THE END OF THE COUNTY ‘BOSS’?
Arnold Korotkin
Source: THE NEW JERSEY DEMOCRAT
THE END OF THE COUNTY ‘BOSS’?
Not quite. Not yet. But the writing’s on the wall. Case in point: useless county endorsement conventions
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Photo credit: The Jersey Journal
Throughout New Jersey, a county-by-county series of political conventions is underway, to endorse candidates for office – from U.S. senators and member of the House of Representatives to county commissioners. To some, these events are seen as examples of local democracy in action, bringing together party organizations on a countywide basis to choose who to support in the June 2 primary vote. But to others, especially to reformers, to activists, and to seasoned political observers, these conventions represent a desperate effort by county bosses to maintain their grip over local politics.
For at least a century, politics in New Jersey has been associated with the existence of the political boss, the powerful and well-connected county or municipal leader who commands a network of business associates, patronage employees, ambitious office-holders seeking to move up the ranks, and pay-to-play contractors who line the boss’s campaign coffers with contributions. The legendary archetype in the state was Frank Hague (1876-1956), the brewery bill collector and corrupt, anti-communist mayor of Jersey City and Hudson County boss who squatted atop the state for decades.
They’re still around.
But things are changing. The collapse of the “county line,” which allowed county bosses to rig election ballots in party primaries in an overwhelming advantage for hand-picked favorites, crippled the power of the county bosses in 2024. As a result, the county endorsements mean a lot less than they used to. For example, in Essex County and Morris County, conventions met in December and ended up backing Brendan Gill and Tom Malinowski, respectively. But Gill, a commissioner and apparatchik of the machine in Essex, the fiefdom of Chairman LeRoy Jones, finished fourth after a chaotic and contentious online convention. And Malinowski, a former member of Congress, who’d represented a small section of Morris County until 2022, finished second. Both lost to a spirited, independent grassroots effort by Analilia Mejia, a union organizer and former leader of the Working Families Party.
Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, told The New Jersey Democrat in an interview that things have indeed changed since 2024. Asked about the fact that Gill lost to three others despite the backing of the Essex County Dems, Rasmussen said:
They just couldn’t overcome a lot of that splintering that we’re talking about. This is a situation where the party leaders have to be sweating. They ask themselves, ‘Is this going to keep on happening to us, or are we going to figure out how to handle these insurgent campaigns, so that we can regain a foothold over them?’ Not through changing the rules. You know, the line is gone. That’s not coming back. But can they leverage the other assets and other advantages that they have to be able to gain the upper hand again? Because right now, I think that we’re seeing that they’ve lost the upper hand.
Parties have lost control, to a degree, over who wins nominations, and the party’s traditional “gatekeeping” function no longer applies, said Rasmussen. “They’ve lost that, and it’s not coming back to them.”
Many question whether endorsements by the county organizations have any impact in the real world and, indeed, whether they should make endorsements at all. (On the national level, for example, the Democratic National Committee doesn’t endorse anyone running in the presidential primary.) In some cases, a party endorsement comes with a degree of election assistance, literature, door-knocking, and phone calls. But compared to what the candidates themselves do, and help from unions, activists, and in some cases super PACs, the county organizations usually don’t make much of a difference.
End of the Line
“For the most part, you don’t get anything from a party endorsement,” a leading Democratic strategist told The New Jersey Democrat. “And the county chairs have an outsized opinion of how important they are. For candidates, what you get if you win is: nothing.” Asked whether the county committees should even bother to endorse candidates, the strategist said, “In fact, a convention often does involve a roomful of grassroots activists. But maybe they should just have a meet-and-greet instead.”
The end of the county line opened the barrier to entry for candidates seeking office, since hopefuls no longer faced the prospect of heavy-handed backing from a county boss. In CD-11, the special election to succeed Representative Mikie Sherrill in Congress, drew as many as 13 Democratic candidates. At last count, at least 18 Democrats are running to succeed Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman in CD-12, eight Democrats are seeking to unseat Representative Tom Kean Jr. in CD-7, and five candidates are vying to topple Representative Jeff Van Drew in South Jersey’s CD-2.
“In New Jersey, progressive activists have successfully removed the line after years and years of county leaders effectively blocking any challenge to incumbents,” said Ritu Pancholy, vice chair of the South Orange Democratic Committee, in an interview with The New Jersey Democrat. “Now that we have contested elections, county organizations should not endorse pre-primary. We should enable voters to learn from the candidates. [And] because these primary endorsements occur so early in the process, county organizations should abstain in the primary.”
Asked if the endorsements were often predetermined, Pancholy – who’s involved in a countywide effort in Essex to reform how the Essex County Democratic Committee works – said yes. “[We] receive minimal information beforehand, and it is evident that county leadership has already chosen favorites. I have never believed in that practice, and it makes the process feel unfair.”
In South Jersey, where any Democratic nominee will face a steep challenge in defeating Van Drew, a former-Democrat-turned-MAGA-Republican, county conventions have been held in Atlantic, Cumberland, and Cape May counties. In the latter case, the contested convention in Cape May County endorsed Zack Mullock, the mayor of Cape May city, by voice vote, though one opponent, Bayly Winder, a former USAID official, slammed the decisionas the result of “backroom dealing.”
In Cumberland County, the Democratic committee’s convention endorsed Tim Alexander, a civil rights attorney who’s already lost to Van Drew, but not before Chairman Kevin McCann endorsed Mullock but then said he didn’t mean to back him for reasons that are unclear. (According to people familiar with what happened, allies of Alexander pressured McCann behind the scenes.) The end result left many complaining of machine politics, and according to the New Jersey Globe the Cumberland Dems didn’t bother to release a vote count, in what the Globe called a “chair endorsement snafu.”
And in Atlantic County, the Democratic convention narrowly endorsed Alexander, who edged out Winder by a vote of 101 to 95, after ranked-choice-voting eliminated Mullock and another candidate. But Michael Suleiman, the chairman of the Atlantic County Dems, had announced his support for Alexander back in December, even before Mullock was in the race, perhaps stacking the deck in favor of Alexander.
In an interview with TNJD, conducted before the convention was held, Suleiman acknowledged that with the end of the county line, endorsements are less potent. “With an office block design” – that is, the post-county line ballot design – “conventions don’t mean as much,” he said. “However, I do think it’s a good stamp of approval for candidates.” Yet he seemed nostalgic for the old way of doing things, saying:
I thought, frankly, that sometimes the anti-line stuff was a little unfair. I mean, if you don’t like the line, you don’t like the line. The judge got rid of it, no problem. But a lot of these county committee members have been long-standing volunteers and operatives and door knockers and canvassers for decades, and they’ve been around the block. They know politics. They know how to look at candidates and I think they have a good eye, whether you agree with them or not on who would be a good candidate and who wouldn’t be. And I think the county conventions provide a good litmus test for candidates’ viability.
Suleiman added that because a county endorsement doesn’t mean as much as it used to before the elimination of the county line, a candidate endorsed by the county committee still has to work hard to win the nomination. “If you win our convention, you get the endorsement, you get the slogan,” he said. “But at the end of the day, does that mean that much? Not as much as it did, quite frankly, but I still think it’s an important part of the process. I think it’s good for the candidates to go through that exercise because, I mean, look, if you can’t whip up or effectively campaign to 300 party volunteers, then you shouldn’t be running for higher officer, right?”
But that’s exactly the problem, a veteran Democratic organizer told TNJD. Forcing candidates to spend weeks ahead of a convention appealing to delegates to an impending convention, meeting them personally, making phone calls, sending emails and text messages to the delegates, is overly burdensome. “In my county, candidates expend enormous effort trying to reach a hundred people. And that takes away time that they could be using to reach actual voters,” she said.
Take, for example, New Jersey’s CD-7, which sprawls across all or part of six counties: Hunterdon, Warren, Sussex, Morris, Somerset, and Union, with eight candidates seeking the nomination. Union County’s committee, which met earlier, has yet to endorse anyone in CD-7, but apparently it will. Morris, Sussex, Somerset, and Warren County Democratic committees are all meeting later in March, and each will presumably endorse one of the eight.
In Hunterdon County, in CD-7’s field of 18 candidates, the Democratic committee’s convention on March 1 ended up giving the party’s backing to Rebecca Bennett, a healthcare official and Navy veteran, in a two-person run-off, over Brian Varela, a grassroots organizer and former leader of the New Jersey Forward Party.
Michael Drulis, the chairman of the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee, told TNJD that he believes the process works fairly well. In an interview conducted on the eve of the convention, Drulis said that about 250 delegates do the work ahead of time, do research, and meet the candidates at various events or in one-on-one talks. He said:
So the candidate that gets endorsed is endorsed by the people who have really done the work to get to know them, make sure that we’re putting forth the candidate who can win in November, who is the worthy candidate, who has the right democratic values, who can run the right campaign. These are all things that take some analysis and focus.
Some counties, Drulis acknowledges, may or may not have a boss-run system, but he said that Hunterdon is proud to have a system that’s run collectively by its county committee. And, he said, Senator Andy Kim’s effort in 2024 that challenged the county line system, and got it eliminated, was certainly aimed at the boss system. “Senator Kim’s lawsuit and action was created around what you’re referring to the county boss, right? It was intended to take away that characterization and that kind of authority,” he said. “And I don’t know about other counties, to be honest. I can only talk to you about what Hunterdon is. But every county has their own bylaws. … And in other countries, the chair at the end of the day is voted on by the county, and if that’s the kind of leadership and style they want, they have that right to self-govern.”
In other words, if a county wants to have a boss, they can have a boss.
Meanwhile, in CD-12, spread over four counties (Mercer, Somerset, Union, and Middlesex) the four county organizations are set to endorse four different people. The Union County Democratic Committee, run by a “boss of bosses,” Nick Scutari – who is both chairman of the county committee and president of the state Senate – held an early, early convention on February 8 and gave its blessing to Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp. The Middlesex County Democratic Committee, a party organization run by boss Kevin McCabe, gave its backingto a favorite son of sorts, East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen. The Mercer County Democratic Committee met on February 26, and it endorsed Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson. And the Somerset County Democratic Committee convention is scheduled for March 18, but already four of its commissioners have endorsed fellow Commissioner Shanel Robinson.
Thus, rather than let voters evaluate and choose one of the 18 candidates running, some of whom are likely to drop out before the June 2 primary, four different county organizations are putting four different thumbs on the scale. To what end, exactly?
Certainly, the end of the county line is forcing county organizations, and county chairs, to rethink strategy.
And TNJD had this exchange with Rasmussen:
Q Are these endorsements a way for the county bosses to try to hold on to what they had?
A. Yeah. And voters do not seem to have any patience for that right now. The voters are prepared to write that off. They’re prepared to ignore that and not just to write it off, to ignore it, but also to hold it against the candidates who wield it. And so, that’s where the party organizations need to be careful. They need to figure this out. They need to figure out how to be a trusted resource because right now, they’re not. Right now, they’re suspects.
Suspect they are.
Arnold Korotkin
THE END OF THE COUNTY ‘BOSS’?
Not quite. Not yet. But the writing’s on the wall. Case in point: useless county endorsement conventions
|
|
Photo credit: The Jersey Journal
Throughout New Jersey, a county-by-county series of political conventions is underway, to endorse candidates for office – from U.S. senators and member of the House of Representatives to county commissioners. To some, these events are seen as examples of local democracy in action, bringing together party organizations on a countywide basis to choose who to support in the June 2 primary vote. But to others, especially to reformers, to activists, and to seasoned political observers, these conventions represent a desperate effort by county bosses to maintain their grip over local politics.
For at least a century, politics in New Jersey has been associated with the existence of the political boss, the powerful and well-connected county or municipal leader who commands a network of business associates, patronage employees, ambitious office-holders seeking to move up the ranks, and pay-to-play contractors who line the boss’s campaign coffers with contributions. The legendary archetype in the state was Frank Hague (1876-1956), the brewery bill collector and corrupt, anti-communist mayor of Jersey City and Hudson County boss who squatted atop the state for decades.
They’re still around.
But things are changing. The collapse of the “county line,” which allowed county bosses to rig election ballots in party primaries in an overwhelming advantage for hand-picked favorites, crippled the power of the county bosses in 2024. As a result, the county endorsements mean a lot less than they used to. For example, in Essex County and Morris County, conventions met in December and ended up backing Brendan Gill and Tom Malinowski, respectively. But Gill, a commissioner and apparatchik of the machine in Essex, the fiefdom of Chairman LeRoy Jones, finished fourth after a chaotic and contentious online convention. And Malinowski, a former member of Congress, who’d represented a small section of Morris County until 2022, finished second. Both lost to a spirited, independent grassroots effort by Analilia Mejia, a union organizer and former leader of the Working Families Party.
Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, told The New Jersey Democrat in an interview that things have indeed changed since 2024. Asked about the fact that Gill lost to three others despite the backing of the Essex County Dems, Rasmussen said:
They just couldn’t overcome a lot of that splintering that we’re talking about. This is a situation the party leaders have to be sweating. They ask themselves, ‘Is this going to keep on happening to us, or are we going to figure out how to handle these insurgent campaigns, so that we can regain a foothold over them?’ Not through changing the rules. You know, the line is gone. That’s not coming back. But can they leverage the other assets and other advantages that they have to be able to gain the upper hand again? Because right now, I think that we’re seeing that they’ve lost the upper hand.
Parties have lost control, to a degree, over who wins nominations, and the party’s traditional “gatekeeping” function no longer applies, said Rasmussen. “They’ve lost that, and it’s not coming back to them.”
Many question whether endorsements by the county organizations have any impact in the real world and, indeed, whether they should make endorsements at all. (On the national level, for example, the Democratic National Committee doesn’t endorse anyone running in the presidential primary.) In some cases, a party endorsement comes with a degree of election assistance, literature, door-knocking, and phone calls. But compared to what the candidates themselves do, and help from unions, activists, and in some cases super PACs, the county organizations usually don’t make much of a difference.
End of the Line
“For the most part, you don’t get anything from a party endorsement,” a leading Democratic strategist told The New Jersey Democrat. “And the county chairs have an outsize opinion of how important they are. For candidates, what you get if you win is: nothing.” Asked whether the county committees should even bother to endorse candidates, the strategist said, “In fact, a convention often does involve a roomful of grassroots activists. But maybe they should just have a meet-and-greet instead.”
The end of the county line opened the barrier to entry for candidates seeking office, since hopefuls no longer faced the prospect of heavy-handed backing from a county boss. In CD-11, the special election to succeed Representative Mikie Sherrill in Congress, drew as many as 13 Democratic candidates. At last count, at least 18 Democrats are running to succeed Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman in CD-12, eight Democrats are seeking to unseat Representative Tom Kean Jr. in CD-7, and five candidates are vying to topple Representative Jeff Van Drew in South Jersey’s CD-2.
“In New Jersey, progressive activists have successfully removed the line after years and years of county leaders effectively blocking any challenge to incumbents,” said Ritu Pancholy, vice chair of the South Orange Democratic Committee, in an interview with The New Jersey Democrat. “Now that we have contested elections, county organizations should not endorse pre-primary. We should enable voters to learn from the candidates. [And] because these primary endorsements occur so early in the process, county organizations should abstain in the primary.”
Asked if the endorsements were often predetermined, Pancholy – who’s involved in a countywide effort in Essex to reform how the Essex County Democratic Committee works – said yes. “[We] receive minimal information beforehand, and it is evident that county leadership has already chosen favorites. I have never believed in that practice, and it makes the process feel unfair.”
In South Jersey, where any Democratic nominee will face a steep challenge in defeating Van Drew, a former-Democrat-turned-MAGA-Republican, county conventions have been held in Atlantic, Cumberland, and Cape May counties. In the latter case, the contested convention in Cape May County endorsed Zack Mullock, the mayor of Cape May city, by voice vote, though one opponent, Bayly Winder, a former USAID official, slammed the decisionas the result of “backroom dealing.”
In Cumberland County, the Democratic committee’s convention endorsed Tim Alexander, a civil rights attorney who’s already lost to Van Drew, but not before Chairman Kevin McCann endorsed Mullock but then said he didn’t mean to back him for reasons that are unclear. (According to people familiar with what happened, allies of Alexander pressured McCann behind the scenes.) The end result left many complaining of machine politics, and according to the New Jersey Globe the Cumberland Dems didn’t bother to release a vote count, in what the Globe called a “chair endorsement snafu.”
And in Atlantic County, the Democratic convention narrowly endorsed Alexander, who edged out Winder by a vote of 101 to 95, after ranked-choice-voting eliminated Mullock and another candidate. But Michael Suleiman, the chairman of the Atlantic County Dems, had announced his support for Alexander back in December, even before Mullock was in the race, perhaps stacking the deck in favor of Alexander.
In an interview with TNJD, conducted before the convention was held, Suleiman acknowledged that with the end of the county line, endorsements are less potent. “With an office block design” – that is, the post-county line ballot design – “conventions don’t mean as much,” he said. “However, I do think it’s a good stamp of approval for candidates.” Yet he seemed nostalgic for the old way of doing things, saying:
I thought, frankly, that sometimes the anti-line stuff was a little unfair. I mean, if you don’t like the line, you don’t like the line. The judge got rid of it, no problem. But a lot of these county committee members have been long-standing volunteers and operatives and door knockers and canvassers for decades, and they’ve been around the block. They know politics. They know how to look at candidates and I think they have a good eye, whether you agree with them or not on who would be a good candidate and who wouldn’t be. And I think the county conventions provide a good litmus test for candidates’ viability.
Suleiman added that because a county endorsement doesn’t mean as much as it used to before the elimination of the county line, a candidate endorsed by the county committee still has to work hard to win the nomination. “If you win our convention, you get the endorsement, you get the slogan,” he said. “But at the end of the day, does that mean that much? Not as much as it did, quite frankly, but I still think it’s an important part of the process. I think it’s good for the candidates to go through that exercise because, I mean, look, if you can’t whip up or effectively campaign to 300 party volunteers, then you shouldn’t be running for higher office, right?”
But that’s exactly the problem, a veteran Democratic organizer told TNJD. Forcing candidates to spend weeks ahead of a convention appealing to delegates to an impending convention, meeting them personally, making phone calls, sending emails and text messages to the delegates, is overly burdensome. “In my county, candidates expend enormous effort trying to reach a hundred people. And that takes away time that they could be using to reach actual voters,” she said.
Take, for example, New Jersey’s CD-7, which sprawls across all or part of six counties: Hunterdon, Warren, Sussex, Morris, Somerset, and Union, with eight candidates seeking the nomination. Union County’s committee, which met earlier, has yet to endorse anyone in CD-7, but apparently it will. Morris, Sussex, Somerset, and Warren County Democratic committees are all meeting later in March, and each will presumably endorse one of the eight.
In Hunterdon County, in CD-7’s field of 18 candidates, the Democratic committee’s convention on March 1 ended up giving the party’s backing to Rebecca Bennett, a healthcare official and Navy veteran, in a two-person run-off, over Brian Varela, a grassroots organizer and former leader of the New Jersey Forward Party.
Michael Drulis, the chairman of the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee, told TNJD that he believes the process works fairly well. In an interview conducted on the eve of the convention, Drulis said that about 250 delegates do the work ahead of time, do research, and meet the candidates at various events or in one-on-one talks. He said:
So the candidate that gets endorsed is endorsed by the people who have really done the work to get to know them, make sure that we’re putting forth the candidate who can win in November, who is the worthy candidate, who has the right democratic values, who can run the right campaign. These are all things that take some analysis and focus.
Some counties, Drulis acknowledges, may or may not have a boss-run system, but he said that Hunterdon is proud to have a system that’s run collectively by its county committee. And, he said, Senator Andy Kim’s effort in 2024 that challenged the county line system, and got it eliminated, was certainly aimed at the boss system. “Senator Kim’s lawsuit and action was created around what you’re referring to the county boss, right? It was intended to take away that characterization and that kind of authority,” he said. “And I don’t know about other counties, to be honest. I can only talk to you about what Hunterdon is. But every county has their own bylaws. … And in other countries, the chair at the end of the day is voted on by the county, and if that’s the kind of leadership and style they want, they have that right to self-govern.”
In other words, if a county wants to have a boss, they can have a boss.
Meanwhile, in CD-12, spread over four counties (Mercer, Somerset, Union, and Middlesex) the four county organizations are set to endorse four different people. The Union County Democratic Committee, run by a “boss of bosses,” Nick Scutari – who is both chairman of the county committee and president of the state Senate – held an early, early convention on February 8 and gave its blessing to Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp. The Middlesex County Democratic Committee, a party organization run by boss Kevin McCabe, gave its backingto a favorite son of sorts, East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen. The Mercer County Democratic Committee met on February 26, and it endorsed Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson. And the Somerset County Democratic Committee convention is scheduled for March 18, but already four of its commissioners have endorsed fellow Commissioner Shanel Robinson.
Thus, rather than let voters evaluate and choose one of the 18 candidates running, some of whom are likely to drop out before the June 2 primary, four different county organizations are putting four different thumbs on the scale. To what end, exactly?
Certainly, the end of the county line is forcing county organizations, and county chairs, to rethink strategy.
And TNJD had this exchange with Rasmussen:
Q Are these endorsements a way for the county bosses to try to hold on to what they had?
A. Yeah. And voters do not seem to have any patience for that right now. The voters are prepared to write that off. They’re prepared to ignore that and not just to write it off, to ignore it, but also to hold it against the candidates who wield it. And so, that’s where the party organizations need to be careful. They need to figure this out. They need to figure out how to be a trusted resource because right now, they’re not. Right now, they’re suspect.
Suspect they are.