Nia Gill did extremely well in Montclair – but it wasn’t enough to win

As expected, State Sen./former Gov. Richard Codey (D-Roseland) won the Democratic primary on Tuesday for State Senate in the 27th legislative district, beating fellow State Sen. Nia Gill (D-Montclair) in an incumbent-on-incumbent showdown caused by redistricting.

What was less expected was how well Gill performed, despite the many factors working against her. Running off-the-line with little money or prominent backers, Gill managed to get 42% of the vote, losing to Codey by just over 15 points.

Most of that performance was thanks to one town: Montclair, Gill’s hometown and longtime political base. The famously liberal township of 41,000, which was moved from the 34th district into the 27th district on the state’s new map, favored Gill by a 69%-31% margin – a hugely impressive result given that Codey had full party support.

In addition to backing Gill by a huge margin, Montclair also had sky-high turnout, at least compared to other towns in the district and across the state. 25% of the town’s registered Democrats turned out to vote, while the average turnout in the rest of the district was just 13%; Montclair cast more than twice as many votes as Clifton, which has a population two times as big as Montclair’s.

Part of the reason for Gill’s great showing is that she’s represented Montclair since her arrival in the legislature in 1993, while Codey last represented it in 2001 (the two legislators were once running mates). Incumbency is not always a guarantee of anything, especially for a less prominent office like state legislator, but Montclair’s high-information voters evidently feel some loyalty to their pioneering, idiosyncratic senator.

Some of the credit also goes to progressive activists in Montclair who made a concerted push on Gill’s behalf. While Gill herself didn’t run much of a campaign, an orbit of affiliated activists very much did.

One other factor that contributed to Gill’s Montclair win was her performance among the town’s Black voters. Gill, one of six Black members of the State Senate, did incredibly well in Montclair’s 4th ward, historically the hub of its Black community, getting more than 80% of the vote in some majority-Black voting districts.

Besides Montclair, Gill’s second-best primary showing came in Clifton, which not coincidentally is the other town that she currently represents. Codey won Clifton 61%-39%; combined, Gill won the two towns in her old district by 20 points, 60%-40%.

The problem for Gill, though, was that she couldn’t come anywhere close to those numbers in the district’s four remaining towns, all of which are currently in Codey’s 27th district (and most of which have been represented by him for decades). Codey carried West Orange, Livingston, Millburn, and Roseland by a combined margin of 74%-26%; in Roseland, Codey’s hometown, he won by a ridiculous 86%-14%.

Codey managed that in spite of not running a particularly active campaign himself (though he got some late assistance from the Essex Democratic organization), and not spending very much of the money he has stockpiled. The 76-year-old senator still has more than $800,000 on-hand for whatever he may do next.

Gill’s success in Montclair, and her failure everywhere else in the 27th district, raises a lot of what-ifs. In hindsight, if she had raised more than the few thousands she did, or if she put up more of a campaign to complement the efforts from progressive groups on her behalf, the primary looks very winnable.

Chief among the missed opportunities is West Orange. In many ways, West Orange is like Montclair – a very liberal suburb with a high-information voter base and a sizable Black population. But Gill didn’t have any pre-existing connections there, nor did she make a serious effort to build new ones, essentially conceding the town to Codey.

(Of course, if Gill had taken the race more seriously, then Codey likely would have too – the eternal fallacy of political what-ifs.)

At the same time as Codey was winning by a modest margin, his two running mates, Assemblyman John McKeon (D-West Orange) and soon-to-be-Assemblywoman Alixon Collazos-Gill (no relation to Nia Gill), were both winning in blowouts. The party-backed Assembly candidates got a combined 76% of the vote against Gill’s running mate Eve Robinson and a fourth candidate, former Assemblyman Craig Stanley.

That means a large number of voters – particularly in Montclair, which McKeon and Collazos-Gill both carried – were willing to split their tickets for Gill while voting the party line elsewhere.

Regardless of the what-ifs, Codey was very much the winner on Tuesday, and he’ll get to serve (at least) another four years in the Senate. This January, he’ll start his 51st year in the New Jersey Legislature, a longer tenure than anyone else in history.

But after more than a year of observers like the New Jersey Globe predicting a devastating loss, Gill got to go out with a bang.