Analilia Mejia and Tom Malinowski are neck-and-neck for the Democratic nomination in New Jersey\u2019s 11th congressional district, with Mejia currently leading Malinowski by 486 votes, 28.8% to 28.0%.<\/p>\n
The New Jersey Globe previously projected<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n Around 91% of the vote has been tallied, and a winner may not be declared tonight, pending late-counted ballots.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n If Mejia wins, it would be a remarkable upset and a major victory for state and national progressives, who boosted Mejia<\/a> 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\u2019s most left-wing candidate and rallied a huge and diverse progressive base behind her.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, 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<\/a> from the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association, and Malinowski also had an allied super PAC spending on his behalf.<\/p>\n If Malinowski does indeed lose, then AIPAC may be responsible for his loss \u2013 but Mejia, who likened Israel\u2019s actions in Gaza to a genocide, is not the candidate the group would have wanted to see win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Analilia Mejia and Tom Malinowski are neck-and-neck for the Democratic nomination in New Jersey\u2019s 11th congressional district, with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":452237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-452236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=452236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/452236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/452237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=452236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=452236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=452236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}