How the deal to send Nellie Pou to Congress came together

A few weeks ago, when Democrats were beginning to chatter about the possibility of having to replace the late Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-Paterson) on the ballot, State Sen. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon) wasn’t at the top of anyone’s shortlist. Pou is widely liked in her neck of New Jersey, but with numerous other ambitious Democrats spread across the 9th congressional district, the mild-mannered state senator didn’t seem like a top contender for the seat.

That assessment, as it turns out, was flat-out wrong. Upon announcing her campaign last week, Pou amassed support from all three county Democratic chairs in the 9th district, and won last night’s convention uncontested after all of her would-be opponents dropped out of the race. Now the official Democratic nominee for the seat (replacing Pascrell on the ballot), she’s on a glide path to Congress, assuming she beats Republican Billy Prempeh in November.

How did Pou do it? By being the right candidate at the right time: a middle-of-the-road Democrat who didn’t throw up any ideological red flags, a Hispanic woman who was a demographic match for the plurality-Hispanic 9th district, and a skilled, enemy-free politician who was liked by basically everyone and strongly opposed by no one.

For party leaders in the 9th district, which covers parts of Passaic and Bergen Counties and a small portion of Hudson County, Pou was too perfect of an opportunity to pass up – and their word was gospel, since the timing of Pascrell’s death didn’t allow for a proper primary where voters themselves could have weighed in. Here’s the story behind the frenetic weeklong campaign that will likely lead to New Jersey’s first Latina congresswoman.

Laying the groundwork

The first big decision in the race for Pascrell’s seat was made by Pascrell himself, when he announced in March 2023 that he would run for a fifteenth term in Congress. Pascrell was 86 at the time and would have been nearly 90 by the time the next congressional term ended, but he was still a feisty presence in Washington and insisted that he could continue doing the job just as well as he had been for nearly three decades.

Pascrell’s decision to run again was enough to deter most other Democrats from running for his seat; both Assemblywoman Shavonda Sumter (D-North Haledon) and Paterson Mayor André Sayegh floated potential primary campaigns but opted against them. One Democrat, Prospect Park Mayor Mohamed Khairullah, did step up to challenge Pascrell – and he got crushed 76%-24%.

That seemed to settle things, but when Pascrell was hospitalized on July 13 with an undisclosed illness, chatter about his seat started up again – this time with an added layer of anxiety about what would happen if things went south for Pascrell. Everyone doing the chattering wanted the congressman to pull through, but they also recognized that they had a very short window of time to figure out an alternate solution if he didn’t.

Under state law, Democrats had until August 29 – yesterday – to meet for a county convention to choose a new nominee to replace Pascrell if he died or withdrew from the race. As July and August ticked by, the timeframe to come up with a solution if tragedy struck grew shorter and shorter, and Democrats began playing through disaster scenarios.

What if Pascrell died in the middle of election season when it was too late to remove him from the ballot, forcing Democrats to convince their voters to vote for a dead man over Billy Prempeh? What if the House was decided by a one-seat margin in November, and a vacancy in the 9th district prevented Hakeem Jeffries from becoming Speaker? There wasn’t much local Democrats could do to avert those scenarios as long as Pascrell’s prognosis remained uncertain, but they could do their best to be prepared for a sudden vacancy.

In Passaic County, Democrats in Clifton and Paterson began working to put people in county committee seats that had long been left unfilled. Because the state primary was back in June, county committee members would have complete control over who would fill Pascrell’s vacant spot on the general election ballot if he left the race in one way or another, meaning that every committee seat was crucial.

Bergen County Democrats, meanwhile, became aware of a key mathematical fact that not all of them had realized before: even though the 9th district was seen as a Passaic district, Bergen Democrats actually started out with an edge in county committee seats, especially if they joined forces with the district’s small Hudson contingent. If they wanted to, Bergen Democrats probably had the votes to elect one of their own to Congress.

All of those maneuverings had to remain private, though, as long as Pascrell stayed in limbo. The congressman’s health went up and down for more than a month; after briefly being discharged from the hospital on August 7, he had to be readmitted a few days later in worse shape than before. On August 21, Pascrell died at the age of 87.

That day, the state’s politics shut down in mourning for the congressman, who had been a legend in Paterson politics for nearly 40 years. The very next day, however, the campaign to replace him had to begin; there simply wasn’t enough time for anyone to wait any longer.

Sumter, Pou, and Assemblyman Benjie Wimberly (D-Paterson) – who all represent the same Paterson-based district in the state legislature – launched campaigns on August 22, while Sayegh entered the next day. Two prominent Bergen County politicians, Assemblyman Clinton Calabrese (D-Cliffside Park) and Bergen County Commissioner Tracy Silna Zur (D-Franklin Lakes), were seriously considering joining the race as well.

(Two other prospective contenders from the city of Passaic, Passaic Mayor Hector Lora and Assemblyman Gary Schaer, could have also been strong candidates – the city of Passaic is more aligned with Bergen County than Passaic County for political purposes – but they decided not to go for it.)

With so many formidable candidates running, the August 29 convention was shaping up to be a clown car, one with an impossible-to-forecast outcome. But that’s not how New Jersey bosses like their races to be fought, and the three county Democratic chairmen in the 9th district felt substantial pressure to come up with a deal. The question was, could they agree on a candidate before time ran out?

The grand deal

From the beginning, Passaic Democratic Chairman John Currie’s top choice for Pascrell’s seat was Sumter, his goddaughter and close ally, and he endorsed her the day she launched her campaign. If Passaic County were the only county in the 9th district, Sumter would likely be on her way to Congress right now.

But Sumter, considered one of the legislature’s most progressive members, had major vulnerabilities outside Currie’s orbit, especially on the issue of Israel. Democrats in Bergen County, Clifton, and the city of Passaic, the latter two of which have substantial Orthodox Jewish populations, began fretting that Sumter’s outspoken support for a ceasefire in Gaza would attract unwanted attention – and perhaps even draw the involvement of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which spent heavily to oust two pro-Palestine House Democrats in primaries this year.

(Sayegh, too, was seen as vulnerable on the Palestine issue, making him just as much of a no-go for the Democrats who were worried about Sumter.)

Given Sumter’s even-keeled answer on the Middle East at a candidate forum earlier this week, those concerns may have been overblown. Nonetheless, they were enough to poke major holes in her campaign, and they forced Currie to decide whether he wanted to wage a daunting political battle on behalf of his protégé.

The fundamental math problem for Currie was that while a bare majority of the 9th district’s population lives in Passaic County, his own Passaic coalition would be outnumbered in a direct county-on-county fight. Bergen and Hudson Democrats were, from the beginning of the process, allied as a bloc, and they had Democrats in the city of Passaic on their side too; combined, that trio accounts for around 60% of the 806 county committee seats in the district. Currie has had a good 2024 in other ways, maintaining control of the county commissioner board against a powerful slate of primary challengers, but his organization was not set up well to handle this particular 9th district campaign.

Ironically, Currie was the one who appointed the members of the Congressional Redistricting Commission back in 2021, when he was still the state party chair. He could have insisted that the commissioners draw a map making the 9th district into a more definitively Passaic-based district – but he wasn’t yet thinking about succession plans for the then-84-year-old Pascrell, and so he didn’t. 

Bergen Democrats, meanwhile, were dealing with a candidate problem of their own. Bergen Democratic Chairman Paul Juliano knew that his party had the county committee numbers to get its way at the convention, and he had two candidates, Zur and Calabrese, who were interested in running. If his entire organization had gotten behind one of them, they likely would have been unstoppable.

As white candidates from the far-flung corners of the 9th district, however, neither Zur nor Calabrese was an especially good fit for the majority-minority seat, and they knew it. Both politicians recognized that they could probably win, but that they’d draw some bad headlines for doing so and would be highly vulnerable to a primary challenge come 2026. After much hemming and hawing, both passed on running for the seat.

(The fact that there was no person of color from Bergen County ready to step up to run is Bergen Democrats’ own fault. In 2018, after Latina Assemblywoman Marlene Caride left to lead the state Department of Banking and Insurance, Democrats in the majority-minority 36th legislative chose Calabrese, the scion of a legendary Italian American political family in Cliffside Park, to replace her. Had they chosen a Hispanic politician instead, that person might be on their way to Congress right now – and had Caride stayed in politics rather than moving to the state judiciary, she could have been the frontrunner for the congressional seat.)

Finally, there was Hudson Democratic Chairman Craig Guy. Guy knew from the outset that Hudson Democrats would play third fiddle in a district dominated by Bergen and Passaic Counties, and no Hudson candidate ever emerged as a serious contender for the seat. 

Recognizing that, Guy tied himself closely with Juliano, an increasingly strong alliance that is set to play a major role in the 2025 governor’s race. Together, the two chairmen (plus their allies in the city of Passaic) commanded a clear majority of the 9th district’s county committee vote, and they could advocate for what Guy most wanted out of a new 9th district candidate: a well-liked person of color, particularly a Hispanic person, who would expand Hudson County’s minority representation in Congress.

Guy and Juliano settled on an agreement: they would let the 9th district remain a Passaic County seat, but they would choose which Passaic candidate would get the nod. The only question was, which one?

Sumter and Sayegh were out from the beginning due to perceptions of their Israel views, Lora and Schaer decided not to run, and no other Democrat in the county was prominent enough to warrant much serious attention. That left two options: Wimberly and Pou. 

Wimberly was an appealing candidate in many ways; the seven-term assemblyman’s history as a championship-winning high school football coach made him a popular figure in Paterson, and he was widely respected in the Bergen County portion of the district.

Wimberly was also the candidate best liked by Pascrell’s family, who remembered his tireless efforts to re-elect Pascrell during his tough 2012 primary against fellow Rep. Steve Rothman. Had Pascrell himself still been alive to oversee the battle over his seat, he likely would have preferred Wimberly to be his successor, which could have gone a long way for the assemblyman.

But Wimberly wasn’t on the best of terms with Currie, who had a troubled relationship with Pascrell in the years before his death. Moreover, as a Black man in a seat that’s just 11% Black, he wasn’t the most obvious demographic fit for the seat, though that certainly wasn’t an insurmountable issue.

Then there was Pou. Pou had been in the legislature for 27 years, succeeding Pascrell when the then-assemblyman was elected to Congress in 1996, and had fostered a deep bench of friends and few enemies during her tenure (give or take some local drama in Paterson). She was a Puerto Rican woman, which fit the demographics of the district well, and she was 68 years old, meaning that she wouldn’t be in Congress forever. For Juliano and Guy, the case for Pou was a very strong one.

Over the course of the weekend, Currie, Juliano, and Guy met several times to figure out what to do, and also interviewed many of the candidates to see where they stood on key issues. (Complicating the process was that, when Pascrell died, most of his would-be successors were scattered around the world: Zur was in California, Sayegh was in South America, and Sumter and Wimberly were both at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.)

The three chairmen knew that the stakes were high. Because Pascrell’s death happened so late in the cycle and there wasn’t any time to schedule a special election, the convention was the final word on who got to serve in Congress. And while the hundreds of county committeemembers in attendance would cast secret-ballot votes and could make up their own minds, a joint endorsement from all three county chairs could essentially decide the race before the vote even took place.

As they deliberated, the race was moving fast without them. Pou got an endorsement from Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) and was lining up support from other Hispanic members of Congress, raising her own profile and the demographic stakes of the contest, while Wimberly and Sumter were each starting to release their own endorsement lists from local elected officials and unions.

Juliano and Guy were convinced Pou was the right person for the job; Currie, who still very much wanted Sumter to go to Congress, proved resistant, but he eventually bowed to numerical reality and went along. On Monday, the three county chairs announced their joint support for Pou. The deal was done.

What comes next

In theory, Sumter, Wimberly, and Sayegh could have stayed in the race and fought it out to the convention. Both Sumter and Wimberly had some notable endorsements from local elected officials and unions, some of which were announced after the Pou deal was announced, so they were far from pushovers.

But once the three chairmen came out in support of Pou, running against her would have almost certainly been a losing battle, and everyone knew it. Sayegh dropped out of the race on Monday; Sumter and Wimberly stuck it out through a New Jersey Globe candidate forum on Monday evening, at which they both came across as more camera-ready than Pou, but they too exited the race on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively.

Their departures allowed yesterday’s convention to go from a contest to a coronation, one that could be entirely focused on commemorating Pascrell and lauding Pou.

“I’m excited about today but even more excited about tomorrow and all the tomorrows that will follow as we unite to show the residents of our district what is possible when we fight together,” Pou said in her speech accepting the nomination. “And fight together we must.”

Now that she’s the Democratic nominee, Pou’s next task will be defeating Prempeh to actually win her place in Congress. That shouldn’t be too difficult of an ask, since Joe Biden won the 9th district by 19 percentage points in 2020, though it’s not one where Democrats can afford to fall asleep at the wheel.

If and when Pou is elected, it will necessitate a special convention for her seat in the State Senate, one at which any or all of Sumter, Wimberly, and Sayegh could run. If any of them win, it would trigger a further cascade of conventions and special elections further down the chain in Passaic County; to paraphrase the New Jersey adage, when a new congresswoman is elected, it’s time to begin the search for a new planning board member.

One question that can never be satisfactorily answered is whether Pou could have become a congresswoman through any process other than the one that just occurred. If, say, Pascrell had announced his retirement last year, who knows whether Pou would have embarked on a difficult months-long primary campaign to succeed him – and even if she had, she might have gotten boxed out by other candidates anyways, since there likely would have been much less pressure to come to a cross-county deal during the normal primary process.

It’s impossible to say how that hypothetical race would have played out, but what is clear is that the tragic circumstances of Pascrell’s death led to something of a perfect storm for Pou. (There’s a strong touch of New Jersey irony in the fact that the perfect storm leading to the state’s first Latina congresswoman was facilitated by three old-style party bosses, all of them men and two of them white.)

Assuming she’s elected to Congress, Pou is set to join two other members of the 1997 state legislative class there, alongside Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) and Assemblyman – probably soon to be Congressman – Herb Conaway (D-Delran). (Pou’s legislative tenure predates theirs slightly, since she was appointed to succeed Pascrell in January 1997 while they weren’t elected until November.)

Pou has something else in common with Watson Coleman and Conaway: none of the three of them were initially the favorites to win their seats in Congress. Watson Coleman was, at first, viewed as the underdog against State Sen. Linda Greenstein (D-Plainsboro) in the 2014 primary to succeed Rep. Rush Holt (D-Hopewell), while Conaway wasn’t even on the New Jersey Globe’s first shortlist for Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown)’s seat this year; the focus was instead on State Sen. Troy Singleton (D-Delran), who didn’t end up running, and Assemblywoman Carol Murphy (D-Mount Laurel), who lost the primary to Conaway.

Both Conaway and Watson Coleman ended up confounding expectations, proving to be savvy operators with the right message for the right point in time. Now Pou has joined their exclusive club and punched her own ticket to Congress; New Jersey will soon see how she intends to use it.