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A tale of three county commissioner primaries
County commissioner races are like the middle child of New Jersey politics. They don’t attract the same level of interest as, say, a race for Congress; at the same time, they’re not truly local in the way that a mayoral or council race is.
But for the state’s 135 county commissioners, and the many other politicians who aspire to be one, they’re the most important elections in the world.
Last Tuesday, there were four counties that hosted competitive county commissioner primaries: Gloucester, Morris, and Sussex on the Republican side, and Hudson on the Democratic side. Hudson County hasn’t yet released detailed election results, so any analysis there will have to wait, but here’s a closer look at the other three races.
Gloucester County
As a mid-level office that most voters don’t know very much about, county commissioners are often forced to run in what essentially amount to “generic ballot” races – races where, since the candidates themselves aren’t well known, voters fall back on partisan preferences to guide their choices.
Primary elections are a bit different, since all the candidates are members of the same party, forcing voters to consider their options more carefully. But in Gloucester County’s showdown this year between the GOP organization and a ticket of renegades, the county commissioner race was clearly defined by the simultaneous battle for two Senate seats at the top of the ticket.
Heading the party-backed slate were State Sen. Ed Durr (R-Logan) and Gloucester County Commissioner Nick DeSilvio (R-Franklin) in the 3rd and 4th legislative districts; opposing them on the “Regular Republican Party” line were Assemblywoman Beth Sawyer (R-Woolwich) and former Washington Township Councilman Chris Del Borrello. Despite the cross-district alliances, however, the two races had very different outcomes.
In the 17 Gloucester towns in the 3rd district, the party-backed county commissioner slate – Frank Fisher, Brooke Rivello, and Erik Anderson – won by a collective seven-point margin, 54%-46%. Two towns where Durr did especially well, Clayton and National Park, backed the party ticket by 42 and 52 points, respectively.
But in the four heavily populated towns in the 4th district, the renegade slate of former Harrison Committeeman Adam Wingate, Franklin Committeewoman Heather Flaim, and East Greenwich Committeeman James Philbin won by a huge 20-point margin. Del Borrello’s home of Washington Township, which cast more primary votes than any other town in the county, backed his commissioner slate by 36 points.
(The three Gloucester County towns that are in the safely Democratic 5th district only accounted for about 8% of the county’s vote, but for what it’s worth, they supported the off-the-line slate by 11 points.)
Even towns that look like exceptions to the rule have clear explanations for how they voted.
Franklin Township, for example, backed the party-line slate by 20 points despite being in the otherwise unfriendly 4th district. But DeSilvio’s hometown is Franklin, and it was the one town he carried in his entire district.
On the flipside, East Greenwich, Harrison, and Woolwich look out of place in the 3rd district for supporting the off-the-line slate – except that those three towns were the towns where Sawyer performed best, and where many local Republicans campaigned against the county GOP slate.
The six county commissioner candidates did of course run their own campaigns with their own individual strengths. Wingate, for example, did astonishingly well in his hometown of Harrison, where he previously served on the township committee; he got 560 votes in the town, surpassing both of his running mates by more than 100 votes.
But on the whole, the story of this year’s Gloucester County Commissioner primary was really the story of the fight happening above it.
Morris County
Like in Gloucester County, the GOP battle for a county commissioner seat in Morris County was fought alongside a number of other primaries for legislative and local offices. But while incumbent Commissioner Tayfun Selen (R-Chatham) and challenger Paul DeGroot were each allied with a larger ticket, Selen’s nine-point win wasn’t strongly correlated with what was going on elsewhere on the ballot.
Selen and DeGroot had already faced off once before, in the 2022 Republican primary for the 11th congressional district. In that race, Selen had the Morris GOP line and carried the county 40%-36%, but DeGroot won the nomination overall thanks to a strong performance in neighboring Passaic County.
DeGroot did a bit better in places where he had running mates; he lost the 26th district portion of the county by six points and the 24th district by eight points, versus an 11-point loss in the 25th district. Some of DeGroot’s best towns, like Riverdale and Parsippany, were also the towns where off-the-line 26th district Senate candidate Tom Mastrangelo did best.
But the differences between districts were relatively minimal, indicating that most voters didn’t treat the commissioner campaign as a proxy for other battles.
There also wasn’t an obvious correlation between DeGroot’s performance and the boundaries of the 11th congressional district, where voters should theoretically know him best. He lost the 11th district by eight points and the neighboring 7th district by 10 points – not much of a variation.
Instead, the best explanation for DeGroot’s performance seems to be simply that there are certain towns that like him, and certain towns that don’t. In his 2022 congressional primary, he won six towns: Parsippany, Montville, Kinnelon, Lincoln Park, Riverdale, and Pequannock; this time, he won all of those same towns except Montville, plus Netcong and Victory Gardens.
DeGroot has proven twice in a row that he’s a strong primary candidate even when he doesn’t get party support. But if he wants to win office at some point, he’ll probably need to expand his appeal outside the northeastern Morris County towns that vote for him no matter what.
Sussex County
Primary elections in Sussex County, the northernmost county in the state and one of its most rural, will always be different than anywhere else for one simple reason: there’s no county organizational line, or even a county party endorsement.
The lack of a line has created a unique voting culture in the solidly Republican county – one where contested GOP primaries are the norm and where voters are tuned in to most races, even for more obscure offices like county commissioner.
There was some geographic variation in the results. DeGroot did best in his hometown of Wantage, winning the town by a colossal 49-point margin, while the one town Yardley was able to carry was Stillwater, where he was a committeeman and mayor prior to being elected as a county freeholder in 2017.
Overall, though, the result was a blowout for DeGroot across the board. That may have in part been because of Yardley’s connections with Bill Winkler, a controversial consultant who alienated much of the Sussex GOP this cycle – but the simpler explanation is that DeGroot simply outworked the field.
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