Bids for U.S. Senate, Congressional Seats Top Today’s Primary Ballot
The U.S. Senate seat former Newark Mayor Cory Booker won last October tops today’s primary election, which will also determine which major party candidates will vie for all of New Jersey’s 12 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in November.
This year’s primary is more notable than most because a quarter of the state’s members of Congress are retiring — in the case of the 1st District, Rob Andrews has already left — and in most districts, the winner of the Democratic or Republican primary winds up winning the general election. New Jersey’s districts are currently split, with half “red” and half “blue.”
Given that, probably the most watched race is for the right to represent the Democratic party on the general election ballot in Central Jersey’s 12th District. Three current state legislators are running, as well as a physicist, but the race is expected to boil down to two: Assemblywoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Mercer) and Sen. Linda Greenstein (D-Middlesex).
The only nonpartisan poll, a mid-May Monmouth University Poll, had Greenstein leading Watson Coleman among likely voters by just 1 percentage point, but a third of voters were still undecided. In a blog post yesterday, Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, gave Watson Coleman a two-point edge, but added, “I won’t be the least bit surprised if this forecast turns out to be wrong.” (O’Dea/NJSpotlight)
The polling place was a ghost town. When people run unopposed why bother spending the money to open. The polls?
why did you show up?
Even someone running ‘unopposed’ needs at least one bona fide vote from a bona fide primary voter on a designated primary election day to be eligible to win the election and receive their party’s nomination. And it’s not necessarily true that they are running unopposed–voters have the ability to write-in the candidate of their choice. Although this is unlikely, write-in votes for a particular candidate could outnumber the votes cast for a candidate named on the ballot. So it is a fallacy to presume that someone that appears on the ballot will automatically win.
It is an embarrassment to our Democracy that no one even runs in these primaries. Total waste of time to give a facade of democracy to the 2 major parties. I felt like a total moron for taking 15 minutes of my life yesterday to show up to vote when there was only 1 opposed race and that was a foregone conclusion. Maybe Albino had the right idea, these elections are a waste of time.
We should loosen the rules for getting independents and third parties on the general election ballot. Then let the Dems and Reps pay for the primaries themselves and run them privately.