A brief electoral history of Bill Spadea

Most of the candidates running for governor in New Jersey this year have gone about their political lives in a very careful, ordered way. They’ve slowly built up connections in their local communities, won a seat in the state legislature or perhaps in Congress, and bided their time for the chance to run statewide.

Bill Spadea has a different theory of the case.

Over the course of his three decades in politics, Spadea has made numerous attempts at breaking into the mainstream: first as the chairman of the College Republicans in the 1990s, then as a U.S. House nominee in 2004, and finally as a State Assembly candidate in 2011. He’s been rejected each time, either by Republicans wary of his rhetoric or by voters themselves.

But even as traditional political power has eluded him, Spadea has proven remarkably effective at building a loyal grassroots base convinced, as he is, that New Jersey and the nation at-large are begging for truly conservative leadership. For the last decade, Spadea has taken that message to the airwaves via his drivetime radio show on New Jersey 101.5, putting his voice in New Jerseyans’ cars every weekday morning.

As he will acknowledge, it’s not a standard path to power, and he’s the only major candidate for governor on either side of the aisle who’s never held elected office before. But given his pro-Trump bona fides and his loyal radio audience, no one is doubting his seriousness as a candidate.

Some of his fellow Republicans – most notably Jack Ciattarelli, his chief rival for the GOP gubernatorial nomination – are convinced that a Spadea nomination would lead to a historic wipeout. Spadea insists that embracing a truly conservative message is the only way Republicans can win, a belief he’s held ever since his College Republican days. There’s only one way to find out for sure who’s right.

This is the seventh in a series of in-depth histories of New Jersey gubernatorial candidates. Previous profiles: Steve Fulop, Steve Sweeney, Jon Bramnick, Ras Baraka, Jack Ciattarelli, Ed Durr

The makings of a conservative

As is true of many politicians, the story of Bill Spadea begins with his father.

Dominick Spadea, an executive at a small manufacturing company, was a committed conservative who was politically active in his local GOP organization in Cherry Hill. In 1973, when Bill was four years old, Dominick challenged then-Camden County GOP Chair Harry Leiner for his county committee seat. (At the time, Cherry Hill elected just two county committeemembers, one man and one woman, who then appointed lower-level district leaders; Leiner wouldn’t have been able to remain GOP chairman if he wasn’t a member of the county committee.)

“We need a change in Cherry Hill,” Dominick told the Courier-Post. “The present leadership under Henry and [former Mayor] John Gilmour hasn’t done the job.”

Dominick lost that race, but it wasn’t his last time in the spotlight. A decade later, Dominick, who had become a firearms manufacturer, developed a new type of submachine pistol that was smaller than a machine gun but could still fire 30 rounds in just two seconds. The gun was officially considered an automatic weapon, and thus faced strict restrictions in the U.S. market; Dominick then tried to sell the guns to anti-Soviet Afghan rebels, but was thwarted by then-Senator Frank Lautenberg and the CIA.

A young Bill Spadea surely grew up hearing those stories: of how his father’s attempts to do good for his town and his country were blocked by intransigent Democrats and feckless Republicans. It’s not hard to see the throughlines of Dominick’s story in Bill’s political trajectory.

After graduating from Boston University and joining the Marine Corps Reserves in 1991, Spadea began a political career of his own, working as national youth director for President George H.W. Bush’s 1992 re-election campaign. That job was quickly followed by another: chairman of the College Republicans, a position to which Spadea was elected in 1993.

Almost immediately, Spadea worked to make the organization a politically potent – and very conservative – force within the Republican Party. In many ways, he was successful; one retrospective written by a later College Republicans chairman in 2002 credited Spadea with expanding registration efforts, communicating effectively to College Republicans nationwide via his Broadside magazine, and “assist[ing] the hundreds of youth efforts that changed the course of history by electing a Republican Congress for the first time over 40 years in 1994.”

But he also quickly ran into trouble. Early on in his tenure, a fundraising letter with Spadea’s signature on it called Senator Bob Kerrey (D-Nebraska)’s vote for Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget “treasonous” and dangled the prospect of hanging as a punishment; the message drew condemnation from Democrats and Spadea had to apologize to Kerrey.

More concerning for the GOP’s head honchos was Spadea’s alliance with Howard Phillips, a conservative activist who co-founded the U.S. Taxpayers Party as a more right-wing alternative to the Republican Party. Spadea and Phillips knew each other even before Spadea became the College Republicans chairman, and Phillips prophetically told Spadea in one letter to “keep in mind what I had to say about the New Jersey gubernatorial race” (likely referring to the 1993 election that was already well underway at that point).

In December 1994, Spadea at last went one step too far when he allowed Phillips to write an article for the Broadside promoting his right-wing third party and urging readers not to “waste your vote” on Republicans. Haley Barbour, the Republican National Committee chairman at the time, yanked all official Republican Party support for the College Republicans organization, evicting them from their offices and cutting off $120,000 in funding.

Spadea was characteristically defiant, telling the Washington Post in February 1995 that the scuffle was part of an “ideological war” for the soul of the Republican Party.

“How conservative is the Republican Party going to be?” Spadea said. “Haley Barbour wants the country to believe – and, first of all, wants Republicans to believe – that the battle does not exist: that pro-life and pro-choice can exist under the big tent. And while he’s doing that, he’s pushing the conservatives out of the party and promoting the liberals within the party.” (One such “liberal”: then-New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman.)

But it was the end of Spadea’s tenure atop the College Republicans – the only elected position he’s ever held. A month after the battle with Barbour, Spadea said he wouldn’t seek re-election; his quest to reshape the Republican Party would have to take a different path.

The dream of elected office

Upon bowing out of the College Republicans, Spadea took a step back from politics. He was honorably discharged from the Marines in 1999, and that same year he became a licensed real estate broker, a career that he would continue until he began working in the media more than a decade later. He and his wife Jodi settled down in Princeton and had a daughter and a son.

But the political bug never truly went away, and in 2004, Spadea decided he would leap back into the world of politics, this time as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives against Rep. Rush Holt Jr. (D-Hopewell).

Holt, who had unseated Rep. Mike Pappas (R-Rocky Hill) in 1998, represented the 12th congressional district, a sprawling, oddly drawn seat that spanned five counties and stretched from the Delaware River to the Navesink. With a strong incumbent in Holt, and with deep-blue towns like Trenton and Princeton within its borders, it was considered a Democratic-leaning seat; the Cook Political Report rated it as “Likely Democrat.”

That didn’t deter Spadea, who spent nearly a year traveling across the district introducing himself to voters. At one point, Spadea took a 22-day walk across the entire district, covering 200 miles and all 44 of the district’s towns, and he worked to energize an army of College Republicans like the ones he had led ten years earlier.

“I learned that young people have the energy, enthusiasm and confidence to go above and beyond what normal people might do,” Spadea said at the time. “The energy is unbelievable and people really notice.”

Notably, at least based on the scant coverage of the campaign that still exists today, Spadea strategically ran as less of an all-out right-winger. Democrats dismissed Spadea as “way out of touch” for the light-blue district, but in interviews, Spadea focused on bread-and-butter Republican issues like reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy and lowering taxes rather than on the culture-war battles he later went on to prioritize. According to the Daily Princetonian, Spadea’s chief causes were “homeland security, reimportation of pharmaceuticals from Canada and empowerment of small businesses.”

Any amount of moderation wasn’t nearly enough, though, against the popular Holt. The congressman won a fourth term 59% to 40%, a big overperformance compared to John Kerry’s approximately nine-point victory in the district; Spadea may have visited all 44 of the district’s towns, but he only won 13 of them.

(Spadea was one of three unsuccessful House nominees from 2004 to go on to have a noteworthy political career; now-Rep. Herb Conaway was the Democratic nominee against Rep. Jim Saxton in the 3rd district, and now-Democratic Assemblyman Dan Hutchison was the Republican nominee against Rep. Rob Andrews in the 1st district that same year.)

One of the great arts in politics, however, is losing well – and Spadea lost well. His congressional campaign had put him back on the radar of New Jersey Republicans, and many of them found they liked him. With one campaign – even a losing one – he had built out his personal brand and put himself back in the conversation.

In the years that followed, Spadea started re-engaging in the political scene that he had left behind in the 1990s. He became a member of local boards in Princeton like the zoning board and the Princeton Battlefield Society, and in 2008 he joined forces with businessman John Crowley to found the grassroots conservative organization Building the New Majority ahead of Crowley’s ultimately abandoned campaign for U.S. Senate. He also stumped for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign – his first connection to what would later become Trumpworld.

In 2011, Spadea decided to enter the political arena once again when just-re-elected 16th district Assemblyman Peter Biondi (R-Hillsborough) unexpectedly died of cancer two days after Election Day. A special GOP convention was quickly called to fill his seat, and Spadea – whose hometown of Princeton had recently been added to the Somerset County-based district – was one of several candidates to throw his hat into the ring.

Spadea still had some allies and relationships in the district from his time as a congressional candidate, but it was quickly clear that he would not be the establishment’s choice. That title went to Readington Township Committeewoman Donna Simon, who had the support of Biondi’s widow and of local Rep. Leonard Lance (R-Clinton), among many others; Spadea instead had to lean into the grassroots conservative message he had been honing for decades.

For a race decided by a few hundred party insiders, it wasn’t the right strategy. When the votes from county committeemembers were tallied on January 19, Simon won easily with 155 votes to Spadea’s 52 and also-ran contender John Saccenti’s 38. The outcome was very much an expected one, and Spadea said he had every intention of seeing the race through to a June primary – which would have put him on a collision course with not just Simon but also Jack Ciattarelli, the district’s other assemblymember at the time.

“Look, friends told me not to even bother [with competing at the convention] but I came to pay my respects and now it’s time to reach the people,” Spadea said. “I love primaries.”

Spadea had intentions to team up with other off-the-line conservative contenders for office that year, including U.S. Senate candidate Anna Little and 7th congressional district candidate David Larsen. But he ultimately bailed on those plans and dropped out of the race a month after the convention, saying that the financial barrier was too high for a “grassroots, conservative candidate” like him to win a primary.

Spadea had, at that point, tried to break into the GOP mainstream three times, and had been rebuffed in different ways each time. Perhaps it was time for a new strategy – something outside of the confines of elected politics.

“It was a realization that this was not about who has the right ideas,” Spadea said in a 2017 interview with Politico, reflecting on his Assembly convention loss. “It was that the backroom dealing that I saw first-hand where the county chairs cut deals with each other and say, ‘OK, it’s your turn. Who’s next in line for you?’ And that is very unsettling.”

The fight for the airwaves

After losing his second run for office, Spadea remained part of the political world, and he was intermittently included on shortlists for higher office like lieutenant governor in 2017 and U.S. Senate in 2018. But Spadea was by then focused on another avenue to success: the media.

Starting even before his Assembly campaign, Spadea had begun appearing as a regular TV guest for outlets like New Jersey Spotlight News and Fox News, providing commentary from a conservative perspective. In 2013, he turned that into a proper job, becoming the host – ringleader may be a better word – of Channel 9’s new program Chasing New Jersey, where Spadea sent reporters out into the field to record the news on their cell phones.

As with prior efforts Spadea had led, Chasing New Jersey immediately proved controversial, though the blame didn’t really lie with him. A number of prominent New Jersey politicians claimed that WWOR-TV was abandoning its mandate to report on local news and replacing it with a program styled more like TMZ; members of Congress like Senators Bob Menendez and Frank Lautenberg asked the Federal Communications Commission to review WWOR-TV’s license.

But whatever the politicians may have said, the show was a success. Before too long, Spadea was making forays into the world of radio, too, filling in as an on-air host on New Jersey 101.5, a “rabble-rousing” call-in station; by 2014, he had his own show, and in 2015, he was made the host of 101.5’s Morning Drive call-in programming, replacing Jim Gearhart. In just a few years, Spadea – who also remained the host of Chasing New Jersey through 2020 – had made himself into a media mogul.

As Spadea said in the 2017 Politico interview, the key to success on the radio was making his listeners and callers, who might feel alienated by traditional media and social media, feel like they were having a real conversation with him.

“With Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, it’s almost an overload of information out there. I actually think because of all the noise, that one-on-one conversation I’m able to have with that person listening to the radio,” he said. “I think there’s a greater power because you filter out all the distractions and the noise.”

For someone like Spadea, it was the perfect setup. Gone were the days when he had to suck up to Haley Barbour or try to win over New Jersey GOP insiders primarily interested in protecting their own. His radio show gave him the ability to broadcast his conservative views to an audience far bigger than ever before – and as long as his viewers kept loving it, no one was going to tell him to back down.

As chronicled by Politico’s Matt Friedman and others, that unfettered-ness hasn’t always reflected well on Spadea. In 2022, for instance, he strongly backed a congressional candidate named Ian Smith who turned out to be a habitual drunk driver and a Holocaust denier; he’s also gone to bat for Clark Mayor Sal Bonaccorso, who pleaded guilty today to official misconduct (and who has also made a series of racist rants), and for Red Sox player Jarren Duran, who had called a heckler a “fucking faggot.”

Spadea’s heresies go in the opposite direction, too, as his GOP gubernatorial opponents like to point out. “People give Trump a lot of credit for going after the deep state – the reality is he didn’t,” Spadea says in one clip highlighted by a super PAC supporting Jack Ciattarelli. “He failed. And I’ve said this over and over again. Forget about your position on Donald Trump now, but he failed.”

But after decades of trying to work within the political system, Spadea at last gets to say: who cares? He’s got a devoted following on the radio who hang onto every word he says about drag queen story hour or illegal immigration, and his higher-ups at 101.5 have no real interest in slowing his roll; the traditional media and establishment politicians, at last, have no real control over what he can say or do.

When Spadea announced his long-awaited campaign for governor last summer, he made it clear that gubernatorial candidate Bill Spadea will be the same guy as the one listeners have heard on the radio – and the one who got yanked out of the College Republicans three decades ago.

“The insider establishment powerbrokers, well, they don’t like me,” Spadea said in his announcement video. “Why? Because I’m an outsider they can’t control, and because I’m unapologetically conservative: pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, and pro-Trump.”

Spadea’s strategy has already paid some dividends. He’s raised more than $800,000 so far, enough to qualify for matching funds, and has the support of Ocean GOP Chairman George Gilmore, giving him a leg up in the single most important county in a Republican primary; an even bigger endorsement, from Donald Trump himself, could be in the works, though that’s far from a sure thing.

And rather incredibly, he also hasn’t been forced to give up his radio show, with 101.5 letting him stay on as a host and the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission declining to intervene. That means that, even as he actively campaigns for governor, Spadea’s voice still gets to blare in listeners’ cars on weekday mornings under the guise of news.

Now, with county convention season beginning and the GOP primary just five months away, Spadea will have to find out whether it’s enough.

Spadea’s brand of no-holds-barred conservatism has gotten him a statewide profile that’s the envy of his political enemies; it’s also, in the past, gotten him kicked out of the Republican establishment and rejected from political office. With no recent electoral track record to speak of, it’s impossible to say how voters this year will react to a candidate like that.

Back in 1995, Spadea recalled a conversation he had with Scott Reed, then the RNC’s executive director, during the dustup between the RNC and the College Republicans. Many things have changed in the last 30 years since then, but Spadea’s quote could have just as easily been said in 2025.

“I was told specifically, ‘You’re not a team player,’” Spadea said. “And I said, ‘Well, define team. What’s the team here?’ As far as I’m concerned, the team means the grass-roots activists and average blue-collar regular people… His response was something like, ‘You better shape up or we’re gonna come down on you.’ The threat was always there of pulling the plug. I told them I was willing to take that risk because I believed I was doing the right thing.”