Bayonne voted for four more years of Jimmy Davis on Tuesday.
The incumbent mayor won 57% of the vote, beating out former Assemblyman Jason O’Donnell and physician Bill Mitchell. Davis’s entire slate of City Council candidates won on Tuesday.
“I’m not going to try and thank everybody that worked because it would take me forever, but I want to start by saying to everybody in this room and everybody in Bayonne by saying thank you. Thank you for being behind me all the way on a long road,” Davis told a packed and jubilant crowd at his victory celebration at the Villa Maria in Bayonne.
Davis’s victory margin surprised even his own team, which expected to eke out a much tighter win.
The incumbent mayor received 6,850 of the 11,931 votes cast. O’Donnell took 4,556 votes, or roughly 37%, while Mitchell took just 525 votes, or about 4% – the same percentage that Anthony Zanowic took in 2014 to trigger a runoff that ended with Davis’s first victory.
There was only one close race in Bayonne on Tuesday. In the city’s Second Ward, Councilman Salvatore Gullace won 1,531 votes, while O’Donnell-backed Kevin Kuhl took 1,468 votes.
Davis spokesman Phil Swibinski called the vote an “incredible testament to the progress Bayonne has made” and said the margin meant Davis would go into his second term with a strong mandate.
In addition to Davis’s record, Swibinski credited the campaign’s success to the work of Davis campaign manager Joe DeMarco, who stepped down from his role as the city’s business administrator to oversee Davis’s reelection run.
Davis’s reelection will have a tectonic effect on the intraparty feud between Hudson County Executive Tom DeGise and a handful of the county’s most influential mayors, including Uion City Mayor Brian Stack, Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop and West New York Mayor Felix Roque.
After tonight, DeGise can count on Bayonne’s Democratic County Committee members to vote for the candidate he fields against Stack, who is running to be Hudson County Democratic Chairman.