Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA via AP Images
Rep. Robert Menendez Jr. (D-NJ) speaking at the U.S. Capitol, June 7, 2023
The Democratic primary on Tuesday for New Jersey’s Eighth Congressional District will in large part be a referendum on the last name Menendez, which once held cachet in the state’s politics but has now been sullied in the eyes of many New Jersey voters.
That’s the challenge for incumbent Rep. Rob Menendez Jr., the fortunate son of disgraced Sen. Bob Menendez, who’s currently on trial across the river in New York for a second round of corruption charges brought by the Department of Justice. Menendez Jr., who was only first elected to Congress in 2022, is facing a highly contested challenge from Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla, who has made his opponent’s family connections a focal point for the race.
There are other policy differences over issues like Medicare for All, but for the most part the race isn’t neatly ideological. When it comes to New Jersey politics, especially this year, the real schism is machine vs. outsider.
The outcome of the race will be a major test of the durability of the state’s political machine, which has taken severe blows to its standing this year, including to the very design of the ballot that Menendez and Bhalla will appear on. Menendez Jr. will still reap many benefits from the machine, including top donors, consultants, and party resources. But he may not be able to overcome the tarnished image of the state’s business-as-usual politics. The only recent poll, from April, showed Bhalla with a five-point lead.
“We’re watching perhaps the waning hours of the boss-dominated archaic system in New Jersey, which still feels like a living exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of American Politics,” said Ross Baker, political science professor at Rutgers University.
The prosecution against Menendez Sr. exposed a pay-to-play culture that has been associated with New Jersey politics for some time. But the real shake-up in the political establishment came in the Democratic primary to replace Menendez in the Senate, where Gov. Phil Murphy’s wife Tammy squared off against Rep. Andy Kim, who represents a new guard of reformers critical of the state machine.
Murphy’s campaign, wounded by charges of nepotism, failed to catch fire, losing every contested county endorsement convention in the state. She eventually dropped out. More consequentially, Kim fought and defeated the notorious “county line” ballot, which was used to give machine-backed candidates preferential placement. A state court temporarily invalidated the county line, making 2024 the first primary election in which the names of all candidates for a particular office will appear next to each other on the ballot. (Bhalla was a party to the lawsuit.)
That means that Menendez will not have the advantages of ballot design in Union, Hudson, and Essex Counties. But the state party machines are still working aggressively to keep him in office.
MENENDEZ JR. TOOK HEAT WELL BEFORE charges were announced against Menendez Sr. last fall for accepting bribes from an Egyptian halal meat tycoon and other business interests in exchange for pushing their policy preferences. His son was criticized for being propped up by party bosses mainly because of his family name when he ran for the seat vacated by 13-term Rep. Albio Sires in 2022. Prior to that, Menendez Jr., 38, had a relatively unassuming career as a lawyer and then a Murphy-appointed commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. But as soon as he announced his congressional bid, he immediately received the endorsement of every major local and state politician and easily dispatched two challengers in the primary.
This time around, the younger Menendez seems to clearly be aware his last name is a problem. The campaign logo, plastered on yard signs throughout the district, features “ROB” in prominent bold letters and “MENENDEZ” in a smaller font. That’s a complete flip from the last cycle, when the word “MENENDEZ” was much more prominently featured.
Menendez Jr. testified on his father’s behalf during an unrelated 2017 corruption case for accepting gifts in exchange for political service for a doctor. That case ended up with a hung jury, thanks in large part to the Supreme Court’s narrowing of the definition of public corruption.
Though he has yet to testify this time around, Menendez Jr. has publicly defended his father while he fights the DOJ case. “I strongly believe in his integrity and his values,” Menendez Jr. said in a statement after the indictment.
Remarks like these have only bolstered Bhalla’s line of attack. A prominent ad campaign run by an aligned super PAC argues that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” (The super PAC, America’s Promise, commissioned the poll showing Bhalla in the lead.)
This time around, the younger Menendez seems to clearly be aware his last name is a problem.
Menendez Jr. has hit back at Bhalla by claiming that he’s dragging the contest into the mud by making it about private family matters. The Bhalla campaign, however, contends that they aren’t going after a personal relationship between father and son, but the way Menendez Jr. has exploited his last name for political connections and money. “He’s a replication of the same apparatus,” Bhalla says repeatedly on the trail.
Menendez seems to want to have it both ways. He wants his opponent to focus on him individually, while relying on his father’s network of consultants, legal resources, and donor base to finance his congressional ambitions.
For one, Menendez Sr.’s leadership PAC, New Millennium, has donated $20,000 to his son’s campaign this cycle, while funneling money to the legal defense fund for the corruption trial at the same time. Menendez Jr. refuses to return those contributions, while virtually every other recipient of the senator’s bucks has returned them or donated the money elsewhere, including former allies like Rep. Josh Gottheimer. Menendez Sr.’s reputation has become that radioactive.
The senator’s legal defense fund also shares many of the same major donors as his son’s congressional campaign. Those top contributors to both the campaign and legal defense fund include partners at the law firm Lowenstein Sandler (where Menendez Jr. used to work) and the real estate tycoon family the Barrys. Last fall, after the first fundraising quarter, Politico reported that over a quarter of Menendez’s top contributors also gave money to his father’s previous Senate races.
Several top advisers to Sen. Menendez have maxed out individual contributions to his son’s campaign. One is Don Scarinci, whom Sen. Menendez was forced to fire in the late 1990s when he was caught on tape urging a contractor to hire one of the senator’s political allies, though Scarinci remained very close in the Menendez political orbit. Another is the senator’s former chief of staff Mike Solimon, who runs the lobbying group Mercury Public Affairs. Solimon is a registered foreign lobbyist for Qatar, one of the Middle Eastern countries Menendez accepted gifts from in exchange for political favors, the DOJ alleges. Bhalla has also criticized Menendez Jr. more generally for taking large campaign donations from Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry, as his father has.
Jr.’s campaign also is chock-full of his father’s consulting staffers, who jumped ship when it became evident the senator would lose his seat. (Menendez Sr. has reportedly filed enough signatures to run for re-election as an independent, though that is mostly seen as a bargaining chip in a potential plea deal.)
Menendez hired on three firms, Renaissance Campaign Strategies, GLH Consulting, and Message and Media, all of which worked for the senator. Rob Menendez also retained his father’s longtime fundraiser Sam Maltzman, who was fired from the Obama campaign for soliciting a donation from a New Jersey doctor who was looking for a pardon in a Medicare fraud case in exchange for a dinner with the president. That doctor, Dr. Munr Kazmir, happens to also be a contributor to both Menendez Sr. and Jr.’s campaigns.
Menendez also carries the support of Hudson County, the largest county in the district and the key base of support for the family’s political empire. The ties are so deep that most of the senator’s backers in the county are still standing by his side, and one expression of that commitment is through their endorsement of his son in this primary race.
The party bosses often also serve as local elected officials, like Union City’s Brian Stack, who is mayor and a state senator. Hudson County’s Nicholas Sacco was a state senator until redistricting put him into Stack’s district. These politicians control volunteer groups and large blocs of votes, which Menendez Jr. still has in his corner.
He also has strong support from House Democrats. BOLD PAC, the electoral arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, cut a Spanish-language ad for Menendez Jr. And in mid-May, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), his entire leadership team, and key committee leaders like Energy and Commerce’s Frank Pallone (D-NJ) and Ways and Means’ Richie Neal (D-MA) held a fundraiser for Menendez Jr. While Jeffries is generous with endorsements to incumbent Democrats, raising money is a step he has not taken for threatened progressives like Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
Policy differences in the race are minimal. Bhalla is championing Medicare for All, while Menendez calls for a more generic expansion of access to health care. Other policy disagreements are more local. Menendez supports an $11 billion infrastructure project first proposed by former Republican Gov. Chris Christie to expand the New Jersey Turnpike. Unions also want the project to continue because it creates jobs. Bhalla is opposed to the expansion because it entails using eminent domain to uproot mainly low-income communities.
Those flashpoints likely won’t decide the election. The main showdown is principally over whether voters see Menendez as part of the same corrupt establishment as his father, and whether the machine era in New Jersey is truly over.
