Winners & Losers

Winner	Losers
LEROY JONES	JOSEPH MUNIZ
The Essex County Democratic Chairman lets Millburn Democrats pick the candidate for the organization line in Essex — an impressive display of strong leadership and extreme confidence.	The North Bergen Democratic operative will not get Vinny Prieto’s Assembly seat after a backlash from a group of powerful Democrats in opposition to him going to the Legislature.
JEFF VAN DREW	MARY MAPLES
The Democratic State Senator wins the Atlantic County organization line for Congress in the 2nd district, albeit with just 57% of the vote.  He’ll run in the June primary with all eight county lines — and so far, three rivals are splitting up the votes to his left.	The Governor’s Authorities Unit Director put her boss on the losing side of a fight over the vice chairmanship of the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission.  She called Mildred Crump to tell her that Phil Murphy was backing Liz Calabrese seemingly unaware that Crump is a close political ally of the other candidate, Luis Quintana.
NJ.COM	NRCC
The website for New Jersey’s largest newspaper uses a photo of Gov. Phil Murphy wearing his baseball hat backwards as clickbait –makes sense to do whatever it takes to monetize the old media.	The National Republican Congressional Committee can’t be happy as five different candidates score an organization line in the 2nd district GOP primary — a seat the Republicans have held since 1994.
MATT FRIEDMAN	FRANK GILLIAM
The POLITICO New Jersey reporter has a great scoop on a new Super PAC, and even better, gets into a fight on Twitter with Sebastian Gorka.  P.S. Sounds like a Hugin Super PAC to me.	While not breaking records set by Cammarano of Hoboken or Evelyn Williams, the new Atlantic City Mayor faces a possible criminal complaint less than three months after taking office.
JUAN MELLI	DEREK ARMSTEAD
The founder of BlueJersey.com and former Hoboken communications manager lands a new job at one of the state’s most prestigious public affairs firms.	The Mayor of Linden pulls a Mary Maples — that means an inability to assess the political climate and properly count votes — and loses his bid to dump an insurance agent tied to his rival and replacing him with one of his campaign contributors.

Editor’s Note: By popular demand, the New Jersey Globe will publish a weekly Winners & Losers list.  Some readers may remember this as the same format as the one  I published every week from 2000 to 2010.  This is my first Winners & Losers in eight years. — DW