Incumbent Republican Bernardsville Mayor Mary Jane Canose and Republican council candidates Kathleen Tober and Thomas Slocum appeared headed for an easy victory this November after no Democrats initially filed to run for mayor or for the two borough council seats up for election, including one they already held.
That changed when former Councilman Jeffrey Hammond won a write-in campaign for the Democratic mayoral nomination; Democratic incumbent Jeffrey Roos and Christopher Schenck mounted successful write-in campaigns for the two borough council seats.
Each candidate received more than 75 write-in votes — more than three times the 25 votes required to secure a Democratic nomination.
Hammond, the former medical director of the Level I Trauma Center at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, was elected councilman in 2018 but lost his re-election bid three years later.
Long regarded as one of Somerset County’s most competitive municipalities, Bernardsville was once a reliably Republican stronghold but has steadily trended Democratic alongside the county as a whole. Kamala Harris carried the borough by just under two percentage points in the 2024 presidential election, and Gov. Mikie Sherrill narrowly won Bernardsville in 2025, defeating Jack Ciattarelli by less than one percentage point.
Republicans, however, have continued to enjoy greater success at the local level.
Last year, Republican incumbents Rich Traynor and Charlie Szrom fended off a strong challenge from Democrats Daniel Woods and Robert Frawley, winning a combined 53% of the vote on the same ballot that saw Sherrill carry the borough. The outcome highlighted the continued resilience of Bernardsville Republicans even as the community has become more competitive in the second Trump era.
While Bernardsville is no longer the Republican bastion it once was—Tom Kean Jr., for example, carried the borough with 64% of the vote during his 2006 challenge to U.S. Senator Bob Menendez—it has not followed neighboring Somerset County communities such as Montgomery and Franklin, where Democratic gains at the top of the ticket have made municipal victories increasingly difficult for Republicans.
The borough’s political evolution has been evident for several years. In 2018, Mayor Kevin Sooy switched parties and sought re-election as a Democrat. That same year, his daughter, Sara Sooy, was elected to the Somerset County Board of Chosen Freeholders (now the Board of County Commissioners), becoming one of the first Democrats elected to the county governing body since 1979. Kevin Sooy ultimately withdrew from the mayoral race, and Republican Mary Jane Canose defeated Democratic Councilman Thomas O’Dea.
Despite the disadvantage of having to wage write-in campaigns simply to secure spots on the ballot, Democrats now have a full slate in a borough where elections are increasingly decided by narrow margins. The race will provide another test of whether Bernardsville’s local politics are beginning to mirror the closely contested federal and statewide elections that have defined the community in recent years.
An earlier version of this story misstated the results of the Bernardsville Democratic primary.