Umba will seek rematch with Katz in 2025

It looks like a rematch in the 8th legislative district, where Assemblyman Brandon Umba (R-Medford) has already announced that he’ll run again in 2025.

Umba, a freshman South Jersey lawmaker, told the Star-Ledger that he plans to take on Democrat Andrea Katz, a former Chesterfield school board member who unseated him in the 2023 midterm elections by 255 votes.

Not long after,  Anthony Angelozzi, who finished third in the four-way race for two Assembly seats – ahead of Umba – declared on social media that he would make a second bid for an Assembly seat.

“I will be back on the LD8 Democratic Assembly ticket with Andrea Katz for a rematch in 2025,” said Angelozzi, the president of the Hammonton Education Association.

Angelozzi, who received just 198 fewer votes than Katz and 440 less than re-elected Assemblyman Michael Torrissi (R-Hammonton), already has the backing of his home county Democrats.

“Anthony would certainly have my support and the Atlantic Dems endorsement,” said Michael Suleiman, the Atlantic County Democratic chairman.

As the incumbent who won by the narrowest margin in 2023, Torrissi is arguably the number one target for Democrats in 2025.

He is planning on seeking a third term.

“If the election were tomorrow, I’d be running again,” Torrissi told the New Jersey Globe.  “I have no plans to run for any other office, and I’m not leaving the Assembly anytime soon.”

He said he would better communicate his bipartisan bonafides over the next two years.

In this year’s election, Democrats spent money on TV ads linking Torrissi and Umba to the pro-life positions of a Republican state senator in another district, Ed Durr (R-Logan).  That came despite Torrissi’s vote to codify Roe v. Wade into state law and his support of the state budget.

“I’m more interested in my district than running for re-election,” Torrissi said.  “The Republican Party needs a new face, and I hope I’m part of that.”

Torrissi had tried to get on the 8th district slate in the past, but Burlington Republicans had eschewed an Atlantic County candidate.  There has been a realignment in that thinking since Hammonton appears to have saved a Senate and Assembly seat for the Republicans.

Umba had gone to bed on election night as a narrow winner, but vote-by-mail ballot tallies two days later put him behind by 27 votes; Katz’s margin grew when provisionals and late-arriving VBMs were counted.

State Sen.-elect Latham Tiver (R-Southampton) will not be on the ballot again until 2027.

Katz is the first Democrat to represent the 8th district in the legislature since John Sweeney (D-Florence) ousted freshman GOP incumbent Kenneth Wilkie (R-Florence) in the 1973 Watergate Democratic wave election.  Sweeney served one term before James Saxton unseated him in 1975; Saxton went on to serve in the State Senate and 24 years in the U.S. House of Representatives.