A quick look at the results from Tuesday’s primary election shows that the lack of the “party line” ballot design did not matter for almost all endorsed Democratic candidates, who won easy victories. But a deeper dive into the results tells a somewhat different story.
NJ Spotlight News compared results from Tuesday’s election to results from 2022 and found that the average share of the vote for Democrats with challengers this year was lower than in 2022 when the party line ballot was used.
“It’s early as the votes are still being counted but it certainly looks like not having a county line shakes things up, especially in the less high-profile races where the county line matters the most,” said Julia Sass Rubin, a professor and associate dean at Rutgers University’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy.
Perhaps the best test of the party line’s power continues to play out in South Jersey’s sprawling 2nd Congressional District, which covers all or parts of six counties. With 92% of the vote counted, Joseph Salerno leads the Democratic field of four candidates by 1.2 percentage points, according to the latest tally from The Associated Press.
Salerno did not win any county endorsements. Democrat Tim Alexander, the party’s nominee two years ago who lost to Republican incumbent Jeff Van Drew, got three county endorsements and leads in all three of those counties. Three county committees did not endorse in the race and both Salerno and Alexander used those county parties’ names as their ballot slogans.
‘Most impactful’
Rubin, who authored a notable study on the impact of the party line, cited the 2nd District race as one in which the loss of the line may be a factor. Quieter races without incumbents are the ones in which the line has been “most impactful,” she said. While Alexander got the line in Atlantic County, which is the largest share of the district, he has garnered only 43% of the vote there so far and leads Salerno by only about three percentage points. In the ballot draw, Salerno won top ballot position.
The federal judge’s ruling in the party line lawsuit did not apply to Republican ballots because their candidates did not join the lawsuit until it was well underway. Ballots in Mercer and Monmouth counties reflected the county line, but the Burlington County clerk chose to use the same office-block ballot design for Republicans as she did for Democrats.
“Mohan won Mercer and Monmouth by more than 20 percentage points each,” Rubin noted. But in Burlington County, Shirley Maia-Cusick, the second-place finisher, is beating Mohan by about five percentage points with 94% of the vote counted.
Republican Senate results also give clues
The Republican Senate race, which Curtis Bashaw won by about seven percentage points, also shed some light on the line’s impact, Rubin said. Bashaw and second-place finisher Christine Serrano Glassner each won all the counties where the local party endorsed them. But Bashaw’s smallest margin, 4.5%, was in Burlington, where the GOP ballot design was the office block.