Judge’s ballot ruling could upend NJ’s boss politics beyond Andy Kim’s Senate race

A federal judge’s bombshell decision to end an arcane balloting practice in New Jersey may well demolish the state’s entrenched culture of boss-dominated machine politics.

The ruling rippled immediately through the state’s Senate race, where Rep. Andy Kim is the Democratic front-runner who led the legal challenge against what’s known as “the county line” giving prime ballot position to party-backed candidates.

But the consequences could be far more sweeping, threatening to end a system in which county party leaders have been able to effectively handpick candidates and influence elections before voters even cast ballots.

Eliminating the line for the June primary overturns a big advantage candidates had already established in the Republican Senate contest and in several major House races around the state.

And if potential appeals aren’t successful and District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi ultimately decides that the county line is unconstitutional for all future elections, New Jersey could soon see more crowded — and far more competitive — primaries. Including the 2025 race for governor.

Indeed, Kim may be the reason the line ended, but his race was virtually settled when first lady Tammy Murphy — who had based her campaign around running on the line in New Jersey’s most Democratic-rich counties — suddenly dropped her candidacy Sunday, leaving Kim with two long-shot rivals.

For decades, New Jersey county parties — sometimes at the behest of a single party chair — have been able to give the candidates they back a significant advantage in the Democratic and Republican primary, putting them in the same line or column as every other party-endorsed candidate. That sometimes meant the difference between a candidate for town council running in the same column as the president of the United States and a rival candidate off somewhere to the side in what’s known as “ballot Siberia.”

The line gave New Jersey politics a certain stability, and some have argued that has contributed to the corruption the state has been notorious for by allowing power brokers in areas dominated by one political party to effectively run the government with few checks and balances.

Those days may be over.

Now, at least for the June 2024 election, voters will see a list of candidates under the offices they’re seeking, with no shared columns or rows between candidates for different offices. That’s how all other states lay out ballots, known as office blocks.

Congressional primaries scrambled

The conventional wisdom about many of New Jersey’s key 2024 races was immediately upended.

In the Senate GOP primary, wealthy hotelier Curtis Bashaw had won the majority of county line endorsements against his chief rival, Mendham Mayor Christine Serrano-Glassner. Bashaw, running as a more moderate Republican with no history of donating to former President Donald Trump, can no longer depend on that organizational advantage. Serrano-Glassner, by contrast, has run a pro-Trump campaign and is married to Michael Glassner, who heads Trump’s legal defense fund.

Neither candidate has name recognition, but Serrano-Glassner has the Trump connections — something she can likely exploit to her advantage in the primary.

“Bashaw looked like he had the upper hand going into this. But I think all bets are off without the line,” said Monmouth University pollster Patrick Murray.

Bashaw said he is still confident in his primary prospects but disagreed with the decision.

“We made a decision to go forward with the race based on the rules. We allocate resources based on the rules. It seems unfair to change the rules in the middle of the game,” Bashaw said in a phone interview.

In a statement, Serrano-Glassner said that Quraishi’s ruling should be “praised” for returning “power to the people.” The elimination of county lines boosts her candidacy since Bashaw had the county line in a majority of the state. She called herself “the clear front-runner.”

“The county lines are now irrelevant and the playing field has been leveled for a pro-Trump, grassroots-supported candidate such as me over a Democrat-loving elitist such as my opponent Curtis ‘Bacaw’ Bashaw,” she said in a statement.

Several House races have also been dramatically altered. Perhaps none more than in the 8th District primary, where Democratic freshman Rep. Rob Menendez — son of the indicted Sen. Bob Menendez — faces Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla.

The younger Menendez had been backed by the powerful Hudson County Democratic Organization and would have been placed in the same column under President Joe Biden. The new ballot structure gives Bhalla’s campaign a significant lifeline. Now, a big question will be whether the Menendez name — deeply unpopular in most of the state — will be fortunate or unfortunate for the senator’s son in the congressional district that was the seat of his father’s power.

Rob Menendez said he has “a broad coalition of supporters” and he intends to earn voters’ support based on issues such as affordability and protecting reproductive rights.

“We are running an aggressive and well-resourced campaign, centered on our track record of accomplishments, regardless of any external factors,” he said in a statement.

Bhalla on social media said that the ruling is a “Great day for democracy.”

“Now, New Jersey will get what the other 49 states get: Free and fair elections.”

Scrapping the county line system for the June election also upends the Democratic primary race to replace Kim in the House. The two leading candidates in the likely Democratic district are state Assemblymembers Herb Conaway and Carol Murphy. Conaway trounced Murphy — who is not related to New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy or first lady Tammy Murphy — in endorsement contests decided by hundreds of low-level party officials in secret votes, giving him what would have been favorable ballot positioning in the entire district. But that advantage is now wiped away.

Carol Murphy welcomed the decision as a victory for women “because this archaic system has played a crushing role in suppressing women’s voices.”

Another candidate in that Democratic primary is Sarah Schoengood, who was a co-plaintiff in Kim’s lawsuit.

“For decades, powerful party bosses handpicked their preferred candidates and banished the other candidates to ballot Siberia,” Schoengood said in a statement. “The court's decision will make this year's ballots fair so that every primary voter is heard and every candidate has an equal shot at the party nomination.”

Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell, a 27-year incumbent, also faces a primary challenge from Mohamed T. Khairullah, the mayor of tiny Prospect Park, in a race that’s largely focused on Arab-American disaffection over Pascrell’s perceived lack of aggressiveness on the Gaza War. The district is home to a large Palestinian-American population.

Implications for 2025 governor's race

All this has occurred as a bevy of Democratic and Republican candidates — some declared and others all-but-officially-running — have spent months if not years positioning themselves to run for governor in 2025, when Phil Murphy’s second term expires and he’s constitutionally barred from seeking a third consecutive term.

Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, former Senate President Steve Sweeney and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka have all declared their candidacies on the Democratic side, while others — including Reps. Mikie Sherrill and Josh Gottheimer — are seen as candidates in waiting.

On the Republican side, only state Sen. Jon Bramnick has declared, while former gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli is expected to officially announce his bid next month and far-right radio host Bill Spadea is considering a run.

Most of those candidates from both parties had been making the rounds to win favor with power brokers around the state. Now, if Quraishi nixes the line altogether, those power brokers’ say over who the party nominates will be deeply diminished. That may be felt with candidates for local offices, like county commission, even more acutely than with candidates for statewide office. Those lower-level offices control the awarding of contracts that in many cases feed the political machines that until Friday held so much control over the ballots.

As a result, the party chairs would see a lot more primary challenges at the municipal level, Murray, the pollster, said.

“They’re going to have to run some active campaigns to defend their turf,” he said. “They’ll still have significant resources to their advantage because they still control the levers of power that control patronage and jobs in the counties where those parties are in the majority, but … It neuters some of the tactics that they’ve used in the past.”

Murray also noted that candidates with big war chests could have an even bigger advantage if lesser-funded opponents no longer have county lines to fall back on.

For now, one of New Jersey’s most powerful Democratic bosses, state party chair LeRoy Jones, is taking the decision in stride. Jones — who also chairs the party in Essex County, a Democratic vote-producing powerhouse — said he’s “not bothered” by the decision “at all.”

“I believe in the organization. I believe if you have good candidates, organization, you win. I’ve had organization since I’ve been in this and my results are strictly based on that. We just brand differently now and we move forward,” Jones said.

But another influential leader, Democratic State Committee Vice Chair Peg Schaffer — who also leads Somerset County Democrats and backed Tammy Murphy’s candidacy — said she thinks Quraishi’s decision was “dead wrong” and will be reversed on appeal.

“That said, I don’t think it’s a big deal. But what it does is cost us more money,” Schaffer said. “Instead of saying to people ‘vote column 1’ we’re going to have to send them a color-coded card saying where everybody is on the ballot. Vote for the ‘x’ line or the ‘z’ line depending on where they end up.”

Schaffer said the lack of a line could turn primaries into a sort of free-for-all with many less-qualified candidates running without vetting from the party organizations.

“This could be a big joke,” she said.