Bagolie defeats Stanley for Democratic Assembly nomination

Livingston Councilwoman Rosaura Bagolie defeated former Assemblyman Craig Stanley tonight to become the Democratic nominee for State Assembly in the 27th district.

She won 107-59, a 64%-36% margin.

She will seek to replace John McKeon (D-West Orange), an eleven-term Assemblyman who is instead running for the State Senate.

Bagolie, born in the Dominican Republic, will join Alixon Collazos-Gill, born in Colombia, on the Assembly slate in a safe Democratic district.  If they win, this will be the first time two Latinas will represent the same district in the New Jersey State Assembly.

“This is the true democratic process,” said Bagolie.  “I’m happy everyone got to place their vote, and stand up and vote on their ballots, and the Essex County party came out and decided who they wanted to be on the ballot in November, and there is no better democratic process than that.”

The 43-year-old Bagolie, known as Rosy, is the superintendent of the East Newark public school district and the principal of the East Newark School.  She emigrated to the United States at age eight and grew up in Elizabeth, eventually receiving her doctorate from Seton Hall University.

Bagolie would also become the legislature’s first Jewish Latina; her mother’s family were Dutch Jews who fled to the Dominican Republic via Curacao to escape the Nazis.

Livingston Democrats picked Bagolie to run for an open township council seat in 2022; she won the general election by nearly 2,400 votes.  Her election would pave the way for Ketan Bhuptani to be appointed the first Asian American councilman in January.

Stanley, 67, a former Irvington resident who now lives in West Orange, represented the Newark-based 28th legislative district between 1996 and 2008.  The nephew of the late Rep. Donald Payne Sr. (D-Newark), Stanley was first elected to the 28th district in 1995 after incumbent Assemblymen Harry McEnroe (D-South Orange) and James Zangari (D-Irvington) lost party support for re-election.

“A lot of the reporting was saying this was going to be the person — didn’t talk about the fact this is a convention,” Stanley said. “(I) wanted to show the process.”

In 2007, Stanley found himself kicked off the party line, one victim of a broader factional fight among Essex County Democrats. He continued his campaign anyway and nearly won, losing by 127 votes to now-Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker (D-Newark), who was one of the party-backed candidates; Ralph Caputo came in first.

Stanley ran again to regain his seat in 2009 but fell well short. He’s also run multiple campaigns for mayor of Irvington, where he lived until recently: one in 2002, which he lost, and another in 2018 that he abandoned before making it to the ballot.

The Assembly ticket initially included two incumbent assemblymen, McKeon and Thomas P. Giblin (D-Montclair).  Giblin had initially sought re-election to a tenth term but decided not to run again just before the filing deadline.  He was replaced on the organization line by Collazos-Gill, a former aide to Rep. Steven Rothman (D-Englewood) and a Democratic state committeewoman from Essex County.

McKeon and Collazos-Gill easily won a contested primary against former Montclair school board member Eve Robinson, who ran with Nia Gill, and Stanley.

The 27th district includes Livingston, Millburn, Montclair, Roseland, and West Orange in Essex County and Clifton in Passaic County.