn into will only last a few months, after which the winner of the regularly scheduled November election will take office in January 2025. And the choice for who will fill that general election spot rests with the 10th district’s Democratic organizations – the very organizations that have come out in full force for McIver.
That’s because Payne died after filing had already closed for the regular primary, and since no one had filed to run against him, he won uncontested. State law allows local parties to choose new candidates to fill the general election slot held by a candidate who has since died or withdrawn before the final filing deadline of August 29.
Just yesterday, Essex, Union, and Hudson Democrats announced that they’ll hold their convention to determine Payne’s replacement on July 18, two days after the special primary. The filing deadline to compete at the convention is 2 p.m. today.
If McIver wins the primary, then there shouldn’t be any drama at all, since she’s already the choice of top party leaders, who would be able to say they’re simply obeying the will of the voters. If she loses, though, things get quite a bit more interesting. Suddenly, avowed McIver supporters will have to either choose another candidate or forge ahead with one who had been rejected by voters just two days earlier.
Butler and LaRue, who are both in McIver’s corner, said that they think the convention delegates will support McIver regardless of what happens on Tuesday.
“I think she’s as safe of a bet as can be,” Butler said. “It becomes more difficult to make that argument [if she loses the primary], but I don’t think that means that she would not still win the majority of that vote. It just would complicate things for her and her supporters.”
“One way or the other, we will be able to go down to D.C. and celebrate her as a new congresswoman,” LaRue said.
Fulop, though, said that he’ll do everything in his power to make sure that the winner of the primary, whoever it may be, is also the winner of the convention.
“I think the true test of how much respect the county organizations give to the voters is going to be whether they respect who the voters nominate on Tuesday,” Fulop said. “Whoever wins next week should have the support of the full New Jersey political apparatus at the convention… And they should say it in advance, to be honest. They should make it clear before the election that they’ll support whatever the voters say.”
Regardless, in order to get to that point at all, one of McIver’s opponents will have to beat her on Tuesday. Given the wealth of institutional advantages she’s built up – from fundraising, to endorsements, to boots on the grounds across the district – that’ll be a tall order.
“Everybody feels really comfortable with the candidate that the organizations are supporting,” Butler argued. “I think that says a lot about who LaMonica is as council president in Newark, how she comported herself, and how she is as a person. Everybody feels comfortable with her being the standard-bearer for the Payne legacy.”
This story was updated at 10:31 a.m. with new mail-in voting data from Ryan Dubicki, and again at 4:51 p.m. with information about a second candidate forum last night in Jersey City.