How it went the last time Bob Menendez faced Democratic primary voters

Senator Bob Menendez had every conceivable advantage going into his 2018 Democratic Senate primary. He had twelve years of incumbency, unified Democratic support everywhere in the state, and a basically clean legal bill of health after federal charges against him were dropped following a mistrial.

Then Election Day came, and Menendez received only 62% of the vote. Nearly 160,000 votes went to his opponent, a total unknown named Lisa McCormick.

In the wake of new federal bribery charges brought against Menendez last week, the story of that odd, obscure primary has resurfaced. Despite widespread calls for his resignation, Menendez seems to be intent on running for re-election next year, which of course prompts the question: if he did so poorly even with universal party backing last time around, how could he possibly win next year?

At the time of the 2018 primary, Menendez had just officially beaten back the first federal case against him. 

In 2015, federal prosecutors charged the senator with trading influence on Capitol Hill in exchange for political donations and lavish vacations from wealthy Florida ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen. Echoing the new charges brought against him last week, Menendez was accused of using his official Senate position to aid Melgen, including trying to change Medicare reimbursement policies to Melgen’s benefit and helping Melgen’s girlfriends obtain travel visas.

But the case against Menendez turned out to be a relatively weak one. Jurors, most of whom favored acquittal, deadlocked in November 2017 and caused a mistrial; two months later, in January 2018, prosecutors dropped the charges and let Menendez walk away scot-free.

That allowed New Jersey Democrats – who had largely stuck by Menendez throughout his trial, with Senator Cory Booker appearing as a character witness – to unabashedly back the senator as he sought re-election. No prominent Democrat would want to run in a primary with no prospect of party support and with a vindictive Menendez promising retribution against those who crossed him.

“To those who were digging my political grave so they could jump into my seat, I know who you are and I won’t forget you,” Menendez said immediately after jurors failed to convict him.

The Democratic challengers who did throw their hat in the ring were not especially threatening. They included Michael Starr Hopkins, a public defender with a background working on national campaigns; Nestle executive Mitchell Horn, who was a Democratic candidate for Morris County Freeholder in 2016; and McCormick, a gadfly Rahway activist and the longtime partner of controversial Democratic operative James Devine.

But in what was perhaps a tactical error, Menendez’s team worked behind the scenes to whittle down that field. Hopkins dropped out of the race in March 2018, saying that he wasn’t able to fundraise enough for a statewide campaign (and implying he’d support Menendez), while Horn simply didn’t file his candidacy with the Secretary of State after getting shellacked at Democratic county conventions.

That left only McCormick, who had previously run for Rahway mayor and Union County Clerk and had failed to get onto the ballot for a gubernatorial campaign in 2017.

If Menendez had wanted to, he could have easily spent some money on a robust field operation and ads blasting McCormick, who had no real campaign to speak of and would have struggled to defend herself. (To this day, McCormick has not filed fundraising reports with the Federal Elections Commission, so it’s anyone’s guess how much money she raised.)

But Menendez made the calculated decision to completely ignore McCormick and pretend there was no primary election at all. The underfunded and idiosyncratic McCormick didn’t pose enough of a threat, Menendez figured, to bother dipping into his campaign warchest, which had been depleted by his legal battles and would need to be built back up for the fight against wealthy Republican challenger Bob Hugin.

Menendez’s campaign knew that their decision might cost the senator a few points in the primary, but figured that was a reasonable price to pay. What they didn’t know is just how strong the anti-Menendez vote would turn out to be.

On Election Day, McCormick got a shocking number of votes from all across the state, including in some places hardly known for being hotbeds of anti-establishment sentiments. In the end, she won 37.7% of the statewide vote – 158,998 votes – and six counties.

The most McCormick-friendly parts of the state tended to be more conservative areas with a less robust local Democratic organization. Hunterdon, Sussex, and Warren Counties, all heavily white, rural counties in the state’s northwest, were the three counties where McCormick did best. In some small towns, McCormick got upwards of 70% of the vote.

McCormick also did surprisingly well in South Jersey, where the local Democratic organization is typically able to provide big margins for its endorsed candidates. She won Cape May and Salem Counties, the latter of which is one of two counties in the state that has no county line (Sussex is the other); came within 17 votes of carrying Gloucester County, a big source of votes; and managed to win some inner Camden suburbs like Collingswood and Haddon Heights.

Even in parts of the state where Menendez was dominant, McCormick managed to sneak in with some surprisingly good results. Menendez easily carried Union County, for example, but nearly lost the well-to-do suburbs of Westfield and Summit; McCormick also got more than 36% of the vote in Hoboken, a town in Menendez’s home base of Hudson County.

All of this, to be clear, was accomplished by a candidate with zero name recognition and no visible campaign apparatus. The voters of New Jersey, who usually vote along the party line even when there is a viable challenger, gave nearly two-fifths of the vote to a woman most of them had never heard of.

Menendez’s best areas, meanwhile, were concentrated in the state’s urban cores, especially those with large Black and Latino populations.

The senator’s single best municipality (besides tiny Teterboro and Pine Valley, which cast three votes each) was Union City, the overwhelmingly Hispanic town where Menendez himself had grown up; with Union City Mayor Brian Stack fully engaged, the city voted for Menendez 91%-9%. Also among the most Menendez-friendly towns were Newark, Trenton, Camden, Paterson, and Elizabeth.

Menendez generally did well across North Jersey, even in whiter and more suburban towns. Most towns in Bergen County, for example, voted for him by 30 points or more, and stereotypically progressive Essex County towns like Montlcair and Maplewood also overwhelmingly supported him.

Those areas, combined with Menendez’s passable showing in most of Central Jersey and along the Shore, were enough to give the senator a fairly comfortable win. After all, a huge percentage of New Jersey’s Democratic primary voters are concentrated in urbanized North Jersey, whereas McCormick’s best areas were sparsely populated and had more Republicans than Democrats.

But news outlets hardly treated Menendez’s win as a convincing mandate. Bloomberg blared that “Menendez’s grip on Senate seat loosens after punishing New Jersey primary”; the Bergen Record applauded McCormick for putting up a “surprising fight”; and the Star-Ledger simply asked, “What the hell happened to Bob Menendez in Tuesday’s primary?”

Pollsters sometimes pit politicians against an unnamed generic opponent or “someone else,” to see what the appetite is for ousting an incumbent or flipping a seat. Such polls sometimes overestimate how well a challenger would actually do, since real candidates have baggage and drawbacks that idealized generic opponents do not.

In analyzing the 2018 Senate primary, it’s best to look at McCormick as a generic opponent. She was not a known quantity herself, but a huge number of Democratic voters wanted to vote for someone other than Bob Menendez, and she was the option presented to them. It probably didn’t hurt, either, that she was a female candidate in a year when Democrats were electing women to office up and down the ballot.

(McCormick has since revealed herself to be a problematic character, running an underhanded campaign against Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) in 2020 that included fake websites and spoofed emails, and submitting huge numbers of fraudulent petitions for a 2021 gubernatorial run. Those false petitions led to ongoing charges against Devine, McCormick’s partner and campaign manager.)

Menendez won’t have generic opponents in 2024. One established challenger, Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown), has already entered the race, and others – First Lady Tammy Murphy and several other members of Congress among them – could join the field as well. If Menendez does run for re-election, he will have real people to run against and attack.

But the appetite to oust Menendez will also be far higher. According to polling released yesterday, news of the new federal charges has already reached a remarkable number of New Jerseyans, and the senator’s favorability ratings are at an abysmal 8%-74%, with the vast majority of even Democratic voters viewing him unfavorably.

He’s highly unlikely to have county parties on his side, either. It’s clear that Menendez’s 2018 strength in parts of Essex and Bergen Counties, among others, came from being on the slate of a powerful county organization – but 14 county party chairs this time have already called on him to resign.

In other words, the 2018 primary points towards a rather obvious conclusion: Menendez is probably screwed. Even when he didn’t have criminal charges officially hanging over his head, lots of New Jersey voters wanted him gone, and last week’s indictment will only exacerbate their desire for a new United States Senator.

Unfortunately for Lisa McCormick, that new senator won’t be her. But her legacy will be as the candidate who proved that Bob Menendez wasn’t so untouchable after all.