New Jersey has long been a state with a reputation as a hotbed of political corruption, and rightfully so. There is a longstanding tradition of cronyism, payoffs, fraud, racketeering—the list goes on and on. Party loyalty is paramount, and party bosses run their state fiefdoms with an iron fist. What they say goes. (The most recent example of this, of course, is the resurrection of Sen. Robert Menendez, who, despite federal corruption charges, is 2018’s duly anointed Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate thanks to his position as one of the chieftains of the political machine of North Jersey.) So it’s kind of unusual when a person with the slenderest of ties to the political machine of either party rises to become a credible candidate for higher office.
But in 2018, Jim Keady, a lifelong social justice activist and former professional soccer goalie, is a legitimate contender for Congress from New Jersey’s 4th District. In a year when just about anything is possible, the usually insurmountable polling margin of long-term Republican Christopher H. Smith in this district (+15) has been cut in half, and just like elsewhere in the country, Democrats are smelling blood in the water.
But that’s not why he chose to run. Keady has been toying with running for this seat since 2015, when the odds against any Democrat picking off Smith were far greater. No, Jim Keady chose to run against Chris Smith not to take advantage of the fabled Blue Wave of 2018, but to rid the House of one of its worst threats to women’s reproductive rights and more importantly, to rebuild the Democratic Party, to move it in a more progressive direction, and to do this from the ground up throughout the district, and eventually the state.
Political power in the Garden State is still very much a local affair—it’s in the hands of the town councils, mayors, and committee chairs that administer the state’s 565 municipalities. In New Jersey, school districts and public services are allocated not by county, but by municipal district. There are no county schools, no county police. Instead, most towns employ their own services. If you want to know why it’s so expensive to live here, there’s at least part of your answer.
And local politics in New Jersey is as machine-driven as it gets. It’s inscrutable and byzantine, and it affords great power to people who are rarely held accountable. It’s an unbelievably partisan and obtuse system that literally permits county party chairs to make up rules as they go along; if you’re running for Congress and you have a contested primary, you actually get party endorsement as the “chosen” candidate before the actual primary. Candidates typically receive party imprimatur and a coveted “party line” slot on the primary ballot by virtue of a poll of party delegates in attendance at each county’s convention, which happens before the primary. Attendance at party conventions as a delegate is typically based on service to the party in township committees, councils, etc. But even this arcane process varies from county to county. In Monmouth County, which forms the bulk of District 4, the county Democratic chair actually chooses a percentage of delegates as the folks who actually are privileged vote for the preferred candidate. Yes, that’s right—the party bosses actually choose who will vote. Which, it goes without saying, lends itself to manipulation of results. If you know how a particular delegate may vote and you choose only delegates that you know will vote a certain way to be the voting delegates, that gives you a pretty good idea of the outcome of the process. And so, the party has its chosen candidate—the person who gets preferential ballot treatment—and the voting public is never the wiser. They actually think they’re choosing the Democratic contender when they vote in the primary, when in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Oh sure, there’s an election in early June, and they do get to vote, but it’s largely irrelevant, not only because party powers that be force all Democrats at the state and national level to fall in line behind this pre-selected candidate immediately after the convention, but because people tend to vote down the ballot in a straight line, and this line is where the preferred candidate appears. Voters may not even realize that the Democrat in the preferred spot on the ballot has an opponent who is also a Democrat, and that this person might actually be a more suitable choice for the district.
Indeed, in this particular case—when Rep. Smith has been in office for 37 years, and has, for all intents and purposes, run unopposed—they may not even realize there’s a real live primary battle going on. You see, for most of Chris Smith’s time in office, the Dems have pretty much conceded this seat to the Republican Party, waiting until the last minute to put someone up for election every two years, and offering little to no party support. So this spring, it’s coming as a shock to primary voters when canvassers come to their doors to talk about a contested Democratic primary in the 4th District. After all, they may not have been of voting age the last time it happened.
Yes, the deck’s stacked against local boy Jim Keady despite his years of activism, public service and community engagement. The Democratic Party—as it done in a number of other races across the country—has handpicked a veteran to run. In this case, it’s the local party that’s done it, not the DCCC. And their excuse is that the 4th District, which they see as moderate to conservative, needs a moderate candidate. The New Jersey Dems see the district—which is loaded with retirees and veterans—as a place where this type of candidate will be attractive. But the 4th District has historically suffered from low Democratic turnout because of the weakness of the candidates put forth by the party who, given Smith’s strength amongst the national Right to Life community, has often barely bothered to field contenders. An average of about 76,000 registered Democrats simply don’t vote, and another 100,000 or so voters don’t even bother to declare a party affiliation. The district is changing demographically, too, as more folks from the northern, more urban areas of the state move southward in search of less congestion and a cheaper cost of living. And District 4 lies just south of fast-rising Asbury Park, the internationally famous music and arts mecca and home to a vibrant LGBTQ community; the once desolate seaside resort that sits at the southern border of NJ-06 has of late seen a fairly significant number of residents shifting southward into the 4th. It just doesn’t seem likely that these new voters will be engaged by a milquetoast Democrat with ties to the defense industry, no political experience, and next to no name recognition in the district he hopes to represent.
There is far more to this story than space or time permits, but suffice to say, it’s a classic David & Goliath tale, one that seems to be playing itself out in similar races across the country in 2018. The Democratic Party in general and the DCCC in particular have seen fit to insert themselves into congressional races about which they seem to know next to nothing. Why it’s the party’s business to foist congressional candidates on districts about which they seem to know very little is questionable in any election year; why they have seen fit to do this in a year when our very Democracy is at stake, in which every single seat is of vital interest, is almost beyond comprehension.
But Jim Keady is a fighter, and like Laura Moser in Texas’ 7th District, he’s not going away. Stay tuned to the congressional race in New Jersey’s 4th - it’s apt to be a doozy.