Gov. Phil Murphy will call a July special primary election and a September special general election to fill the seat of the late Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark), meaning that the residents of the solidly Democratic 10th congressional district will not have to wait until November to regain representation in the House.
Murphy’s writ of special election, which will be issued later today, orders as fast of a schedule as New Jersey election law allows: a special primary election on Tuesday, July 16 and a special general election on Wednesday, September 18, with the new member presumably taking office sometime shortly thereafter.
Notably, that means that the filing deadline for the special primary will be at 4 p.m. on May 10 – just a week from today. Any Democratic candidate interested in running for Payne’s seat, then, will have only a brief window of time to launch their bids before the nominating petitions are due and the campaign officially begins.
Payne, a widely liked figure in state politics, died on April 24 after suffering a heart attack; he had suffered from health issues for years leading up to his death. He was first elected to his Newark-based seat in 2012 after the death of his father, Rep. Donald Payne Sr. (D-Newark), New Jersey’s first-ever Black member of Congress.
But while Murphy is calling a special election for the remainder of Payne’s current term, the filing deadline for the regular 2024 election has already passed – and Payne is unopposed in the 10th district Democratic primary. Once Payne wins posthumously, Democratic committee members in the 10th district’s portions of Essex, Union, and Hudson Counties will meet to select a new nominee to replace him on the November ballot.
The consensus, at least from Essex County, appears to be that the 10th district’s next member of Congress should be a Black Democrat from Newark, the state’s largest city. The district is the only Black-majority district in the state, and has been held by a Black representative since Payne Sr. first took office in 1989.
In the week following Payne’s death, the list of leading potential Essex candidates has narrowed to Newark City Council President LaMonica McIver, Newark South Ward City Councilman Patrick Council, Essex County Surrogate Alturrick Kenney, Assemblywoman Shanique Speight, and Essex County Commissioner A’Dorian Murray-Thomas, all of whom are from Newark. Also potentially in the mix is Rev. Ronald Slaughter, the pastor of the St. James AME Church and the vice chairman of the New Jersey State Parole Board; Slaughter lives in West Orange, but his church is in Newark.
(Kenney faces at least one significant obstacle: as a judge of the surrogate court, he would need to resign his current office immediately upon his decision to enter the race and circulate nominating petitions. That would trigger an election for surrogate in November, with both parties meeting to pick their nominees for a five-year term.)
It’s still unclear if any candidate will emerge from Hudson or Union Counties. Union is likely to support an Essex pick, unless State Sen. Joseph Cryan (D-Union) wants to run, but Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop has not said if Hudson County will make a play for Payne’s seat.
In the 2022 primary, Essex made up 54% of the Democratic primary vote in the 10th district, with 33% in Union and 13% in Hudson. Essex has 53% of the county committee seats.
The special election, in which party leaders don’t have the same ability to pick and choose nominees, could make things more chaotic. It’s entirely possible that 10th district voters will nominate someone other than the party leadership’s choice; if that happens, the special election nominee would end up serving in Congress for a few months, and would then be succeeded by the regular election nominee in January.
Democrats are not expected to hold their special meeting to fill Payne’s spot on the November ballot for a two-year term until after the July 16 special primary election; in other words, the special primary nominee will already be known by the time the full-term nominee is chosen. County committee members are not obligated, however, to award the full-term nomination to the special primary winner.
The New Jersey Globe has confirmed that party leaders do not intend on choosing a caretaker nominee to fill the few remaining months of Payne’s term. They’d prefer that their eventual candidate for the two-year term get a jump on House seniority in advance of what will likely be a large freshman class; 46 incumbents around the country are not seeking re-election this year, and one has already lost a primary.
On the GOP side, Carmen Bucco is unopposed for the Republican nomination for a full term, and would likely start out as the frontrunner in a special primary as well. But Donald Trump only got 18% of the vote in the 10th district in 2020, so whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee will essentially become a representative-elect.
The filing deadline for independent candidates for the full term is June 4, and the filing deadline for independents to run in the September 18 special election is July 16.
The election calendar for the special will now move at warp speed: a ballot draw could come as early as May 17, after the list of primary candidates is certified. County clerks would need to commence mailing vote-by-mail ballots for the July 16 primary on June 1, and early primary voting would be held on July 12, 13 and 14. While the general election in a deep-blue district is anti-climatic, there will still be a nine-day early voting period in advance of September 18.
The deadline to change parties to vote in the July 16 special primary will be on May 22, and the voter registration deadline for the special general will be on June 24.
As long as Payne’s seat remains vacant, Democrats in the House will be down by one vote, which could be critically important in a chamber that Republicans only control by a few votes overall. That created an impetus for Murphy to call a special election even though the winner won’t be sworn in until the fall, when Payne’s term would have been almost over anyways. The New Jersey Globe has confirmed that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had requested that Murphy fill Payne’s seat as quickly as possible.
This will be the first free-standing special election for Congress in New Jersey since February 6, 1950, when William Widnall (R-Ridgewood) was elected to the 7th congressional district after Rep. J. Parnell Thomas (R-Allendale) was convicted on corruption charges.
Click HERE to download the nominating petition for the July 16 special election ballot.