A brief electoral history of Sean Spiller

If Sean Spiller is elected governor of New Jersey this year, it will be the culmination of two very different strands of the Democrat’s life and career.

One of those strands is Spiller the teacher: Spiller started out as a science teacher before beginning his climb up the hierarchy of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), New Jersey’s biggest teachers’ union and one of its most powerful unions, full stop. Spiller became the organization’s president in 2021 after eight years in executive board positions.

The other strand is Spiller the politician: a resident of Montclair, Spiller spent eight years as a councilman and four years as the town’s mayor, and the famously liberal and politically active bastion gave him a platform unmatched even by towns four times its size.

But as different as the two sides of Spiller’s professional life may be, they’ve always been deeply intertwined. Spiller, a progressive Democrat but not a radical, approached his elected offices in Montclair with the mentality of a teacher and a union leader – much to the chagrin of his local detractors – and the NJEA was heavily invested in his political rise, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to help him win his local races.

Now, Spiller and the NJEA are trying to make the leap to the state’s highest office, and they’re doing so in lockstep: the NJEA has pledged to spend tens of millions of dollars supporting Spiller, drawing criticism from Spiller’s opponents but undoubtedly establishing him as a force to be reckoned with.

Will that be enough to win a governor’s race despite having a far thinner electoral track record than most of opponents? Spiller says yes – and so does his union.

This is the eighth 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, Bill Spadea

Spiller the teacher

Sean Spiller’s first love wasn’t teaching, or union organizing, or politics. Instead, per a profile the NJEA published in 2021, it was hockey.

Born in 1975 in Jamaica to a New Zealander father and a Jamaican mother (herself a teacher), Spiller was raised in Montville and went to Rutgers, where he played on the college hockey team and became captain by his junior year. (He lived for a time in the college’s hockey house with future GOP strategists Mike DuHaime and Bill Stepien.) After graduating, Spiller tried to make it as a minor league hockey player, but it didn’t work out; he bounced around jobs, from research editor to Associated Press baseball reporter, before landing back at Rutgers for an education program.

From there, he took a teaching job in Kinnelon, a small borough in Morris County, and a few years later became a science teacher in Wayne. It was in those jobs that Spiller first became involved in union politics, though he said he didn’t necessarily think of himself as political at the time.

“Fred was super pro-union, and from Day One he was in my ear saying, ‘Go talk to the union rep – tell him this, show him that!’” Spiller said in the NJEA profile, referencing fellow teacher and eventual union leader Fred Vafaie. “He was a veteran teacher, so he knew the value of the association, and he knew how it could help as a resource, support structure, and much more… Of course, like most new teachers, I remember thinking, ‘I’m just trying to survive!’”

Spiller was won over by the idea of union organizing – so much so that in 2007, he was named president of the Wayne Education Association. He had also caught the eye of national union officials, and began making connections in both the Passaic County Education Association and the NJEA.

Spiller’s labor rise came at a politically challenging time for teachers’ unions in New Jersey. With the election of Chris Christie as governor in 2009 and Steve Sweeney as Senate President in 2010, the NJEA found that it had few allies in the top level of state government, forcing it to fight bitterly over teacher salaries and pension payments.

In 2013, in the midst of that troubled era, Spiller was elected as the NJEA’s secretary-treasurer, winning nearly 60% of the vote in an internal election. The position is the NJEA’s third-in-command, but it promised far greater power in Spiller’s future; NJEA leadership typically works on a consistent cycle, where those elected to be secretary-treasurer become vice president four years later and president four years after that.

By nature, union politics are internal affairs, meaning that there was little news coverage of Spiller’s rise through the union hierarchy or his contested 2013 win. But even though it happened behind closed doors, the outcome was a tremendously important one; an ordinary science teacher a decade earlier, the 38-year-old Spiller was on the path to becoming New Jersey’s most powerful teacher.

During his first four years in NJEA leadership, Spiller served under President Wendell Steinhauer, who continued to do battle with Christie and took the extraordinary step of funneling millions of dollars towards Sweeney’s Republican opponent for State Senate. (Spiller himself went down to South Jersey to campaign for Sweeney’s challenger, Fran Grenier; Sweeney won easily, and is now one of Spiller’s opponents for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination.) 

In 2017, Marie Blistan became president, Spiller moved into the vice presidency, and the pair forged an extremely tight bond with new governor Phil Murphy; the union had enthusiastically endorsed Murphy early on in his 2016 campaign, and Murphy repaid the favor by spending quite a bit of his political capital once in office to fund the state’s pension system. Blistan’s term also covered the first year of the Covid pandemic, when social distancing and remote learning created massive new challenges for the state’s teachers.

Finally, in 2021, the time arrived for Spiller to take his turn at the wheel. Spiller was unanimously elected NJEA president in May, and took office in September; he was the first Black man to serve in the position (one Black woman, Judi Owens, had held the role in the 1970s). In the NJEA profile published the day before he became president, Spiller framed his role as one that went far beyond simple union politics.

“Yes, we are advocating for our members’ health and safety, their working conditions and student learning conditions, but I think that even more broadly – when we’re seeing forces around the nation that are fighting to stop us from teaching the truth or forces that are trying to erode democracy – we have to hold the line,” Spiller said. “Public education is the defender of democracy, and we as a union have an oversized role to play, especially at this moment in time, to make sure that we’re here for our kids, our families, our neighbors and our nation.”

In keeping with his predecessors, Spiller made sure that the union remained extremely politically active, spending more than $15 million to re-elect Murphy over Republican Jack Ciattarelli, who is now running for governor again. But unlike them, Spiller also had a political career of his own to think about, one that had been steadily building steam for nearly a decade.

In 2013, shortly after he had become the NJEA’s secretary-treasurer, Spiller was on the shortlist to be State Sen. Barbara Buono (D-Metuchen)’s lieutenant gubernatorial running mate; Buono knew her campaign against Christie was struggling, and wanted a running mate who could energize voters of color and union members. Spiller was ultimately passed over for a different union leader, 1199 SEIU official Milly Silva, and the Buono-Silva ticket lost in a landslide.

Many years later, after Joe Biden was elected president, Spiller put himself in the mix for another higher office: U.S. Secretary of Education. When Biden’s cabinet was taking shape in late 2020, Spiller told the New Jersey congressional delegation that he was interested in becoming the nation’s top education official; it’s not clear how seriously the Biden team took the suggestion, but Spiller got the NJEA to gas him up, with the union telling media outlets that Spiller “would make a terrific Secretary of Education” if selected.

And even though neither of those efforts paid off, he had still accumulated quite a bit of political power back home in Montclair – which brings us to the other side of Sean Spiller.

Spiller the mayor

As of the 2010 Census, Montclair was the 60th-largest municipality in New Jersey, far smaller than the state’s biggest cities and smaller even than some obscure suburbs like Winslow or North Brunswick. But in the minds of the state’s political elite – many of whom live there – the extremely progressive, racially diverse town punches far above its weight. More than any other town of its size, the local political scene of Montclair has reverberations far beyond its boundaries.

Spiller, who had settled down in Montclair and is now raising his two young children there, decided to enter that political scene at a complex time. With the high-spending town weighed down by $250 million in debt, one-term Mayor Jerry Fried decided not to run again in 2012, as did a number of councilmembers; their exits created the conditions for a chaotic brawl for control of the township government, one that gave Spiller his first opportunity at political power.

The 2012 May nonpartisan mayoral race developed into a showdown between two allies-turned-rivals: Robert Jackson, a developer who had served as mayor in the 1980s, and Karen Turner, a local activist focused on reducing town spending. A piece in the New York Times cast the race in existential terms: would Montclair elect another liberal mayor like Jackson or fellow candidate Harvey Susswein, who were committed to the town’s progressive ideals, or would it opt for the more frugal Turner, whom one local activist said was akin to a “Tea Party” conservative?

Jackson, who was also widely seen as the Essex County Democratic Party’s preferred candidate, chose Spiller, then the Wayne Education Association president, as his running mate in the Third Ward to succeed retiring Councilman Nick Lewis. (Spiller’s union role was drew some blowback from Jackson’s opponents; one letter from a Susswein supporter said that “with a Wayne Teacher’s Union president on the slate, and three present and former incumbents, [Jackson] promises that we can develop our way to solvency by increasing revenues without needing to reduce spending or reduce the public payroll. It’s fairy dust.”)

Spiller’s Third Ward opponent was Chris Swenson, who had initially been floated as a Jackson running mate himself before defecting and joining Turner’s slate. The contours of the mayoral race gave Spiller a clear message to run on: protecting services, like libraries and preschools, that Turner’s slate threatened to upend.

“While we hear from some camps who support cut-at-any-cost policies, those I meet going door-to-door or attending events share the same desire I do: To see Montclair continue to be a place of great diversity with tremendous excitement, pride, and potential for future growth,” Spiller said in an op-ed published in Montclair Local.

It was a message that worked for Spiller and for Jackson’s slate as a whole. Spiller defeated Swenson by 133 votes, 45% to 37%, running up the score in the ward’s diverse and densely populated neighborhoods around Bloomfield Avenue; Jackson defeated Turner by a similar 42% to 35% margin in the Third Ward, indicating that the council results were downstream of the contentious (and racially divided) mayoral contest.

A year later, Spiller was elected NJEA secretary-treasurer, leading to the first major controversy during his time in Montclair politics. Spiller was also a member of the Montclair Board of School Estimate, and a group of local parents argued in a lawsuit that serving in both roles was a conflict of interest; after a prolonged legal fight, a judge ruled against Spiller in 2016, forcing him to step down from his board role.

But that didn’t prevent Spiller from easily winning a second term on the council that year. In sharp contrast to the 2012 elections, 2016 was a sleepy election year in Montclair, and in fact Spiller was the only incumbent that year to face any opponents at all; challenger Maureen Edelson argued that Montclair would be better served by smaller government and lower taxes, and Spiller walloped her 73% to 27%.

Publicly, Spiller kept his local politics separate from his union role, but by his 2016 campaign the two had clearly started to bleed into one another. A few days before he was re-elected, a blog post pointed out that a large portion of Spiller’s campaign donations and mailers came from the NJEA and affiliated groups like the Working Families Party. It’s not uncommon for unions to spend money electing their own members to office, but it was an early sign that the NJEA was willing to invest in Spiller’s political career.

As chronicled by the Sunlight Policy Center of New Jersey (SPCNJ), an advocacy group dedicated to fighting the NJEA, the group’s advocacy of Spiller was part of a broader trend. In a 2020 paper prophetically titled “Councilman Spiller, Mayor Spiller, Governor Spiller?”, the SPCNJ noted a substantial rise in NJEA members running for political office, which it attributed to a deliberate strategy by the union to grow its influence.

“We need NJEA members running for office at all levels of leadership,” said Ginger Schnitzer, the NJEA’s government relations director, per the SPCNJ’s report. “And who knows? An NJEA member sitting on a school board today, may one day become our governor.”

The NJEA’s investment in Spiller’s electoral career would only become more important as Spiller’s stature in Montclair grew. In early 2020, Jackson announced that he would retire after two terms as mayor; within days, both Spiller and Fourth Ward Councilmember Renee Baskerville had announced campaigns to succeed him.

The three-month campaign between Spiller and Baskerville wasn’t nearly as fraught as the 2012 race, in part because most of it was conducted virtually. The Covid pandemic forced Montclair (and the rest of the country) to retreat into remote forms of work and campaigning, and the town’s elections switched to all vote-by-mail.

The race’s biggest issue was one close to home for Spiller: education. At the time, Montclair’s mayor had an unusual degree of control over the town’s educational policies; they were automatically given a position on the Board of School Estimate, the board from which Spiller had been removed four years earlier, and had the power to appoint members of the local Board of Education, which in most towns is a separately elected body. 

Spiller, by then the NJEA vice president and soon to become its president, had a lot of experience in the field – and, his critics argued, many conflicts of interest. He said that he intended to appoint a designee to serve in his place on the Board of School Estimate, but as for appointments to the Board of Education, he insisted that his background in the NJEA was an asset, not a conflict.

“Montclair residents have voted overwhelmingly to maintain an appointed board,” Spiller said in a candidate questionnaire. “As a parent and educator, I believe in the value of public education and have a deep interest in giving our students what they need. So, who would be better for education than an educator?”

Spiller’s top critic was the SPCNJ, the anti-NJEA group, which sent out social media posts and op-eds decrying Spiller and arguing it would be a conflict of interest for him to be elected mayor. In the closing days of the campaign, InsiderNJ’s Fred Snowflack opined that it seemed like Spiller was running harder against SPCNJ than he was against Baskerville; “Don’t let right-wing outside groups sway our election,” Spiller said.

Spiller, who ran on a slate with many of his council colleagues, had the support of Jackson, the outgoing incumbent. He also got some serious assistance from his union; according to an analysis by the SPCNJ, the NJEA spent or directed as much as $230,000 to elect Spiller, dramatically more than Baskerville spent on her campaign.

In the end, it was just barely enough: Spiller defeated Baskerville by 195 votes, 50.7% to 48.9%, in an election that remained unresolved for days thanks to late-counted mail ballots. (Around 1,000 ballots were rejected for irregularities, an unusually high number that prompted Baskerville to file an unsuccessful challenge to the results.) Baskerville overwhelmingly won her old stomping grounds in the historically Black Fourth Ward, but Spiller carried the other three wards by just enough to win.

Spiller’s running mates won four out of six township council seats, giving the new mayor a working majority to start out his term. And when he was sworn in on July 1, his connections from the NJEA allowed him to pull a big-name guest to do the honors.

“You’re a dear friend, and it’s a real thrill and a real treat,” said Gov. Phil Murphy after administering the oath of office to Spiller. “Montclair is one of New Jersey’s true treasures – a vibrant community, a diverse community with active and committed residents, a strong small business sector, and a long history of progressive leadership… The task before you, my friend, is to ensure that legacy continues to thrive, and you are more than up to that task.”

Spiller the governor?

Spiller’s single four-year mayoral term that followed, which heavily overlapped with his presidency of the NJEA, was not always a smooth one.

Spiller was handed an early defeat in 2021, when campaign-season concerns about a conflict of interest on the Board of Education boiled over into a referendum changing the school board to an elected role. The referendum easily passed with 71% of the vote, depriving Spiller, who never took an official stance on the referendum, of a key power.

More damaging for Spiller was a long-simmering scandal stemming from a whistleblower lawsuit filed in 2022 by township CFO Padmaja Rao. In the suit, Rao alleged that Spiller and the Montclair town manager had retaliated against her for calling out improper benefits in town government; Spiller “commenced a retaliatory investigation against Rao in an attempt to create a derogatory record of her job performance and conduct,” Rao’s suit claimed. (The township ultimately settled with Rao for $1.25 million.)

And Spiller could never quite shake the impression among some of his local critics that he was more interested in his NJEA role than he was in governing his town. He didn’t exactly quell those feelings when, in 2022, he joined with the NJEA to launch Protecting Our Democracy, an issue advocacy organization that was widely understood to be testing the waters for a future gubernatorial run.

In March of last year, Spiller announced he wouldn’t seek re-election as mayor, clearing the way for his old rival Renee Baskerville to narrowly claim the office on her second try. And in June, he made official what had long been treated like an open secret: he was running for governor.

“Most people don’t expect a high school science teacher to run for governor, because working folks aren’t supposed to be able to get into positions where the decisions are being made,” Spiller said in his launch video. “This is our chance to make sure our voice is in the spaces where it needs to be. This is our chance to have the future we want.”

From the beginning, Spiller’s campaign had to confront the problem that outside of Montclair and his own union, almost no one in New Jersey knew who he was. But the NJEA, which quickly endorsed its own president, has a plan in place to solve that problem: use their enormous financial resources – resources that they’ve devoted in the past to, say, assisting Phil Murphy or badgering Chris Christie – on electing one of their own to the governor’s office.

In a campaign finance filing first caught by Politico NJ, Working for New Jersey, a PAC affiliated with the NJEA, said it intends to spend an eye-popping $35 million to help Spiller, four times as much as candidates themselves are allowed to spend under the state’s matching funds programs. Throughout the fall, New Jerseyans started receiving the PAC’s mailers promoting Spiller alongside 2024 candidates like Kamala Harris and Andy Kim – and according to the PAC’s internal polling, their efforts are working.

But even as his poll numbers grow, Spiller’s ideological place in the Democratic gubernatorial field remains unclear. Spiller spent his formative political years battling over parking spaces in Montclair and teacher salaries in Trenton, and he remains something of an enigma compared to some of his opponents, who have spent decades in the political trenches fighting for their versions of the Democratic Party. (The New Jersey Globe’s Democratic primary debate, coming on February 2, could shed some light on Spiller’s views.)

Spiller and the NJEA – in some ways it seems foolish to even distinguish between the two – have waited a long time for this moment. For Spiller, the governor’s office would be the capstone on a successful if complicated political career; for the NJEA, the project to get more union members into political office could have no greater success than electing the union’s own president as governor.

In an interview last year with Politico NJ, Spiller was asked how he justifies the NJEA’s promise to spend millions on his candidacy, given that the money is coming directly from teachers’ dues; Spiller said that his union is simply supporting a candidate who will fight for them.

“We’re a justice-centered union,” he said. “We’re focused on a number of issues, not just education. We’re focused on housing, we’re focused on good quality jobs. We’re focused on clean drinking water. And we’re not shy about pooling the resources of 200,000 members to say we’re gonna fight for that. That’s what being a union is all about, right?”