Mapping the 2025 Hudson County war

Democrats in Hudson County are, to put it mildly, a fractious bunch. Not an election goes by where the local county Democratic organization isn’t consumed by infighting over a congressional seat, or a mayoralty, or a county government job, although that infighting doesn’t always reach voters themselves.

But even given that history, this year’s political war in Hudson County was something else. County Democrats were bitterly divided not only over the race for governor, which pitted party-backed Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair) over hometown favorite Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, but also over seismic primary contests for the county sheriff’s office and all three of the county’s legislative districts.

The result was a fairly convincing victory for the county Democratic organization, or at least the dominant wing of it led by Democratic Chair/County Executive Craig Guy and State Sen./Union City Mayor Brian Stack. Sherrill managed to beat Fulop in his home county – Fulop barely even carried Jersey City over Newark Mayor Ras Baraka – and county party-backed candidates won four out of six State Assembly races (after spending millions of dollars to do so) and unseated the incumbent county sheriff.

The results in the 32nd legislative district, though, should give those same leaders some pause. Two insurgent candidates unaffiliated with any machine won the district’s two seats in downtown Jersey City and Hoboken, with the county party slate coming in last place; as Hudson County gears up for local elections in Jersey City and Hoboken this fall and county commissioner races next year, the party’s hold on the urban center of the county seems to be slipping.

Looming over every result is the fact that primary ballots, warped in favor of party-backed candidates for decades thanks to the county line, featured a far fairer office-block design this year, putting candidates on equal footing regardless of their party backing. In this new post-line era, political machines can still do what they need to do to win, but it’s no longer quite such a fait accompli.

Here’s what Hudson County’s 2025 Democratic primaries for governor, Assembly, and sheriff look like when mapped out.

Governor

The Hudson Democratic machine was ultimately all-in for Mikie Sherrill this year, but they took a rather circuitous path to get there.

Two years ago, when Fulop announced his campaign, a huge cohort of local Democrats, among them then-Hudson Democratic Chair Anthony Vainieri, endorsed his campaign. But many of those relationships soon soured, and when Vainieri was replaced as chairman by Guy in 2024, it no longer looked like Fulop would get the party endorsement, though he did retain the support of some party bosses like North Bergen Mayor Nicholas Sacco.

Instead, Guy, Stack, and their ilk decided they’d rather support Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly), part of a then-burgeoning alliance between the Hudson and Bergen Democratic organizations. But that, too, fell apart, and after Gottheimer and Sherrill both officially entered the race last November, Hudson Democrats announced that Sherrill would be their true standard-bearer.

When Election Day rolled around and Sherrill carried the county 34%-29% over Fulop, part of her convincing statewide win, the effect of that party endorsement in some parts of the county was visible from space. In Stack’s home turf of Union City, Sherrill won a staggering 68% of the vote, and the 7,456 Union City votes Stack delivered for Sherrill represented nearly one-third of all votes she won in Hudson County. She also won towns like West New York, Weehawken, and Secaucus that are increasingly part of Stack’s wider orbit.

But some credit also belongs to Sherrill’s own campaign, which proved itself capable of getting votes even in places far from her campaign’s home base. Hoboken, for example, is not full of voters keen to toe the party line, but its highly educated voters still backed Sherrill over Fulop 35%-33%.

Fulop, meanwhile, pulled off wins in four towns – Jersey City, North Bergen, Bayonne, and Harrison – but his margins were not especially impressive.

In Jersey City, Fulop was hobbled by the fact that Black voters, who had generally supported him during his mayoral campaigns, flocked en masse to Baraka instead. Fulop retained just enough support from downtown progressives and diverse voters in The Heights to win his home city, but not by much; Baraka held him to a 36%-34% margin – 576 votes – with Sherrill in third at 18%. (Baraka, who did unexpectedly well among Hispanic voters in many parts of the state, also won tiny East Newark.)

And in North Bergen, Sacco’s local machine was able to hold off an onslaught from Stack, but only barely; Fulop carried the city against Sherrill 38%-36%, a paltry 189-vote margin. Fulop ended up only netting around 6,000 votes over Sherrill out of the towns he won, which wasn’t enough to overcome Sherrill’s advantage in Union City alone – and it certainly wasn’t enough to put together a statewide coalition, given that Fulop didn’t win any other counties around the state, either.

The other three gubernatorial candidates – Gottheimer, New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller, and former State Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford) – failed to make much headway anywhere in Hudson; Sweeney, a heavily regional South Jersey candidate, couldn’t even break 2% of the vote.

The county was, in the end, a microcosm of Sherrill’s statewide coalition: robust party support, combined with a campaign message that evidently appealed to everyday voters, was enough to wipe out the more localized bases of her opponents. If Sherrill wins the governor’s race this fall, Hudson County will have been a key part of what got her there.

LD-31

When the stormclouds of the Hudson Democratic war began gathering, Hudson organization Democrats presented 31st district Assemblywoman Barbara McCann Stamato (D-Jersey City) with a fork in the road: she could run on her own slate unconnected with any gubernatorial candidate and get a safe path to re-election, or she could stick with Fulop, her longtime ally, and draw a party-backed primary challenge. McCann Stamato, the Democratic municipal chair in Jersey City, chose the latter.

Electorally, it was the wrong choice. Assemblyman William Sampson (D-Bayonne) remained loyal to the county party, and he was joined by Hudson County Commissioner Jerry Walker (D-Jersey City); together, the two men defeated McCann Stamato and her running mate, Bayonne Councilwoman Jacqueline Weimmer, by a combined 53%-47% margin. (Walker came in first place; Sampson and McCann Stamato were separated by just 228 votes for second.)

Walker and Sampson – both of whom are Black – got enormous margins out of Jersey City’s Black community in Greenville and Bergen-Lafayette, collectively winning more than 70% of the vote in some voting districts that were also overwhelmingly supporting Baraka for governor; the district overall supported Baraka over Fulop 37%-29%. McCann Stamato and Weimmer very narrowly carried Bayonne and did quite well in the district’s third-wheel town, Kearny, but it wasn’t enough to overcome their losses in Jersey City. (Western Hudson County’s other two towns, Harrison and East Newark, are in the Newark-based 29th legislative district instead.)

The race broke down on some interesting geographic lines beyond the binary of the opposing slates. Each ticket featured one Jersey City candidate and one Bayonne candidate, and each municipality showed some particular affection for their hometown politicians: Weimmer finished first in Bayonne followed by Sampson, while Jersey City gave far more votes to Walker and McCann Stamato than it did to their running mates. 

And Walker’s convincing first-place finish – he got 28.6% of the four-way vote and outdid two sitting legislators by more than a thousand votes each – is evidence that, in a post-line era, factors other than party support and incumbency could be paramount. Walker is a former college basketball star and a well-known community activist in Jersey City who ran in a special congressional primary just last year; it’s not surprising, then, that he would have the highest name recognition and support of anyone in a lower-profile State Assembly race.

As for Sampson, he somehow managed to avoid the same loyalty tests as McCann Stamato – despite being on Sherrill’s ticket, his longshoreman’s union supported Sweeney for governor and he himself kept on showing up at Baraka events – and at age 36 will get to continue being the Hudson Assembly delegation’s longest-serving member.

LD-32

In the 32nd district, which covers Hoboken and downtown Jersey City, Assemblywoman Jessica Ramirez (D-Jersey City) was offered a similar choice between Fulop’s ticket and running on her own. Ramirez stayed true to Fulop, and she was joined by Jersey City Ward D Councilman Yousef Saleh on Fulop’s Democrats for Change slate. Party bosses, meanwhile, scouted out two candidates from outside the ranks of elected politics: Jennie Pu, the director of the Hoboken Public Library, and Crystal Fonseca, a Jersey City Department of Public Safety official.

But in the end, the winners came from neither slate. Instead, the 32nd district’s next two assemblymembers will be Katie Brennan, a longtime policy aide who got in a very public fight with Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration seven years ago after she accused a fellow Murphy aide of rape, and Ravi Bhalla, the mayor of Hoboken who ran in a competitive primary against Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) last year.

Like in the 31st district, there were some geographic and demographic divides worth noting. Bhalla, for instance, was the best-performing candidate in Hoboken after serving in local office there for more than a decade, while Saleh came in first in his Ward D Jersey City Council district.

The biggest story of all, though, was the fact that Brennan, despite being a first-time candidate running against several longtime politicians, found support across the entire district, especially in downtown Jersey City’s Ward E – even though Fulop was simultaneously carrying the district with nearly 40% of the vote. (Sherrill got 25% and Baraka got 23%.) Brennan was the six-way race’s first-place finisher with 19.6% of the vote.

And the demise of the county line was a key part of her and Bhalla’s victory. If lines had still existed, Brennan and Bhalla would have either had to team up with a gubernatorial candidate (which they showed little inclination to do) or get lost in Ballot Siberia, since the six gubernatorial candidates would have pushed them into the seventh ballot slot; on office-block ballots, they could run their own campaign with no impediments or unnecessary alliances, allowing the progressive coalition that has long pushed for change in Hudson County to at last notch a win.

One of Brennan and Bhalla’s most prominent supporters, anti-machine Jersey City Councilman James Solomon, is running for Jersey City mayor this November; there will be a competitive race to succeed Bhalla in Hoboken then as well; and every seat on the Hudson County Board of Commissioners, including two that nearly flipped to insurgent Democrats in 2023, will be up next year. Get ready.

LD-33

Of the three Hudson County primaries, by far the most bitter was the race for the 33rd district, but it also turned out to be by far the least competitive.

Stack and Sacco, their fragile truce from a few years ago having broken down, each fielded rival slates in the district. Stack supported Assemblyman Gabe Rodriguez (D-West New York) but dumped fellow Assemblyman Julio Marenco (D-North Bergen), a Sacco ally, from his ticket and replaced him with Larry Wainstein, a frequent Sacco antagonist; Sacco, in turn, cobbled together a ticket of former North Bergen school board member Tony Hector and former Union City Republican municipal Chairman Frank Alonso.

Hector and Alonso tried to make the race newsworthy in any way they could, attacking Stack as a corrupt boss and promoting Leonard Filipowski, a.k.a. LeRoy Truth, a YouTube provocateur whose only mission for the last year has been to pester Stack. They also, somewhat awkwardly, teamed up with Fulop, whose alliance with Sacco meant that his otherwise progressive Assembly slate was stuck with someone who had been a registered Republican until a few days before he filed to run.

But in the end, any proxy war between Stack and Sacco – and that’s really what it was, more so than a referendum on the Assembly candidates themselves – was always going to favor Stack, and his slate won 70%-30%. Stack delivered a gargantuan 66-point margin for Rodriguez and Wainstein in Union City, and the district’s other big town, West New York, voted for them by a similar 61 points. Secaucus and Guttenberg, two towns that had historically been more aligned with Sacco than Stack, also voted for the Stack ticket.

Sacco’s own ailing machine couldn’t remotely keep up. In North Bergen, Alonso and Hector scraped by with a 51%-49% win; Wainstein, who got around one-third of the vote three times against Sacco in North Bergen previous local races, actually got second place in the town, beating out Alonso by nine votes.

County sheriff

The final casualty in the 2025 Hudson war was Sheriff Frank Schillari, a veteran of the sheriff’s department whose alliance with Sacco, and by extension Fulop, doomed his re-election bid this year.

Opposing Schillari was Jimmy Davis, the mayor of Bayonne since 2014 and a former law enforcement official himself. Davis had the official support of the county party, which – despite some of Davis’ old skeletons, and despite the fact that Schillari retained the support of a majority of the county’s mayors – was enough for a 53%-46% win.

The results closely matched the governor’s race in some ways, with Union City voting overwhelmingly for Davis – Stack was as critical to Davis’s victory as he was to Sherrill’s – and North Bergen supporting Schillari by a modest margin. (Anti-machine progressives in downtown Jersey City also largely voted for Schillari, an interesting twist of fate for the 78-year-old party stalwart.) But there were some differences between the two races that are instructive.

Davis, for example, carried his hometown of Bayonne by 11 points and Schillari won his hometown of Secaucus by 37 points – even though both towns voted for the gubernatorial candidate associated with the opposite slate. That’s a key part of political battles in Hudson County and elsewhere: whatever else may be going on in a race, voters are oftentimes willing to give local candidates an advantage.

Jersey City’s Black voters, meanwhile, generally supported Davis despite voting for Baraka at the top of the ticket. In a county-line system, that split result might have been strange, but in a world where voters are able to approach each individual race on its own merits, more unusual coalitions are able to form.