NJ-11's Special Election

The U.S. House in New Jersey's Eleventh U.S. House District has been vacant since Mikie Sherrill resigned from it to become governor of New Jersey.  This month, there is a special election for a U.S. Representative to complete the unexpired House term.  Many pundits say that it should be an easy win for the Democrats, given the left-of-center nature of many of the district's voters and given also that Trump is dragging down the Republican Party.

I'm not so sure of that.  Joe Hathaway, the Republican nominee, is running as a moderate and positioning himself as a fiscal conservative.  His Democratic opponent is running as a person who will fight for workers and ordinary people and fight for better health insurance and an affordable cost of living.  Well, what's wrong with that?

Nothing, at face value, but the problem is with the Democratic candidate in question.

The Democratic nominee is an Hispanic woman named Analilia Mejia. Her sex is not an issue - after all, she'd be taking over Mikie Sherrill's House seat if she wins - but her ethnicity just might be, despite the growing number of Hispanics in the district.  But that's actually the least of her troubles as she prepares for the special election next Thursday (April 16).

First, there's her very name.  You know how Hispanics will be speaking English with an American accent but lapse into a Latin American accent to pronounce a Spanish name?  Even Anglophones who don't know a word of Spanish would have to adopt a Latin American cadence to pronounce her full name properly - and that's ballot-box poison.  And not just for Hispanics.  Just ask Michael Dukakis, who was mocked by, of all people, country singer Loretta Lynn because she "can't even pronounce his name!"

Second, Mejia is a progressive.  That might help her with voters in some of the Essex County communities in the district (though not all of them, least of all the Caldwells, which gave America Sam Alito!), but her affiliations with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren may be an Achilles heel in more Republican Morris County, in which the district is centered.  Mejia started out as an organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers.  She has been the executive director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, an affiliate of the arch-progressive Working Families Party, and she was a delegate for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 New Jersey Democratic presidential primary, a contest easily won by Hillary Clinton.  Oh yeah, Mejia was also national political director for Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign. 

Third, Mejia won the Democratic U.S. House nomination in a crowded primary that featured eleven candidates.  She only got about 25 percent of the vote, meaning that 75 percent of Democrats in the district voted to nominate someone else.  In fact, Tom Malinowski, the former congressman from another New Jersey district, might have won the nomination if not for the fact that the American Israel Public Affairs Public Committee had spent so much money to defeat him for votes he cast in the House regarding Israel they objected to that they shot themselves in the foot, enabling Mejia's victory despite Mejia being more skeptical of Israel than Malinowski is.

One other thing - Justin Strickland, one of those ten other candidates for the nomination for the election to complete Governor Sherrill's House term, plans to run in the June 2 primary for the full term for the seat that begins in January 2027, arguing that Mejia was not a consensus candidate for the Democrats with only 25 percent of the vote and that Democrats deserve a choice in the June primary.  He has a case.  Only question is whether Mejia will be running for a full House term then or be just another failed Democratic candidate for public office.

So there you have it - a Latina with a difficult name to spell, never mind pronounce, affiliated with Bernie Sanders and an anti-capitalist third party, and someone who was the first choice of only one out of four Democrats in the district.  And she's running against an all-American white male Republican whose name is spelled the way it sounds

Early voting started in the district yesterday, and I plan to vote myself later this week.  Possibly as early as tomorrow.  Oh, I'll vote for Mejia, all right.  But I can't say with full confidence that she's going to eke out a victory.