Candice Smith, a former two-term Hopatcong school board member, has emerged as a leading candidate to replace Jerry Scanlan as the Sussex County GOP chair, the New Jersey Globe has confirmed.
Scanlan announced this morning that he would not seek re-election after eight years as county chairman. He’s set the party’s reorganization meeting for June 21.
“With Chairman Scanlan’s recent retirement announcement, I believe we have an opportunity to build on his success and make our great Sussex County Republican Party even better,” Smith said.
More candidates could enter the race over the coming days.
An educator, author, and radio host, Smith was a Cub Scout and Girl Scout leader and covered the Indianapolis 500, the U.S. Grand Prix, and the NASCAR circuit as a media representative. She currently serves on the Sussex County Community College Board of Trustees. Her husband, Ryan Smith, is a Hopatcong councilman.
“For the last several years I have worked with the Republican Club in Hopatcong to raise monies for campaigns and scholarships for our seniors at our local high school,” said Smith. “My husband and I are active in supporting local Republican candidates by attending myriad fundraisers, making phone calls, knocking on doors, and putting up hundreds of signs twice a year religiously in support.”
In an email to county committee members, Smith outlined her plan: “holding countywide campaign schools that better equip candidates and party leaders to run effective campaigns and build stronger organizations; expanding the Sussex County GOP’s footprint on social media and leveraging emerging technologies to grow our party and promote our conservative principles; (and) reaching out to younger Republicans to encourage greater involvement in our party and promoting conservative principles at all levels of government in the county.”
Smith would become the third woman to serve as Sussex GOP chair if she wins, following Honey Ackerman and Ailish Hambel. Ackerman, the longtime county clerk, ousted 13-year incumbent Arthur Sears by ten votes, 86-76, in 1987 after promising to back open primaries. Hambel, a former Sparta mayor, was elected in 2009 after Richard Zeoli declined to seek re-election.
Among the challenges for Scanlan’s replacement could be the jettisoning of toxic Republican political consultant Bill Winkler and the healing of a spirited June 6 GOP primary election. Winkler has no support to continue, several GOP leaders told the New Jersey Globe.
There also appears to be a movement afoot to dump Kelly Ann Hart, the GOP vice chair and a Winkler ally.
In Sussex County, where Democrats have not won a countywide race since 1999, Republican voter turnout was at 24%, roughly twice the statewide number.
Sussex County Commissioner Dawn Fantasia and Chester Mayor Mike Inganamort carried Sussex County in the GOP Assembly primary, and Jack DeGroot, a 24-year-old farmer and graduate student, walloped two-term County Commissioner Herbert Yardley, a staunch Winkler ally, by a 53%-30% margin.
Fantasia is a lock to win the general election – Sussex County hasn’t sent a Democrat to the legislature since Robert Shelton won in the 1973 Watergate landslide – and the Sussex GOP county committee will need to meet in January to select a new county commissioner to serve the remaining year of her term.
It’s not clear if Smith will have a running mate, but there may no longer be a legal barrier for Hart or another woman to serve as vice chair.
A 1946 New Jersey statute prohibiting the chair and vice chair from being of opposite genders was stuck down by Superior Court Judge Harold B. Wells III in 1997.
“While it is apparent that the statute’s likely intent at the time of its passage was the remedial goal of assuring equal representation in top political party leadership of the two genders, that purpose has been largely subsumed by the pronouncements of both federal and state law striking down gender-based discrimination,” Wells wrote in his opinion.
The law, Wells said that while the law was initially enacted “to protect women, it can now be argued that it serves to bar them from at least 50% of the seats available for top leadership.”
“While at one time the law may have been viewed as salutary to equalize opportunity between the genders in the political forum and to encourage women’s involvement in politics, such a law now has an effect opposite to its original design,” Wells said.
Still, 26 years after Wells’ decision, the New Jersey Legislature has not changed the statute.
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