MONTCLAIR - Oblivious to the cold (sort of), Analilia Mejia led a contingent of supporters Thursday morning from the Paper Plane coffee shop to town hall, a block or so away.

She had just given them a pep talk.

Bad times in America, she said, are nothing new, hearkening back to Jim Crow laws.

Mejia said overcoming legalized segregation - just like fighting the Trump Administration today - will not be accomplished by negotiating on the edges, but by bold and big action.

"That's what our campaign is about," she said.

The trek to town hall was to vote on what is the first day of early voting in the Feb. 5 special CD-11 primary to fill Mikie Sherrill's seat in the House.

Mejia was also being practical. She said she wanted her core supporters to vote early, so they would have plenty of time to canvas and to phone bank between now and election day.

There are 11 people in the race. Two of the most prominent, according to many observers, are Brendan Gill and Tom Malinowski.

Mejia seemed to have them in mind when she expressed happiness in how much her campaign has accomplished in nine weeks.

She is fighting, she said, opponents with huge campaign war chests and endorsements by party "machines."

Mejia is definitely waging this fight from the left flank of the Democratic party.

Bernie Sanders not only endorsed her, he drew more than a thousand people to a rally in Wayne last week. Mejia shared the stage with "Bernie," but you had to presume most came to see the senator.

The ad war in this campaign has gotten a bit acrimonious.

Former Congressman Malinowski, especially, has been attacked for a 2019 House vote about border control. All House Dems from New Jersey backed the bill.

An ad funded by the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), however, links that vote to ICE activities today. By any objective look, that is a wild interpretation at best and a malicious falsehood at worst.

But proving that negative advertising works, a woman at the coffee shop said she's in Mejia's camp partly because of Malinowski's vote on ICE.

She said of Mejia - "She's clean."

There was also a strong union presence at Mejia's event. One man sported a University of Houston baseball cap and was indeed a transplant from Texas.

His story was a good one. He said he used to sell beer at the Astrodome - once home to the Astros and Oilers - but got fired when he tried to organize his fellow vendors into a union. He said the good news is that he sued and ultimately won his case. Now, he's in New Jersey working for Mejia.

With election day a week away, Gill was also active here with two business stops scheduled on Thursday.

Malinowski has an event planned for Thursday evening in Morristown with Jason Crow, a congressman from Colorado. Crow must like Morris County. He was there three months ago to campaign with Sherrill.

Back to Mejia, as she related the excesses of ICE and what she termed a growing "fascism," she hoped for the past to repeat itself.

"We pulled ourselves out of these horrific moments with regular people saying, 'We're not going to take it," she said.

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