In New Jersey’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate earlier this month, there were lots of things that differentiated the two frontrunners, Curtis Bashaw and Christine Serrano Glassner. Serrano Glassner is a committed conservative, while Bashaw is more of a moderate; Serrano Glassner’s background is as a small-town mayor in Morris County, while Bashaw is a South Jersey hotel developer; and perhaps most importantly, Serrano Glassner had the endorsement of Donald Trump, and Bashaw did not.
But for many voters, one thing seemed to be top of mind: who is my local county Republican organization supporting?
The power of county political parties in New Jersey is, at this point, well-known; their endorsements can make or break candidates running for offices ranging from Senate to town council. Much of their power is derived through the county line, the ballot design system that puts party-endorsed candidates in shared rows or columns.
And in the contest between Serrano Glassner and Bashaw for the Senate seat currently held by indicted Senator Bob Menendez, the county line had a 100% track record of delivering for endorsed candidates. Bashaw won the 14 counties where he had local Republican party support, usually in landslides, while Serrano Glassner did the same in the seven counties where she had party backing.
That was enough for a Bashaw victory: he won 45% to 38%, with two other candidates, Justin Murphy and Albert Harshaw, receiving 11% and 5%, respectively.
The success of the line goes even deeper than that, however. In the 17 counties that used the county line this year – the other four did not for a variety of reasons – the strength of the party endorsement near-absolute: Serrano Glassner won every single town in the counties where she had the line, while Bashaw won all but one town in his counties.
To put that into perspective: the six counties where Serrano Glassner had the line are home to 190 different towns, and each and every one individually decided to give their support to Serrano Glassner. Union County’s 21 towns, all but three of Morris County’s 39 towns, and all but five of Bergen County’s 70 towns voted for her by at least 40 percentage points.
Bashaw nearly scored the same perfect record in his counties, with the only exception being Monmouth County’s Marlboro, where the local Republican organization is divided into multiple factions and where Serrano Glassner won 48%-42%. (There’s also a handful of towns in Bashaw-supporting Camden and Gloucester Counties that have missing or incomplete data due to the low number of votes cast, so it’s impossible to say for certain how they voted; a few towns in Burlington and Sussex Counties, which didn’t have a county line this year, had the same problem.)
In some places, the sharp divides across county lines made sense simply given the candidates running. Bashaw is from Cape May, and would be the first South Jerseyan elected to the Senate since the 1950s, so it’s not surprising that he did well across South Jersey, especially in Cape May County; likewise, Serrano Glassner’s position as the mayor of Mendham Borough makes her a natural choice for the voters of Morris County.
But in other parts of the state, there is no realistic way to explain certain election results aside from the county line.
The neighboring towns of Oakland and Wanaque, for example, are similar in population, racial demographics, and voting history, and would in theory have little reason to vote differently in a statewide primary. But Oakland is in Bergen County, where Serrano Glassner had the line, while Wanaque is in Bashaw-supporting Passaic County, which produced an extremely wide split: Oakland voted for Serrano Glassner 76%-13% and Wanaque voted for Bashaw 55%-29%.
Similar examples abound throughout the state. Branchburg in Somerset County supported Bashaw 65%-21% while next-door Readington in Hunterdon County supported Serrano Glassner 56%-30%; Essex County’s Belleville went for Bashaw 54%-33% but Hudson County’s Kearny went for Serrano Glassner 69%-10%. In each case, the only obvious differentiating factor between the two relatively similar towns was the county line.
According to an Emerson poll from April, both Serrano Glassner and Bashaw started the campaign season utterly unknown to most Republican voters, with a whopping 84% of respondents saying they were undecided in the Republican Senate primary. Both candidates spent some money trying to change that – $893,000 from Bashaw and $212,000 from Serrano Glassner as of last month – but it’s likely that a large number of primary voters were never reached by either campaign.
In that low-information environment, where voters likely don’t know key facts about who each candidate is (and which one has Trump’s endorsement), the county line becomes a hugely powerful tool. Lacking other context about who to support, many voters simply go along with what the line tells them.
But it’s a tool that may be running on borrowed time. There was no line on the Democratic side this year, thanks to Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown)’s federal lawsuit arguing that it provides an unconstitutional advantage; the only reason it survived on the Republican side is that no Republicans were part of Kim’s suit, and thus the federal judge said his preliminary injunction didn’t apply to the GOP.
As litigation continues, it looks more and more likely that the line will be struck down permanently, and for both parties; at least, that’s the outcome New Jersey politicians are bracing for. If that happens, what might happen in races like the GOP Senate primary? The four counties that didn’t have a line this year provide a clue.
Two of those counties, Salem and Sussex, haven’t had lines for decades, so this year was nothing new for them. And in both, every single town voted for the candidate that the local party organization supported – Serrano Glassner in Sussex, Bashaw in Salem – though Serrano Glassner’s 50%-32% margin in Sussex was noticeably smaller than in neighboring counties where she had the line.
The other two counties, Atlantic and Burlington, have historically used party-line ballots, but local county clerks voluntarily chose to switch to office-block ballots this year for Republicans as well as Democrats. (The decision was made by a Democratic county clerk in Burlington – much to the chagrin of local Republicans, who unsuccessfully sued to get their line back – and by a Republican county clerk in Atlantic.)
Atlantic Republicans, for their part, fared quite well even on office-block ballots. Bashaw carried the county 64%-25%, similar to his performance in nearby counties, and carried every municipality – a sign that the county organization there is strong enough to deal with a line-free future.
Burlington Republicans, however, struggled quite a bit: Bashaw won there just 35%-30%, and Serrano Glassner managed to carry 11 of the county’s 40 towns. Unlike pretty much every other county in the state, there were no landslides in Burlington County, with most towns voting for their preferred candidate by single or low double digits.
Murphy and Harshaw, notably, also did far better in Burlington than they did statewide, with Murphy winning 23% of the vote and Harshaw winning 13%. Granted, both live in Burlington County (Murphy is a former local elected official from Tabernacle, and won his hometown and neighboring Shamong), but part of their strong performance is also likely attributable to the ballot design, especially since they were the first two candidates listed on Burlington ballots.
The lack of a line in Burlington had effects further downballot, too, where the local GOP’s choice for the 3rd congressional district, Rajesh Mohan, lost the county 34%-30% to challenger Shirley Maia-Cusick. Mohan still won the primary overall, but likely only because the other counties in the district, Monmouth and Mercer, kept their lines intact.
This year’s Burlington result, then, may be what both parties can look forward to in future line-free races where no candidate has the resources to communicate with wide swaths of the primary electorate. Confronted with an undifferentiated list of candidates they may not have heard of, many voters don’t know who to support, creating more fragmented and unusual results.
The question then becomes: if the federal courts had decided to nullify the GOP line statewide this year, would Bashaw still have won?
It’s a tough question, because Bashaw did still have advantages that went beyond the line. Party support remains meaningful regardless of ballot design, as demonstrated by Atlantic Republicans, and powerful county organizations like the Monmouth GOP and Ocean GOP would have still likely been able to deliver large numbers of votes. Bashaw also had a big spending edge, meaning that he had a greater ability to reach voters with ads and mailers than Serrano Glassner.
But as the results in Burlington County showed, without the county line, those advantages only go so far. In deep-blue counties like Mercer, Camden, or Essex where local Republican organizations don’t have a tremendous amount of manpower, the county line may have been the only thing propping Bashaw up. (Then again, the same could be said of Serrano Glassner in, say, Union or Hudson Counties.)
Counterfactuals aside, the reality is that the county line system was in place, and Bashaw won because he did a better job during convention season of convincing county parties to support him. Those parties, many of which delivered massive landslides for Bashaw with the help of the line, can now take a victory lap heading into the general election against Kim.
Anti-line reformers, however, would be justified in asking: should party endorsements, and the ballots they help shape, really have that much power?