Many of New Jersey’s Democratic Party organizations are already set to endorse Tammy Murphy for the U.S. Senate seat currently held by Sen. Bob Menendez. The key endorsements would give her preferred placement on primary ballots in the state’s bluest areas, but some members of those same organizations say the process shows New Jersey’s primary elections are deeply undemocratic.
In several of the state’s largest party organizations, the endorsement choice is made by county party bosses — either without any vote, or with only an advisory vote from the hundreds of community leaders meant to guide the party, according to interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the process.
“All the county chairs tripped over themselves to endorse Tammy Murphy,” said Robert Holzapfel, who is a plumber from Highland Park and an elected member of the Middlesex County Democratic Organization.
County political committees’ endorsements are a source of political power in New Jersey. In all but two of the state’s 21 counties, the candidates endorsed by the party organization for the primary run together on a slate, and the members of those slates are grouped together in a column or row called the “county line” — which would likely have President Joe Biden at the top in the June 4 primary.
Research by academics from Princeton, Rutgers and Oxford universities finds that doing so nearly hands a win to whoever’s on the line — giving them a statistical advantage of 38 percentage points in 45 congressional and Senate races studied over 20 years. New Jersey is the only state with such a system.
“They just think they’re being loyal Democrats,” Holzapfel said. “This is our democracy, you know, [but] people understand the rules of football better than they understand [the county line].”
The ballot design has long been a point of contention for progressives and good government groups. This year, it’s also prompting a backlash among some party faithful, because…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply