The November election now gives New Jersey voters a chance to elect a new person to the U.S. Senate for the first time in more than a decade.
And Tuesday’s primary vote gives New Jersey the first real chance to see what elections would look like without the “party line” ballot, the design that had grouped candidates favored by party leaders. It was a system only used in New Jersey and decried for years as unfair and after Senate candidate Andy Kim sued, a federal judge agreed. Kim won the Democratic primary handily, with The Associated Press calling the race for him shortly after polls closed.
“Our win today is a stunning victory for a people-powered movement that mobilized against corruption and stood up to the machine politics of New Jersey,” Kim said in a statement. “I took the chance to run for Senate eight months ago on the belief that people are fed up with our broken politics and are ready for a new generation of leadership fighting for change. What I found is that there is a deep hunger across the political spectrum for a different kind of politics grounded in integrity and public service that aims to rebuild trust.”
Kim is set to face Curtis Bashaw, who was declared the winner of the Republican primary by AP.
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Watching the ‘party line’
With more mail-in ballots left to count, it’s still too early to tell what impact the suspension of the party line may have had on Democratic candidates. The change this year — with the judge’s ruling that Democrats could not use the line due to Rep. Kim’s lawsuit but that Republicans could — provides a unique opportunity for researchers like Rutgers University professor Julia Sass Rubin, who authored a study on the impact of the line, to see the effect of the line in an election.