The field is now largely set for next year’s Democratic Senate primary in New Jersey. While twice-indicted incumbent Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez hasn’t yet decided on a run, he is so widely disliked in the state after the federal charges laying out alleged pay-for-play service on behalf of the Egyptian government—his favorability rating is now at a shockingly low six percent, and only nine percent even among Democrats—that he is essentially a non-factor in next June’s primary.
Two high-profile Democratic challengers—Congressman Andy Kim, and Tammy Murphy, wife of Gov. Phil Murphy—have entered the primary. (There are others in the race, but only Kim and Murphy are likely to have the money and organization for a serious run.) These candidates will have to prove to voters that they can restore some measure of ethics and integrity to that Senate seat, while presenting an agenda for economic prosperity, lower cost for necessities like energy and health care, and a foreign policy that speaks to our highest values.
Or more accurately, they have to convince five men to give them a favorable ballot position.
Beneath the dramatic, operatic corruption outlined in the recent Menendez indictment lies what has been described as the soft corruption of machine politics in New Jersey, where the whims of unelected county party chairs almost always dictate who gets into office and what policies get enacted. Many of those chairs have already sprung into action on behalf of Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs banker who has never held public office and voted in Republican primaries as recently as 2014, when her husband was Barack Obama’s appointed ambassador to Germany.
Murphy announced her candidacy one week ago. The same day, the Democratic chair in Hudson County, Menendez’s home base, endorsed Murphy. Chairs in Bergen, Camden, Middlesex, Passaic, Somerset, and Essex counties have followed suit. George Norcross, a Democratic power broker in southern New Jersey whose role has diminished in recent years, nevertheless indicated his support for Murphy as well in a closed-door meeting this month, which could bring even more South Jersey counties along, even though that’s Kim’s home base.
These endorsements, from chairs of the four largest counties in the state by population and six of the top nine, were couched in identitarian terms, hailing the candidate who would be the first female senator in New Jersey’s history. In reality, they have the effect of putting a fat thumb on the scale for Murphy, by almost certainly giving her access to the “county line.”
The county line primary ballot in New Jersey, the only one of its kind in the nation, groups candidates together who are endorsed by the county parties, rather than organizing all candidates vying for a particular seat together. All other candidates in the various races are set off in largely empty columns, distanced physically from their competitors, sent to a place sometimes nicknamed “ballot Siberia.”
County line primary ballots, which are used in 19 of the state’s 21 counties, are confusing to look at, some would say deliberately so.
This ballot placement, and the way in which Democratic county parties in New Jersey have conditioned primary voters to only select endorsed candidates, has a near-perfect record. According to an updated analysis from Julia Sass Rubin, an associate dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, incumbent state legislative candidates who receive the county line in contested primaries have won 205 out of 208 primaries in the past 20 years. In the 19 races where the incumbent was denied the county line in at least one county in which they were running, their record is 9 wins and 10 losses.
Looking at 45 congressional and senatorial primaries where different candidates won the county line in particular counties, Rubin could calculate the real impact of the ballot placement. “The average margin in performance for those 45 candidates between being on the county line and having their opponent on the county line was 38 percentage points,” Rubin writes.
The line is a tool for power by the county chairs, who use the county line to dictate policies favorable to their interests. The county chairs become the constituents of New Jersey elected officials as much as, if not more than, the voters.
“It really is five men in a room,” Rubin said in an interview with the Prospect. “When you have this kind of power among the chairs, the situation is corrupt through and through.”
Ironically, Menendez has been the loudest voice about this as it relates to the Senate primary. He has called Murphy’s run, and the county chairs’ actions, a “blatant maneuver at disenfranchisement.” Of course, it’s one he benefited from until this year. And unless a federal lawsuit challenging the ballot line accelerates, it may be how Menendez’s successor is chosen.
IN 1996, RUSH HOLT DECIDED TO STEP AWAY from the Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University and make a go at a run for Congress. Holt, whose father was once a U.S. senator from West Virginia, sought the endorsements of the five county Democratic parties in his district. Some of those endorsements were decided at a convention of elected committee members, two from each precinct, who met and deliberated on the candidates. In two of the five counties, the county chair effectively decided who got the endorsement, regardless of the committee’s viewpoint.
“In those two counties I shared the line with Lyndon LaRouche, who was running for president at the time,” Holt told me. “I didn’t fare too well in the primary. If you don’t have the column or the line, they can relegate you to a distant part of the ballot.”
Holt got the county line endorsements in his next try in 1998 and won the seat, holding it for eight terms. When he ran for Senate in 2014 in a primary against Cory Booker, he went to each chair, asking for their support. While some party chairs simply asked Holt about the issues, in many cases, he said, it was “the most old-fashioned thing you can imagine... truly a smoke-filled room with one person.”
The prize for this county chair persuasion campaign is significant.
County line primary ballots, which are used in 19 of the state’s 21 counties, are confusing to look at, some would say deliberately so. In a presidential year like 2020 or 2024, they have the presidential candidate at the top, and all other races on the ballot—Senate, House, county clerk, freeholders, committee members—below them. (Statewide offices and legislative races in New Jersey come up in odd-numbered years.) Only the endorsed ballot line is full; the others have one or a handful of names in them. The design makes the county line easy to locate; it’s usually in the first or second position to the left, and the only one that’s full of candidates. For the challengers, it’s hard to even discern what office they’re running for. This visual suggests to the electorate who to vote for.
The county parties then offer their endorsed candidates as a slate in campaign material. “All the counties say, vote line A, or row E,” Rubin said. “The voters are just so trained. The ballot is reinforced by the messaging.”
Technically speaking, a county convention process is supposed to determine who receives the county line. In Bergen County, for example, an endorsement convention is in its bylaws, and has been held for nearly 50 years. But in reality, “the chair has the power to give the line,” Rubin said.
Sometimes the conventions’ votes for endorsements are not by secret ballot, and the chair can retaliate against those who vote contrary to his or her interests. Chairs determine which committee members get on the county line, and therefore have significant sway in who gets elected. Many chairs also hold municipal and legislative office, and can grant or revoke political favors. Finally, under state law, a county chair can overrule the decisions of the endorsement convention in nearly all cases. In 2021, Middlesex County Democratic chair Kevin McCabe simply nullified the endorsements for mayor and city council in Edison, and awarded county lines to his preferred candidates.
The combined effect of the odd-looking ballot, messaging from county parties, and voter tradition is remarkable. Rubin collected a number of examples for her paper. She found that no state legislative incumbent who was on the county line in every county in their district has lost a primary race in New Jersey since 2009.
In a Republican primary in the third congressional district, a split endorsement between two candidates demonstrated the effect of the county line. Kate Gibbs received the line in Burlington County, while David Richter had the line for Ocean County. Gibbs won Burlington 57-43; Richter took Ocean 78-22. That’s a difference of 35 points.
In 2020, Sen. Cory Booker tried to get his friend Brigid Callahan Harrison elected to Congress by taking himself off the county line in Atlantic County, and moving to a separate line with just Harrison to try to increase her vote share. Atlantic County voters were so inured to just ticking off the county line that almost 20 percent of them didn’t vote for Booker, or anyone else, for U.S. Senate.
An even more pernicious problem that can arise is overvotes. Sometimes, county clerks put all challengers to an endorsed county line candidate on the same line elsewhere on the ballot. Conditioned to just voting for everyone on a line, voters subsequently vote for multiple challengers, meaning they vote for two people running for the same office. Those votes then must get thrown out.
We saw this kind of induced ballot spoilation in a 2020 U.S. House race. In Mercer County in 2020, Christine Conforti and Stephanie Schmid were both put on the county line, because both challengers received 40 percent at the endorsement convention. As a result, 32.4 percent of the voters chose both Conforti and Schmid in the race; all those votes had to be discarded.
HOLT SAID THAT IN HIS TIME IN CONGRESS, the party bosses were more interested in state and local politics. “I was pleased that I was able to stay away from it,” he said. “The county executives, the freeholders, the governor, they could shift a lot of graft. The chairs were more interested in that sort of thing,”
But the particular circumstances of this Senate primary cuts against Holt’s expectation of county chairs being hands off about federal races. Tammy Murphy is the governor’s wife, and while she has taken a policy portfolio during her husband’s time in office, the views of the county party chairs are almost certainly not too divorced from what they think Gov. Murphy can do for them if they back his wife for Senate.
During his first gubernatorial run, Murphy secured the county lines for most of the northern New Jersey well before the endorsement conventions, after making large donations to county parties. His two main challengers then dropped out. (This is common in New Jersey, which has incredibly low percentages of contested primaries, as candidates believe they cannot win if they do not secure the county line.)
Already, the impact of Tammy Murphy’s connections to the governor are apparent. Days after her announcement, a $100,000 radio ad hit New Jersey airwaves, paid for by the state Department of Human Services and using Tammy Murphy’s voice to support maternal health—her signature issue. This led to cries of unfair use of government dollars for a political candidate. The ads were subsequently canceled.
“There are not a lot of machine politics left. We are the last true bastion,” Rubin said.
On the other side, Kim, who jumped into the Senate race right after the Menendez indictment and is running on an anti-corruption message, gave an interview in September, before the Menendez news came out, where he said that he favored reforming the county line. “My interest when it comes to good governance doesn’t just stop at the federal level,” Kim told the New Jersey Globe. “I’m a believer that democracy is something that ultimately resides with the citizens.” (Gov. Murphy, for his part, has defended the county line process.)
So when choosing between someone tied to all of the trappings of power in New Jersey and someone who has threatened the spoils system that has served county chairs well for decades, it’s not hard to understand who will get the county lines and be favored to win.
Camden and Hudson counties have a top-down structure, and so their party chairs’ endorsement of Murphy almost certainly puts her on those county lines. Bergen and Middlesex counties theoretically have secret-ballot endorsing conventions, but with the preferences of those party chairs known, it’s fairly likely that those county lines will go to Murphy, too.
Somerset, Hudson and Middlesex counties, all of whose chairs have endorsed Murphy, have high concentrations of Asian American/Pacific Islander voters, who would be critical to Kim, who is Korean-American and would become New Jersey’s first senator of AAPI descent if elected.
Murphy’s business Republican past, lack of electoral experience, service as a high-dollar fundraiser (she leads a nonprofit that promotes Gov. Murphy’s agenda with support from undisclosed donors) and relationship to the governor have triggered skepticism about her seeming coronation. “If her name was Tammy Johnson, we would not be having this conversation. It is because Tammy Murphy is married to the Governor,” read a letter from the Fair Vote Alliance, a progressive organization in the state.
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which has endorsed Kim, said in a statement that “Nepotism isn’t the solution to corruption. Andy Kim represents a new generation of progressive leadership—independent, unbought, and able to fight for families like his because he is not drowning in the trappings of establishment power.”
Green was once the communications director for the New Jersey Democratic Party. And his view appears to fit with some of the early polling in the race. An internal Kim poll conducted last week showed Kim up 40 percent to 21 percent on Murphy, with Menendez trailing badly at 5 percent. Kim is “well-liked,” Holt told me. “People see him as an earnest politician.”
But Rubin, who has researched New Jersey politics for years and written about it at the Prospect, said that poll cannot be used as a guide. “The public polling assumes an actual contest,” she said.
Indeed, the quick endorsements for Murphy from Kim’s colleagues in the House is something of a tell. Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Mikie Sherrill both endorsed Murphy. They are both expected to run for governor in 2025, and aligning with the endorsements of the party chairs may make it more likely for them to get county lines and other machine assistance in that gubernatorial election. Reps. Bill Pascrell, Frank Pallone, Donald Norcross, and Donald Payne have also endorsed Murphy.
The way in which county chair endorsements beget other endorsements, because politicians in the state want to curry favor with the county chair, suggests that elections in New Jersey aren’t quite democratic as much as they are payments of tribute to party bosses. “There are not a lot of machine politics left. We are the last true bastion,” Rubin said.
THE FAIR VOTE ALLIANCE HAS CALLED the county line “anti-democratic,” “noncompetitive and unfair,” and asked county clerks to give no candidate preferential treatment on the ballot. Appealing to county clerks’ sensibilities is not likely to be successful. But a federal lawsuit is lurking in the background.
After the mass ballot spoilation in the 2020 U.S. House race, Christine Conforti filed a complaint in U.S. District Court against three county clerks, arguing that the county line “arbitrarily undermine[s] the integrity of New Jersey’s elections” and is unconstitutional. Making it a federal case was critical, Rubin noted, because state and municipal judges are selected by and have ties to the state political machine.
Other candidates denied the county line in their races came in on Conforti’s side, and more county clerks moved to intervene in the lawsuit. Last May, Judge Zahid Quraishi, a Biden appointee, denied a motion to dismiss, allowing the case to go forward. Conforti v. Hanlon is currently in the discovery phase.
“The Court recognizes the gravitas of its decision to allow this case to move forward,” Judge Quraishi wrote in the ruling. “However, it is the Court’s duty and imperative to protect the democratic process.”
Rubin views the lawsuit as a final chance for democracy in New Jersey. “All of the things that would enable reform are blocked by a unique set of factors that allows things to stay in place,” she said. “It’s why the lawsuit is kind of the only hope.”
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