Back in February, the New Jersey Globe laid out how Rabbi Avi Schnall, an Orthodox Jewish Democrat from Lakewood, could win an Assembly seat in the deep-red 30th legislative district. If Schnall could get near-unanimous support from Orthodox voters, supercharge Lakewood’s voter turnout, and keep his losses to a minimum in the rest of the 30th district, he just might be able to squeak by and narrowly win a seat.
Well, Schnall did more than just squeak by. On Tuesday night, Schnall unseated incumbent Assemblyman Ned Thomson (R-Wall) by an astounding 61%-39% two-way margin, establishing himself and his Lakewood community as electoral powerhouses. (Technically, Schnall won 31%-20% in a four-way race for two seats, but this story will focus largely on Schnall vs. Thomson.)
The results give Orthodox leaders exactly what they wanted: a voice to advocate for their interests within the Democratic majority in Trenton. And they represent the beginning of a potentially fascinating political career for the 39-year-old Schnall, the former New Jersey director of Agudath Israel of America.
Here’s how Schnall managed to pull off the most unusual New Jersey election result of the year.
Step 1: Win over Lakewood’s voters
The first step to Schnall’s victory in the 30th district was always going to be winning over rank-and-file voters in Lakewood, a rapidly growing township of around 140,000 people – most of them Orthodox Jews.
And win them over he did. With the universal support of Lakewood’s Orthodox leadership, including the hugely influential Vaad, Schnall – already a well-known figure in the community – won an astonishing 86% of the two-way vote in Lakewood, while Thomson managed just 14%.
While Orthodox leaders abandoned Thomson this year, they didn’t do the same for his two running mates, State Sen. Bob Singer (R-Lakewood) and Assemblyman Sean Kean (R-Wall). The result was an easy win for both Republican incumbents, with the popular Singer getting 92% of Lakewood’s vote.
In other words, in an era where split ticket voting is declining dramatically, the vast majority of voters in Lakewood went to the polls and voted for two Republicans and one Democrat. That, if nothing else, shows just how powerful endorsements from Orthodox leaders can be.
Step 2: Get sky-high turnout in Lakewood
Just winning Lakewood by a huge margin probably wasn’t going to be enough for Schnall to win, though. He also needed to get enough Lakewood voters out to the polls to overcome his losses in the rest of the district.
Lakewood makes up well over half of the 30th district’s population, but thanks to its mediocre voter turnout rate (and the huge proportion of the township under the age of 18), it typically makes up less than half of the district’s vote totals. In the 2021 gubernatorial election, Lakewood cast around 40% of the district’s votes, while the remaining 60% came from Monmouth County towns like Wall and Howell.
That’s an almost unheard-of increase; normally, voter turnout in an off-off-year like 2023 is significantly lower than it is in a gubernatorial election year.
And indeed, the rest of the 30th district experienced a sharp drop in turnout relative to 2021, which was true in most other parts of the state as well. Avon-by-the-Sea, Belmar, Farmingdale, Howell, Lake Como, and Wall cast a collective 41,477 Assembly votes this year, just 59% of the 70,137 Assembly votes they cast in 2021.
Thanks to the turnout disparity, Lakewood cast around 55% of the district’s votes to 45% from Monmouth – a reversal of the usual 30th district status quo. Schnall netted 18,017 votes out of Lakewood, well more than enough to overcome his 8,131-vote loss in Monmouth County.
If Orthodox leaders can continue to get thousands of extra voters out to the polls in future years like they did this year, Schnall will be extremely hard to unseat. (And it’s worth noting that even if the district’s relative turnout had been more like 2021, Schnall still would have won, just by a much smaller margin.)
Step 3: Keep losses to a minimum in Howell and Wall
Given the Schnall campaign’s wild success with steps 1 and 2, step 3 of the winning formula became basically irrelevant: garnering enough of the vote in Howell, Wall, and other Monmouth towns to avoid getting swamped.
In most races, those towns are Republican-leaning, but less so than dark-red Lakewood. But there was substantial reason to believe that voters there would be hesitant to support an Orthodox Jewish candidate like Schnall, and might vote even more Republican than they usually do; Lakewood’s transformation into an Orthodox Jewish hub has been a controversial subject in Ocean and Monmouth Counties for years, especially in towns like Howell that directly border Lakewood.
Thomson recognized that, and he warned voters not to back “Lakewood Rabbi Avi Schnall” – a fairly clear dog whistle.
Thomson’s messaging does seem to have broken through to some extent, particularly in Howell. Schnall lost the two-way vote in Howell 28%-72%, an 11-point swing to the right from the 2021 gubernatorial election. Wall swung 8 points to the right, and tiny Farmingdale swung 15 points.
Schnall also underperformed his Democratic running mate, Salvatore Frascino, throughout Monmouth County, getting 6,121 votes to Frascino’s 6,500. It’s not a huge difference, but there were evidently a few hundred Democratic voters who didn’t want to pull the lever for “Lakewood Rabbi Avi Schnall.”
Ultimately, though, Thomson’s modest overperformances in Monmouth weren’t nearly enough to overcome his catastrophic loss in Lakewood. Now that he’s an assemblyman-elect, Schnall will likely want to forge firmer connections with his new constituents in Wall and Howell – but he doesn’t need them to win.
Step 4: Now what?
With Schnall now set to join the legislature in two months, the question becomes: how will an Orthodox Democrat from Lakewood vote in the Assembly?
Schnall likely won’t agree with Democrats on everything, particularly social issues like abortion and LGBT rights. But the whole point of electing him in the first place was to give the Lakewood Orthodox community more sway in the legislature, so he’ll presumably want to work with Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-Woodbridge) when possible and be a team player on big issues like the state budget.
Schnall also has a good relationship with Gov. Phil Murphy that predates his time as a political candidate; Murphy told the New Jersey Globe yesterday that he looks forward to continuing that relationship now that Schnall is in the Assembly.
“[Schnall] is a good friend,” Murphy said. “He was a heck of a candidate. I’m not at all surprised that he won… He’ll be a great member of the Assembly and I’m really excited to work with him.”
Republicans are already sounding pessimistic about their chances of beating Schnall in future years. If Schnall could unseat an incumbent assemblyman by 22 points, it’s hard to see how he could ever lose unless the Lakewood voter turnout operation suffers a massive collapse.
In fact, Republicans are beginning to fret about their other 30th district seats. If Lakewood wanted to take out Kean in 2025, they probably could; Singer, meanwhile, is a former Lakewood mayor and has deep ties to the Orthodox community, but if he retires in 2027, there may be nothing Republicans can do to prevent Schnall from taking his seat.
Even just one Democratic assemblyman, though, gives Lakewood more prominence in state government than they’ve ever had before. This year was a massive demonstration of the Lakewood Orthodox community’s political power; now it’s time to find out how they’ll use it.