A closer look at more of last week’s legislative primaries

Every New Jersey primary tells a story.

Sometimes, that story is not a very interesting one – the heavily favored candidate wins by a lot and everyone goes home. But in more competitive contests, primary results reveal all sorts of interesting divides: why that town voted differently from its neighbor, or how ballot design created divergent results between counties.

Last week, the New Jersey Globe took a closer look at the primary results in the 27th district, where State Sen./former Gov. Richard Codey (D-Roseland) beat fellow State Sen. Nia Gill (D-Montclair), and the 3rd district, where State Sen. Ed Durr (R-Logan) easily overcame a challenge from Assemblywoman Beth Sawyer (R-Woolwich).

Now, here’s a deep dive into four other intriguing primaries: the Republican contests in the 4th, 24th, and 26th districts, and the Democratic race in the 28th district.

LD4 Republican

Heading into Election Day, the 4th district Senate contest between Gloucester County Commissioner Nick DeSilvio (R-Franklin) and former Washington Township Councilman Chris Del Borrello looked like one of the most competitive primaries in the state. Both sides had at least one county line, lots of money, and a compelling message for why voters in the swingy district should support them.

But in the end, it wasn’t close. Del Borrello swept DeSilvio aside by a 61%-38% margin, and his two Assembly running mates, Matt Walker and Amanda Esposito, won easily as well.

Key to their victory was Gloucester County, which made up the majority of all 4th district votes cast last Tuesday and which backed Del Borrello 60%-40%. DeSilvio had the Gloucester GOP organizational line, but he didn’t necessarily look like he did; Del Borrello had a full slate of running mates and got prime positioning on the ballot itself, so the contest essentially looked like an open primary.

Voters in Franklin Township, where DeSilvio was once a school board member, weren’t fooled, backing their hometown man by a 66%-34% margin. They fought a lonely fight, though, as Del Borrello won the district’s three other Gloucester towns, including a massive 70%-29% win in Washington Township, where he previously served on the township council (and where his brother still does).

In Camden County, where Del Borrello did have the line, he achieved a similar result, winning the county 60%-40%. DeSilvio fought his way to a tie in Chesilhurst, but since it only cast 38 votes total, it didn’t have much impact.

But it was Atlantic County, making up around 7% of the electorate, that truly showed its love for Del Borrello, supporting him 82%-18%. That’s perhaps not surprising, given that it was Atlantic Republicans who first recruited Del Borrello to run at all; Walker, Del Borrello’s running mate, was also the only Atlantic politician on either slate.

One further quirk in Atlantic County was that John Keating, an Assembly candidate unaffiliated with either slate, came in third place, ahead of DeSilvio’s running mates Denise Gonzalez and Michael Clark. That result may seem weird – until you remember that DeSilvio failed to properly bracket his slate in Atlantic County and the county clerk chose to list Keating in his column, making it look like Keating was DeSilvio’s running mate.

LD24 Republican

Thanks to a barrage of outside spending, the 4th district may have hosted the most expensive primary contest in the state, but it was the race for two open Assembly seats in the far northern 24th district that actually ended up being the closest.

Sussex County Commissioner Dawn Fantasia (R-Franklin), not unexpectedly, came in first place with 27% of the vote in the five-way race; her running mate, Chester Township Mayor Mike Inganamort, got second with 25%. Their main opponents, Lafayette Board of Education President Josh Aikens and Warren County Commissioner Jason Sarnoski (R-Independence), got 22% and 21%, respectively, while minor candidate Rob Kovic got 5%.

The geographic breakdown of the results essentially matches what was expected.

In Morris County, Fantasia and Inganamort had the line, and the pair won every municipality in the county, some by a huge margin. Inganamort in particular did very well, as befits the race’s one Morris politician.

The inverse was true in the district’s two small Warren County towns, where Aikens and Sarnoski had county GOP support. Sarnoski, the lone Warren politician in the race, easily carried the county and lifted Aikens up along with him.

But it was Sussex County, which doesn’t have a county line at all, that proved decisive. Fantasia, who has won the entire county multiple times as a county commissioner, came in a clear first place; Ingamanort came in second, and since Sussex cast the lion’s share of votes, that clinched his districtwide victory.

Aikens, the executive director of the Sussex County Republican organization, did win some Sussex towns, including a big win in his home of Lafayette. But with Fantasia and Assemblyman Parker Space (R-Wantage), the district’s uncontested Senate candidate, pushing hard for Inganamort, Aikens’ hometown support evidently was not enough to win.

LD26 Republican

Just a year ago, Morris County Commissioner Tom Mastrangelo (R-Montville) won renomination as county commissioner off-the-line, proving that he had broad support among Morris County GOP voters even when the county party wanted him gone. After last week’s primary results, he and his backers are likely asking themselves: where the hell did all that support go?

Mastrangelo’s off-the-line challenge to 26th district State Sen. Joe Pennacchio (R-Montville) this year had looked formidable, with internal polls from Pennacchio’s campaign showing a tough race. Yet Pennacchio ended up prevailing by a breezy 60%-40% margin, easily winning both of the district’s counties and carrying all but two towns, Riverdale and Wanaque.

Among the towns Pennacchio won was Parsippany, where Mayor James Barberio campaigned in support of Mastrangelo and his slate. Mastrangelo had counted on Parsippany, the largest town in the district by far, to come out big for him like it did in the 2022 commissioner primary – but instead it supported Pennacchio by 11 points.

Towns where the local GOP organization was strongly fully behind Pennacchio, meanwhile, gave him huge margins. Pennacchio won Morris Plains by 52 points and Ringwood by 55; in Montville, the hometown of both candidates, he crushed Mastrangelo 66%-34%. 

Despite his brutal loss, Mastrangelo still did better than his two affiliated Assembly candidates, former Assemblywoman BettyLou DeCroce (R-Parsippany) and former Parsippany Councilman Robert Peluso, whose challenge to Assemblymen Brian Bergen (R-Denville) and Jay Webber (R-Morris Plains) fell very flat.

Even though neither currently represents more than half of the new district, Bergen and Webber got a collective 65% of the vote. DeCroce and Peluso couldn’t even win Riverdale or Wanaque, the two towns Mastrangelo carried, and got crushed by more than 20 points in their shared hometown of Parsippany.

A DeCroce has been on the ballot in Morris County every two or three years since 1983, starting with BettyLou’s late husband Alex, who was a freeholder and then an assemblyman. But with BettyLou’s renomination loss in 2021 and her subsequent drubbing this year, the DeCroce brand may at last have come to an end.

Perhaps more than anything else, the 26th district results should reassure Morris Republicans that their county organization can in fact deliver wins. In both 2021 and 2022, the Morris GOP line either broke or came close to breaking; this time, it showed just how strong it can be.

LD28 Democratic

A couple districts over from the 26th district, another local elected official decided he’d take on his county party.

When an Assembly seat in the Newark-based 28th district opened up earlier this year, former Maplewood Mayor Frank McGehee wanted to be considered by Essex Democrats for the job. But party leaders had other ideas, and instead put Essex Deputy County Clerk Garnet Hall, also a Maplewood native, on the ticket alongside incumbent Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker (D-Newark).

McGehee forged ahead anyways with a longshot off-the-line campaign. He didn’t win, or even come particularly close – Hall and Tucker won 41%-40%-19% – but he did expose the major divides lying beneath the surface of the 28th district.

In Newark, Irvington, and Hillside, McGehee barely registered at all, getting less than 5% of the vote in the three municipalities. Time and time again, the Essex Democratic organization has proven its strength in the county’s urban areas, getting huge margins (if not huge turnout) for its preferred candidates.

Yet despite his poor performance elsewhere, McGehee actually won Maplewood and South Orange, getting 42% of the vote in the two towns combined; Hall was in second with 33%, and Tucker in last with 25%. 

The two towns also had supercharged turnout, with Maplewood casting more votes than Irvington despite Irvington having more than twice as many residents. Even with high turnout, though, Maplewood and South Orange only accounted for 38% of the district’s overall vote, allowing McGehee to get overwhelmed by the other towns.

The differences between the two halves of the district aren’t hard to parse. Irvington and the 28th district’s portion of Newark are overwhelmingly Black and working-class, while Maplewood and South Orange are majority-white well-to-do suburbs (though both do have substantial Black populations).

There isn’t actually much political distance between McGehee, Hall, and Tucker, all of whom are Black and all of whom espouse mainstream Democratic policy positions. But McGehee’s candidacy still turned the race into a geographic slugfest – one that his two favored suburbs were likely always destined to lose.