Analilia Mejia and Tom Malinowski are neck-and-neck for the Democratic nomination in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district, with Mejia currently leading Malinowski by 486 votes, 28.8% to 28.0%.
The New Jersey Globe previously projected that Tom Malinowski would win the nomination based on vote-by-mail and early in-person votes, but Mejia had an unexpected and massive surge among Election Day voters that propelled the race into a photo finish. We retract the call and regret its prematurity, though it is still a possibility that Malinowski will win.
Around 91% of the vote has been tallied, and a winner may not be declared tonight, pending late-counted ballots.
Two other top contenders for the seat, former Lieutenant Gov. Tahesha Way and Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill (D-Montclair), both fell a fair bit behind; Way is currently getting 17% of the vote, and Gill is getting 14%. Nine other Democrats also appeared on the ballot, two of whom had dropped out of the race prior to Election Day, but none of them pulled in more than a negligible share of the vote.
If Mejia wins, it would be a remarkable upset and a major victory for state and national progressives, who boosted Mejia over her better-known and better-funded rivals. Mejia, a former top Bernie Sanders staffer on her first campaign for elected office, ran as the field’s most left-wing candidate and rallied a huge and diverse progressive base behind her.
Malinowski meanwhile, represented a neighboring congressional district from 2019 to 2023 and entered the race with both the highest name recognition and the most money. Malinowski was generally a moderate during his earlier stint in Congress, but he, like Mejia, is affiliated with the more reform-minded wing of the New Jersey Democratic Party.
In its closing weeks, the race was reshaped by a huge bout of outside spending, including $2.3 million from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee against Malinowski, whom the group slammed as insufficiently pro-Israel (using ads that had nothing to do with Israel at all). Way got some major outside assistance from the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association, and Malinowski also had an allied super PAC spending on his behalf.
If Malinowski does indeed lose, then AIPAC may be responsible for his loss – but Mejia, who likened Israel’s actions in Gaza to a genocide, is not the candidate the group would have wanted to see win.