LA in flames, a swampy, depressing, Vietnam-like rain-mist rose over New Jersey the day before Primary Election Day 2025, June 10th, when voters go to the polls to pick their party nominees for governor.

On the Democratic side:

Mikie Sherrill

The congresswoman from Essex County occupies the frontrunner position in this contest, underscored by the support she has from key party organizations (including Essex, Union City, Middlesex, Passaic, Union, Mercer, and others). The attacks she continues to absorb reassert her position as the favorite. Those attacks this season came early and often. Shortly after Sherrill consolidated substantial establishment backing, mostly throughout Northern and Central Jersey, Steve Sweeney (see below) went on offense against the Congresswoman. Now, there's some history here. Sherrill's main political benefactor is Essex County Democratic Committee Chairman LeRoy Jones, who in 2022 kicked the wounded Sweeney off the legislative redistricting commission. Once the toast of Essex as a consequence of his relationship with George Norcross III, a controversial South Jersey power broker, who cut a deal with the Northern County back in 2009 to eject sitting Senate President Dick Codey (from Essex!), Sweeney returns this season as that all-but-forgotten, ineradicable South Jersey ghost of Christmas past, looking, at the very least, to create northern havoc. If Sweeney represents the most obvious negative force from another region of the state, Sherrill labors under the added encumbrance of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka from her home county (opposed in his ultimately successful 2014 bid for the Newark mayoralty most vociferously by a party establishment then dominated by Norcross), who also went negative, in his case late in the process; in addition to Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, who's running against the "establishment," who failed in his aggressive 2017 efforts to kiss the rings, and now likewise tries to slow Sherrill with negative attacks.

If the five other candidates in the contest to one varying degree or another bear the uniform umbilical connections to the machinery of New Jersey politics, Sherrill - who rose out of Morris County, separate from the cocoons of incubated power that sustain the others - comes from the world of the United States Navy, where she spent nine years flying helicopters, irritating to her rivals here in this contest who lack that kind of stark professional differentiation from the largely self (not public) serving culture of New Jersey politics. Branded the establishment choice by other candidates who mostly sought the support of the same organizations they now decry, following those organizations' rejection of their candidacies, Sherrill forced her way into the establishment as that candidate in the contest (the only woman) most unlike the longtime fat cats controlling the party. In the words of a longtime Democratic Party insider relayed this morning to InsiderNJ, Sherrill is "the kind of candidate who comes along only once every 50 years." In the pre bracketing disintegration era, she might have simply cleared the field. But Governor Phil Murphy's attempt to shovel his wife into the available senate seat last year sufficiently stained "the party establishment" to warrant the involvement of a judge, who reworked the ballots in New Jersey primaries to defang county party organizations and complicate the path of someone big enough to secure support on her own merits.

Even in this new environment, Sherrill continues to maintain an edge, as her rivals try to minimize her by association with the same organizations that desperately needed this year to present something more to haggard and doubtful voters (remember, this is the state that produced Bob Menendez, after all, in a supposedly blue state that in 2024 Donald Trump came within five points of winning) than the same old stale toothy male and manufactured statewide candidate.

Steven Fulop

Denied party support (critically, see below, in his home county of Hudson, where early voting shows Union City in a numbers dogfight with Fulop's hometown, and thereby underscoring fracture), the Mayor of Jersey City went negative early and often. Good on policy, he hammered it frequently as a way of connecting with progressive voters. This past weekend, a self-declared "Andy Kim voter" now backing Sherrill, worried about Kim voters going to Fulop on the strength of Sherrill affiliating with the same people who backed Tammy Murphy last year. The Sherrill Campaign, too, appears alert to Fulop as a threat, for they have hit back at Fulop, slowing the apparent momentum of the Jersey City wunderkind with some salient points about his record. But while running a pretty damned good campaign with the materials he had (namely a lot of people in different legislative districts who routinely losing elections and are angry about it), Fulop had another problem, and that was...

Ras Baraka

The Newark Mayor secured the most dramatic moment of the election cycle when masked federal agents threw the cuffs on him outside Delaney Hall in the mayor's home city of Newark. President Donald Trump's overt politicization of the Department of Justice outraged Americans nationwide. His arrest (and subsequent lawsuit) won Baraka a lot of converts and galvanized his backers here. But while the mayor was always the best and most sincere orator in the field of Democratic contenders for governor, he never failed to quell questions about his capacity to build outside the comfort zone of his progressive base, which in many ways is the same group of individuals frantically worked by Fulop (see above). If Fulop proved himself the ultimate campaign technocrat, going back to his self-schooling in Jersey City School Board contests, Baraka had the poetry without the superior mechanical campaign street operation, the kind of organization honed by someone like...

Steve Sweeney

The former Senate President's 2021 humiliation (run over by a nonunion truck driver in his reelection bid, after four years earlier running the most expensive campaign in U.S. legislative history), could always be laid at the feet of Phil Murphy. You heard it all the time back then. "Phil moved too far to the left, brought in Bernie Sanders at the end - it killed Steve. Etc, etc." In any event, the mighty imperial senate president had fallen, focused on playing statewide, even as he took his eyes off LD-3 and got pancaked by Ed Durr. Now, Sweeney out of office hardly looks like a world beater, and even in 2017, at the height of his power, he failed to secure the backing of critical northern organizations. But he still has South Jersey on lockdown. Just look at the VBMs out of Camden County, essentially Sweeney's political capital: 33.4K, or the leader of all counties in that department in the lead up to Election Day, followed by Middlesex [30K], which backs Sherrill (see above). So, if Sweeney had built considerable ill-will among public sector labor unions during his tenure in the legislature and would never compete with Fulop and Baraka for raw progressive votes, he had Building Trades and political organization on his side, at least in one key corner of the state, to be sure. But his affordability message sounded a lot like that offered up North by...

Josh Gottheimer

The Bergen-based Congressman from CD-5 worked hard to try to secure the backing of Union City Mayor Brian P. Stack and Middlesex County Democratic Committee Chairman Kevin McCabe. He even furnished the legal brains for Middlesex to fight a judge's decision scrapping the longtime ballot bracketing system. When Gottheimer failed to entice those powerful players, he fell back on the establishment support of his home county and a huge war chest, which he dipped into early and often to keep the state saturated with his ads. He got his name out there, and even if the most memorable ad of the cycle showed him somewhat comically AI-rippled and improbably boxing Donald Trump, at least people - voters - out there became aware of some guy named Gottheimer in the race, and that helped him. He also secured the powerful backing of Orthodox Jews. No joke. But if Baraka and Fulop continued to remind voters about progressive policies, each in his own compelling way, and Sweeney resembled yesterday's news, Gottheimer couldn't escape appearing to be the candidate the establishment might have gone with (indeed, in some cases, the establishment's first choice) if it did not realize it should go in another direction, in order to move with the times, recognize that part of the party consistently in opposition to Trump, and candidly, finally, as a simple matter of self-protection.

Sean Spiller

At last reckoning, the independent expenditure Working New Jersey PAC backing Spiller, the president of the NJEA, had spent $40 million to make him look like a hero. He had spent half a million.

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For More Information, please see ELEC's Final Pre-Election Report on Spending HERE.

And...

Early Returns: