Schnall flips 30th district Assembly seat blue, with massive support from Lakewood’s Orthodox community

In a tremendously unusual result, Democrat Avi Schnall has won an Assembly seat in the deep-red 30th legislative district, unseating incumbent Assemblyman Ned Thomson (R-Wall), the New Jersey Globe projects. Schnall’s victory is a massive win for Lakewood’s Orthodox Jewish community, which mounted a coordinated effort to elect Schnall to advocate for Lakewood’s interests as a member of the Assembly Democratic majority.

As of 12:05 a.m., Schnall has 27,562 votes, or 31% of the vote in a four-way race, while Thomson has 17,676 votes, or 19.8%. That’s a crushing defeat for Thomson, who has served in the Assembly since 2017.

Schnall, the former New Jersey director of Agudath Israel of America, is currently getting 45% of the vote out of Lakewood, while Thomson is getting just 7%. Thomson leads Schnall 34%-15% in the district’s Monmouth County towns like Howell and Wall, but high turnout in Lakewood meant that Schnall could overcome that margin.

Thomson’s two running mates, State Sen. Bob Singer (R-Lakewood) and Assemblyman Sean Kean (R-Wall), were both supported by Orthodox leadership and won easily.

Under normal circumstances, the 30th district wouldn’t be remotely competitive. It backed Republican Jack Ciattarelli by 28 points in the 2021 gubernatorial election, and hasn’t elected a single Democratic legislator since 1992, when the district first became based in Lakewood.

But Orthodox Jewish leaders saw an opportunity to defy those statistics and elect a member of the Democratic majority caucus. To do so, they had to supercharge turnout in Lakewood and get huge numbers of Orthodox voters to pull the lever for Schnall, a longtime Orthodox leader (with shallow connections to the Democratic Party).

They also needed to avoid provoking a backlash in Howell and Wall, two other 30th district towns that are quite Republican but have minimal Orthodox populations – and in fact were liable to be hostile to Schnall’s Orthodox-focused messaging.

And they did all that and more. Schnall is the first-ever Orthodox Jew from Lakewood to win a seat in the legislature; now the question is how he’ll vote in a Democratic caucus filled with progressive legislators with whom he likely disagrees on many key issues.

See all 2023 election results HERE.