“There’s a burden on it [Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer straight away. If [New Jersey Gov.] Phil Murphy has expertly guided New Jersey Democrats to separate themselves from this debacle, and the Senate caucus must do the same,” said former Democratic Senator Robert Torricelli. “Otherwise you’re going to have candidates in competitive states like Montana and West Virginia having to answer questions about Menendez and whether he represents an issue in the party.”
Menendez’s resistance has the potential to cost Democrats a crucial seat when they already have just a one-member majority. But Schumer remains cautious for now, saying only that Menendez is a “dedicated public servant and always fights hard for the people of New Jersey” who are “entitled to due process and due process.” The White House said much the same thing Monday.
Most immediately, Menendez’s indictment is a major headache for Democrats in New Jersey.
In just over a month, all 120 seats in the New Jersey Legislature will have increased. And Democrats, who hold a 25-15 majority in the Senate and a 46-34 majority in the General Assembly, were already having a difficult year before the Menendez news broke, struggling to counter Republican attacks on the school policies regarding transgender children and pushback. for offshore wind projects.
Republicans are already trying to capitalize on the indictment.
“I think it’s representative of the sleaze out there, and voters will take that into account,” said New Jersey Republican Chairman Bob Hugin, who was the failed Republican nominee against Menendez in 2018.
Menendez was indicted on corruption charges in 2015, defeated them in a mistrial in 2017, and then defeated Hugin by 11 points in an anti-Trump wave. That gave the senator the appearance of New Jersey’s ultimate political survivor.
He is now convinced of his own endurance. At a news conference Monday, Menendez refused to resign, claiming he was once again wrongly accused. He rejected allegations that he took bribes in the form of gold bars, cash and a Mercedes-Benz. The senator did not say whether he would seek re-election or rule it out.
Should Menendez choose to run for office, his prospects cannot be immediately dismissed. As of June 30, he had nearly $8 million in his campaign account.
Still, he would get long chances.
The accusations Menendez made before the 2018 election were a lot harder for the public to digest than the accusations he faces now, and will almost certainly not be resolved before November 2024. That’s part of why most of the state’s Democratic Party apparatus, which supported Menendez during his past legal troubles, called on him to resign Friday afternoon.
New Jersey has a unique voting design in most of its 21 counties in which candidates are awarded “the line” in the primaries – a favorable ballot placement that places a party-backed candidate among all others who have received the party’s endorsement, from the top of the primaries. the ballot paper down. With most Democratic county chairmen calling for Menendez to resign, he is unlikely to win the top voting seat in most, if not all, counties.
Even in 2018, when Menendez had state Democrats firmly behind him, his only primary challenger, the unfunded and largely unknown Lisa McCormick, won 38 percent of the vote against him. That was widely read by primary voters as a protest vote, and does not bode well for a 2024 run for Menendez without the benefits he enjoyed six years earlier.
Now leading state Democrats — from Gov. Phil Murphy on down — are calling on the senator to step aside. And Cory Booker, the junior senator from New Jersey and a close ally, has said nothing publicly despite being one of the first to defend Menendez after his latest indictment.
Strikingly, no major elected officials stood behind Menendez on Monday as he made his first public appearance since Friday’s indictment.
There are some Democrats — especially in Menendez’s home base of Hudson County — who aren’t discounting him. Hudson County Democratic Chairman Anthony Vainieri has not called for the senator to resign, telling POLITICO on Saturday that the senator is “like a rock star” to residents there.
But Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, a Hudson County Democrat who is running for governor in 2025, was dismissive of Vainieri’s comments. He doubts the senator’s home county will be behind him once the time comes to assign county boundaries.
“I think what he was trying to say was that people still admire him in the community he came from. It doesn’t mean that the political world respects him,” Fulop, who has a historically tense relationship with Menendez, said in an interview. “I don’t see an electoral chance for that [Menendez] to be successful. And honestly, I don’t think he’ll get through in the primaries.”
But Menendez could still be a problem for the party, Fulop said, threatening state Democrats’ chances this year. State-level elections without the governor on the ballot are low-turnout affairs, with only the most committed voters casting ballots. And now one of New Jersey’s most high-profile politicians — and the highest-ranking elected official statewide — is getting massive media attention for all the wrong reasons.
“It’s getting so much traction. There is a press corps army in Union City,” Fulop said.
“You’re looking at the core of Democratic and Republican voters who would be voting in an off cycle like this and would be angry about a specific issue that’s being magnified on social media,” he said. “Now, a month before the election, you are touching voters who are not necessarily involved in the political process.
“What does that do to them? Does it make them want to engage?”