This story was first published last week as part of a larger preview of upcoming county conventions; it has been lightly edited for republication here.
Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) and First Lady Tammy Murphy will face off today in two different Democratic county conventions for U.S. Senate: Mercer County, which is home to the state capital of Trenton, and Cape May County, in the state’s touristy southern reaches.
Both counties hold open conventions with secret-ballot votes, which has previously been a recipe for success for Kim; of the seven counties so far that have conducted conventions by secret ballot, Kim has won six – Monmouth, Burlington, Hunterdon, Warren, Sussex, and Ocean – while Murphy has won just one, Bergen. Somerset, Union, and Passaic Democrats have also endorsed Murphy, but their endorsements were awarded either by public convention vote (Somerset) or without a convention at all (Union and Passaic).
It’s very possible that today’s two conventions will both go Kim’s way, although Murphy could come away with a victory in Cape May; Mercer is further out of reach for her. At stake in both counties is the county organizational line, the unique New Jersey institution that lets county parties put their endorsed candidates together in the same row or column. Kim has filed a lawsuit arguing that the line is unconstitutional, but it won’t be heard in court until next week.
Here’s what to expect in Mercer and Cape May as convention season slowly comes to a close.
Mercer County
Today’s Mercer County Democratic convention at Rider University is a bit funny, because no one is really in doubt about the final result: Kim is very likely to win. But it matters quite a bit how much he wins by.
That’s because of a mechanism built into Mercer Democrats’ rules that allows any candidate who gets at least 40% of the convention vote to share the county line, though the official party slogan is only given to the convention winner. Since so much of the power of the line comes from the visual layout of the primary ballot, Kim will need to beat Murphy at the convention by a landslide to truly “win.” (Two other candidates, Patricia Campos-Medina and Larry Hamm, have also filed to compete at the convention.)
Can Kim do it? He’s got a lot of factors working in his favor. For one, he currently represents a little under half of the county in Congress, including its largest town, Hamilton. For another, many of the towns that aren’t in his district – like Princeton, West Windsor, and the Hopewells – are chock-full of the type of white and Asian progressives who are the backbone of Kim’s coalition.
Case in point: the Princeton Community Democratic Organization, a major force in Princeton politics, held its endorsement vote last weekend, and Kim won with 91% of the vote. Murphy, who was not in attendance, got a single vote, putting her behind Campos-Medina and tied with Hamm for third.
Kim also has the support of former Rep. Rush Holt (D-Hopewell), who represented much of the county in Congress for 16 years, while Murphy received an endorsement last week from Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora. Essentially all of the county’s other power players, however, have remained studiously neutral in the race, at least publicly.
That includes top Trenton figures like Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson and the husband-and-wife duo of Trenton Council President Teska Frisby and Mercer County Commissioner Sam Frisby; Hamilton figures like Mercer County Executive Dan Benson, Hamilton Mayor Jeff Martin, and Assemblyman Wayne DeAngelo; and a smattering of others like State Sen. Shirley Turner (D-Lawrence) and Assemblyman Anthony Verrelli (D-Hopewell).
And it includes perhaps the county’s two most powerful Democrats, Mercer Democratic Chairwoman Janice Mironov (also the mayor of East Windsor) and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), both of whom have declined to make any endorsement in the race.
Watson Coleman, though, recently expressed support for reforming the county line system, which aligns her – at least on that issue – with Kim. Mironov, meanwhile, is probably more pro-Murphy than not, though she hasn’t done much to convince her county committee one way or the other.
Mercer is a fairly big prize in statewide Democratic primary, representing 4.7% of the state’s Democrats. It’s also one of just two majority-minority counties to hold an open convention, making its results particularly meaningful as both candidates fight for support from voters of color. (Cumberland County is the other; Middlesex County has a convention, but it’s not fully small-d democratic.)
Mercer Democrats allow a wide variety of people to participate in their conventions: Democratic county committeemembers, elected officials who are from or represent part of the county, municipal Democratic chairs and vice chairs, Democratic club presidents and vice presidents, and more. Last year’s convention drew nearly 500 voting delegates; this year could exceed that total.
And prior conventions show that convention delegates are very willing to take risky votes. In 2023, they booted incumbent County Executive Brian Hughes in favor of Benson 78%-22%, and even kicked DeAngelo off the line for Assembly (though that was later rectified); in 2021, County Commissioner Ann Cannon (D-East Windsor) was dumped after 27 years in office.
All that should bode well for Kim – but whether it bodes well enough for him that he can push Murphy below 40% is anyone’s guess.
At the same convention, Mercer Democrats will also decide on their line for Kim’s open 3rd district congressional seat, where four candidates – Assemblyman Herb Conaway (D-Delran), Assemblywoman Carol Murphy (D-Mount Laurel), civil rights attorney Joe Cohn, and businesswoman Sarah Schoengood – are vying for party support. Cohn is not included in the official list of candidates, but plans to have allied county committeemembers put forward his nomination from the convention floor.
Conaway overwhelmingly won previous county conventions in the 3rd district’s other two counties, Monmouth and Burlington; Murphy (who isn’t related to the first lady) came in second in both, while Cohn and Schoengood barely registered. Since those two counties make up three-quarters of the district, the two wins made Conaway the clear favorite for the Democratic nomination.
Murphy will probably do a bit better in Mercer County than in the prior two contests – but doing well enough to push Conaway below 40%, and thus fully off the line, seems like a tall task. The more realistic path to Congress at this point for Murphy, and for Cohn and Schoengood, relies on Kim’s lawsuit successfully striking down the county line; in fact, Schoengood is one of Kim’s co-plaintiffs in the suit.
In the county’s other congressional district, Watson Coleman will face a convention challenge from former Princeton school board member Daniel Dart, who is running as a moderate Democrat and calling for “new energy and leadership.” It would be a shock if Dart comes anywhere close to getting party support.
Cape May County
Cape May County, the state’s southernmost county and one of its smallest, is part of the South Jersey Democratic orbit, which is backing Tammy Murphy. But it also has a somewhat independent-minded county committee that doesn’t always go along with what South Jersey Democratic power broker George Norcross dictates from on high.
Cape May Democrats will be meeting at the same time as the Mercer convention, so none of the Senate candidates are likely to head to Cape May Court House this afternoon to compete for the county line in-person. Since Cape May is only home to 0.7% of the state’s Democrats, it’s not a hard choice to make.
It’s possible that the county’s Democratic committee will decide not to award a line at all. With relatively new Chairwoman Marie Blistan (a former leader of the New Jersey Education Association) at the helm, Cape May Democrats are considering awarding the line to both Murphy and Kim or ditching the line entirely for the U.S. Senate, essentially abdicating any stake in the contentious primary.
But if local Democrats do choose to award a line, the convention fight between Kim and Murphy is expected to be competitive. (Well, technically not a convention; in Cape May, they call it a special meeting of the full county committee.) With a secret ballot and a progressive-leaning set of convention delegates – echoing other local parties in red counties – Kim stands a very good shot of winning.
That speaks to a fundamentally unusual part of this year’s primary: Kim’s chances in a given county are based heavily on the type of convention the county holds, rather than on geography or other political alliances.
Typically, competitive New Jersey primaries tend to break down on regional lines; the 2000 Democratic primary for Senate between Jon Corzine and former Gov. Jim Florio, for example, was starkly polarized, with Florio on the line in the south and Corzine on the line in the north. That seems to be repeating itself in this year’s GOP Senate primary, where Mendham Borough Mayor Christine Serrano Glassner is a more northern-focused candidate and developer Curtis Bashaw is more southern-focused.
This year, though, Kim has shown an ability to compete in and win conventions in all sorts of different places – as long as they hold real, open votes.
Cape May Democrats are additionally set to award their line in the race for the Republican-leaning 2nd congressional district, where Tim Alexander, Joe Salerno, and Carolyn Rush are competing for party support to take on Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis). Yesterday, Alexander won the Ocean Democratic convention in a landslide, but Salerno and Rush are both from Cape May County and could be more competitive there.
This story was updated at 1:48 p.m. with more information about Cohn’s candidacy in Mercer County.