In what could be an upset victory, an off-the-line candidate for Mayor of Howell in Tuesday’s Republican primary is holding a 66-vote lead in a red town where the Democratic mayor is retiring.
John Leggio, a planning board member, is running in front of Deputy Mayor Ian Nadel, the choice of the Monmouth County GOP organization. Leggio has 1,884 votes (44.4%) and Nadel is at 1,818 (42.8%).
A third candidate, doltish Councilman Fred Gasior, finished far behind with 535 votes (12.6%).
The incumbent, Theresa Berger, was re-elected in 2020 by seven percentage points even as Howell was going to Donald Trump by seventeen points.
It’s not clear how many provisional ballots will be counted, the number of outstanding cure letters to repair technical defects on vote-by-mail ballots or the number of late-arriving VBMs that will be included in the final tally.
Matthew Filosa was unopposed in the Democratic primary.
The 2022 GOP primary produced an odd court decision after two GOP candidates, Gasior and Susan Fischer, didn’t get enough petition signatures on their own but the municipal clerk wound up allowing them to retroactively merge their petitions with Nadel’s to produce one solid petition for three candidates.
A panel of state appellate court judges determined that Superior Court Judge Kathleen Sheedy got it wrong when she upheld the decision. But the sluggish judges put off an appeal for the June primary election until September when it was too late.
Howell is the second-largest municipality in Monmouth County.