Katz defeats Umba for 8th district Assembly seat

Democrat Andrea Katz has won election to the New Jersey State Assembly, defeating freshman Republican incumbent Brandon Umba (R-Medford) in the 8th legislative district.

Katz now leads Umba by 238 votes after picking up 409 votes in the counting of provisional ballots and late-arriving mail-in ballots in Burlington County today. Umba only picked up 220 new votes.

Umba’s running mate, Assemblyman Michael Torrissi, Jr. (R-Hammonton), was the top vote-getter and has won re-election to a second term.

Torrissi has 27,850 votes, followed by Katz at 27,588 and fellow Democrat Anthony Angelozzi at 27,389; Umba is in fourth with 27,350.

This is the sixth Assembly seat flipped by Democrats in the 2023 midterm elections.  They also added two seats each in the 3rd and 11th districts and one in the 30th.

Umba had led by enough votes on election night to cause Katz to concede the race, but additional vote-by-mail ballots counted on Thursday put her ahead by 27 votes.  Her lead grew to 49 votes after late-arriving VBMs and provisional ballots were counted yesterday in the Atlantic County portion of the district.

The New Jersey Globe and the Associated Press both called the race on Tuesday, but retracted that call after Katz narrowly pulled ahead of Umba on Thursday.

The Chesterfield Democratic municipal chair and a school board member, Katz becomes the first Democrat to win the Burlington County-based 8th district Assembly seat since 1973, when John Sweeney (D-Florence) won a single term in the Watergate Democratic wave election that year.

This story was updated at 3:28 p.m. after a small number of additional ballots were added to the tally.