County bosses were stripped of the power to rig statewide elections. Now there’s no clear favorite in a state where Republicans are rising.
The outcome of New Jersey’s June 10 gubernatorial primary is anyone’s guess. With no clear front-runner, the elimination of distorted ballot designs that rigged the vote for county party-endorsed candidates, frustration with Democrats and the influx of Republican voter registration, scholars and other election-watchers said they wouldn’t put money on any of the hopefuls who want Phil Murphy’s job.
Six Democrats are vying for the nomination, an unusually high number enabled by the elimination of the “county line”—a ballot format that allowed county political committees to cluster their preferred candidates into a prominent column, which studies show all but guaranteed a win. Last year, then-Rep. Andy Kim successfully sued to eliminate the design for his U.S. Senate race, arguing that it is unconstitutional. Legislation is moving with overwhelming bipartisan support to codify that ruling into law, but even before that, the county line will not be in place for this week’s primary.
In the past, candidates would compete for all-important county endorsements, and might have dropped out if they didn’t get them, as current Democratic candidate Stephen Sweeney, a former state Senate president, did in 2016, said Julia Sass Rubin, associate professor and director of the public policy program at Rutgers’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. That typically knocked the number of candidates down. Not this year…
County bosses also send out literature that’s indistinguishable from material sent by the campaigns themselves, Rubin said. Tuesday’s election will be a test drive for which methods work best. Even if they’re not all that successful, county committees will likely represent that they were.
“The political machines adapt. They’re about surviving. If this is all very effective for them, they will do the same thing again,” Rubin said. “If it doesn’t work, if their preferred candidates don’t win, I fully expect them to change the rules again to make it even easier for them to control the outcome.”
“There’s going to be an effort by the political machines to signal that ‘we’re still in control.’ If you don’t need them, they become less relevant … there’s a real incentive for them to demonstrate that they’re all still very powerful.”