Congressional candidate Analilia Mejia, who joined delegates in convention protest.
It all came together quickly. In a matter of just a week or so, dozens and dozens of elected district leaders across Essex County coalesced into an organized, ad hoc dissenting coalition to take on the entrenched political machine that has long run Essex, under the twin thumbs of LeRoy Jones, the chairman of the Essex County Democratic Committee (ECDC), and Joseph “Joey D” DiVincenzo, the county executive for Essex County.
The nascent movement, initiated by South Orange district leaders and members of SOMA Action, an Indivisible affiliate based in South Orange and Maplewood, united left-leaning district leaders and reform-minded , center-left district leaders in a direct challenge to how the county’s Democratic party bosses planned to run a rushed December 2 online “convention.” That convention was called by Jones to decide which candidate would get the ECDC’s endorsement in a primary scheduled for February to nominate a candidate to replace Governor-Elect Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district.
To the surprise of many of the those involved, they almost got what they wanted: a delay of the convention, a better voting system and more information about the candidates. Almost, but not quite.
The effort reflected long-held grievances about the power of machine politics in New Jersey.
District leaders, each elected to represent a section of one of the county’s cities and towns, form the backbone of the Democratic party in each municipality. Usually, however, district leaders are siloed town by town. But in one week – starting in South Orange and Maplewood – they connected with one another via the Internet and over the phone to form a loose confederation that ultimately expanded to 94 people, including leaders in Bloomfield, Millburn, Glen Ridge, Livingston, and Nutley.
It all started when Rep. Mikie Sherrill, the former congresswoman and now governor-elect, resigned her seat in Congress, triggering a scramble among would-be candidates to replace her in a special election that Governor Phil Murphy called for April 2026. One after another, politicians, lawyers, former military officers, and activists, began jockeying in a crowded field in anticipation of a Democratic primary election to be held in early February. By Monday, December 1, at least a dozen had apparently qualified by collecting enough signatures to get their names on the ballot.
But – before all the campaigning, and before all the actual, you know, voting – the potential candidates had to deal with the issue of who’d get the endorsement of the ECDC. Spoiler alert: pretty much everyone involved, including the candidates themselves, knew that the lightly shuffled deck had already been stacked in favor of the card secretly placed at the bottom of that deck, namely, Brendan Gill, a political insider, lobbyist, member of the board of Essex County Commissioners, and campaign manager for Murphy’s 2017 election. (See last week’s story in The New Jersey Democrat, How to Rig an Election in Essex County.)
Many of the district leaders felt that they were blindsided by the sudden call for a convention on the virtual eve of the Thanksgiving holiday. Sometime around 7:30 pm on Tuesday, November 25 – two days before Thanksgiving, that is – the voting members of the ECDC, the district leaders, received an email out of the blue announcing that ECDC would convene a Zoom convention on Tuesday, December 2. Just one week later. And, it said, the ECDC members would vote for one of the dozen or so candidates, each of whom would have just two minutes to speak. Whoever got the most votes would then get the ECDC nod.
In an “Open Letter to the Essex County Democratic Leadership,” initiated by a handful of district leaders that grew to include nearly a hundred people – representing about one-fourth of all the eligible voting ECDC members in CD-11 – the dissenters explained their objections, and they compared ECDC’s rushed process to a more orderly process in neighboring Morris County. They called for a postponement of the convention and they demanded the use of ranked-choice voting:
As district leaders at the town level, we’re being called to a virtual convention in less than a week to vote on the Essex County Democratic Committee endorsement for the Congressional special election. We’ve been told to expect an as-yet-unknown number of candidates to speak for two minutes each via Zoom and then we’re expected to vote.
Our neighbors in Morris County have chosen a better path: more time, more preparation, more information from candidates, and – critically – a ranked-choice vote for the endorsement.
These are extraordinary circumstances: a short timeline, many candidates, no public polling, no campaign finance report from most of the candidates to understand their resources (and where those resources come from). There have been no forums or debates.
Essex County Democrats should delay our convention to a timeframe similar to Morris County to allow for the field of candidates to be finalized and for information to be received from the campaigns.
And no matter when the convention takes place, in the interests of democracy and unity behind the choice made by the convention, we request that the endorsement be made by ranked-choice voting.
Among the eventual signers of the Open Letter were two district leaders among the 13 candidates seeking the nomination: Analilia Mejia, a progressive activist and former director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, and Dean Dafis, a civil rights activist and member of the Maplewood Township Committee.
In a December 2 press release announcing their opposition to the convention procedures, the dissenting group noted that “several powerful members of the county leadership publicly endorsed a preferred candidate” – that would be Gill – “even before petitions were submitted, signaling that the outcome had effectively been pre-determined by party insiders.”
“This is not how a democratic process should look,” said Deborah Alessandro, a South Orange district leader who signed the letter, adding that ECDC members were not elected “to serve as a rubber stamp for decisions made behind closed doors.”
And Mejia called for the convention to remain neutral and not to endorse anyone in the primary. “The last thing we need is a rushed process that puts a finger on the scale,” she wrote to ECDC. “We can’t tell people we’re fighting for democracy in Washington while participating in processes here at home that feel rigged from the start.”
So, what happened?
As the convention itself got underway on Tuesday evening, LeRoy Jones began the meeting by announcing that in response to calls to postpone or delay it, he’d ask for a vote among those present on Zoom on whether or not to do so. It was clear, then, that Jones had felt the pressure from the previous week’s protests. And, in the end, the vote was exceedingly close: 133 delegates voted to delay it, against 142 who voted to proceed as planned. The fact that dozens of district leaders beyond the ninety-some who’d signed the open letter voted to postpone a meeting that had already convened was the first sign that Jones’ grip over the committee that he chairs was perhaps shakier that some thought going in.
The convention then heard from each of 12 candidates, in strictly regulated, two-minute-long speeches. (A thirteenth candidate, Jeff Grayzel, the former mayor of Morris Township, boycotted the convention. “Your convention is rigged, and your every move has been choreographed with the assistance of party insiders,” he said.) Most of the speeches were hurried, filled with boilerplate rhetoric. Some of them noted that it felt impossible to present anything like a coherent view of one’s background and views in just 120 seconds. And three of the candidates who did speak – Mejia, Dafis, and Zach Beecher, a former paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division – called on the conventioneers to abstain from endorsing anyone.
From there, the convention went directly to a vote. It’s no overstatement to say that the voting process, conducted online by something called ElectionBuddy, was a complete mess. Complicated and cumbersome, involving emailed links to each delegate, the process was plagued with glitches, made worse by the inability to easily communicate the procedure in a way that was understandable. Dozens of delegates complained that they didn’t receive the necessary email, and many others voted first in the Zoom chat window, which didn’t count. And it was interminable. “I think it would be a comedy if it wasn’t so tragic,” Mejia told TNJD. “And it was all precooked.”
Like watching a performance of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, in which you already know that Hamlet, the king, the queen, Ophelia, Polonius, and many other leading characters end up dead, in the end Brendan Gill won. Surprisingly, though, fully 90 delegates, all district leaders, voted to abstain, that is, not to endorse a candidate, while 132 voted to back Gill. (In other words, had things gone slightly more sideways, along the lines of the earlier vote to delay the convention, it’s conceivable that the Chosen One might have lost to None of the Above – in which case, Jones told the convention, the ECDC would have made no endorsement. (Thirty-six votes went to one or another of the 12 candidates who spoke.)
Noting the technology glitches and the lengthy delays, Jones put the best face on it. “We did the best we can,” he said, at the end.
Ritu Pancholy, a district leader and co-chair of the South Orange Democratic Committee, was one of the chief organizers of the Open Letter. It was, she told TNJD, quite an accomplishment that a disparate group of district leaders from seven Essex County towns came together so quickly, over the Thanksgiving holiday, to put together the challenge that they did. “We did what we could in a very short time frame,” she said.
“What happened here this week is a microcosm of what’s happening overall in the Democratic party,” she said. “People are tired of the old antics and the status quo.” Pancholy, a member of SOMA Action, is also encouraged that the effort, begun locally, spread into neighboring towns and that the district leaders throughout Essex were receptive to the idea of fighting back against the party establishment.
Could this be the start of a longer-term grassroots revolt? It’s possible, of course, that the scores of Essex County district leaders who signed the Open Letter could continue their efforts going forward. The county machines in New Jersey – and not just in Essex, but in Kevin McCabe’s Middlesex, Paul Juliano’s Bergen, Craig Guy’s Hudson, and Jim Beach’s Camden, for instance – are potentially vulnerable to bottom-up revolts by reformers and progressives. Could some of the 94 district leader who signed the Open Letter turn themselves into a semi-official “progressive caucus” inside the ECDC?
In 2024, in South Orange and Maplewood, members of SOMA Action took note of the fact that in many districts in both towns there were vacancies in districts where no district leader was in place. In the spring of ’24, SOMA Action members filed to run in many of those districts – and quite a few were elected in both towns. It was an example of using the mechanism of plain old American democracy to put activists and organizers into place inside the machinery of politics. And what happened this week, culminating in the challenge to LeRoy Jones & Co., was the result.
It’s something that could be replicated elsewhere, in pretty much any of the state’s 500+ municipalities.
Meanwhile, what does the endorsement of Brendan Gill mean? Back in the day – that is, before 2024 – getting that endorsement mattered, because the county organizations could rig the primary ballot to favor an anointed endorsee, giving the machine-backed candidate a huge advantage. Thanks, however, to Andy Kim, Matt Platkin, and a lot of activists, the “county line” crashed and burned last year. Still, the ECDC endorsement does matter, kind of: whoever the county Democratic organization supports benefits from literature printed by ECDC, from field teams of door-knockers and phone-bankers, and the use of the county “slogan,” which is not really a slogan at all – it’s “Essex County Democratic Committee, Inc., ” which the Chosen One can attach to his or her name on the primary ballot. (The added “Inc.” at the end just adds to the irony: these are truly corporate Dems.)
But, as Mejia told The New Jersey Democrat, it’s now up to the voters, when they go to the polls in February. “It motivates me,” she said. “I’m knocking on doors, I’m talking to people.” A former national political director for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, Mejia noted the victory last month of Zohran Mamdani in New York City as a sign that Democratic voters want something different. “And what’s motivating the party now is bold, progressive ideas, and not just in Mamdani’s race.”
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Kudos to NJ-11 district leaders for their rapid organizing to make a stand! Thanks for your reporting!
An early version of this article mentioned the 17th congressional district. The district in question is CD-11, not CD-17. We regret the typo.