Steven Fulop spent years engaged in New Jersey’s boss-driven machine politics. Now he’s waging war against the machine as he tries to win the state’s highest office.
The Jersey City mayor is battling the state’s unique and highly influential county party system, which gives local party leaders the power to effectively select candidates of their choosing in primaries. If he’s successful, it could be the death knell for the once-legendary political machinery that has dictated New Jersey’s political future for decades — and has already been weakened significantly over the last six months thanks to a lawsuit driven by Democratic Rep. Andy Kim.
“The boss system will never be the same in New Jersey. And some people are reluctant to accept this, but that’s just the truth — that the damage has been done,” Fulop said in an interview. “What you’re going to see is a cleansing of the system of elected officials over the next two, three years.”
Fulop has been aggressive in his bid — far from the rule-following early front-runner he played in 2017, when he bowed out of the governor’s race without officially entering it. He has been taunting Democratic Party leaders on social media and in court. He publicly defected from the Senate campaign of the governor’s wife and endorsed Kim, her rival. He’s trying to recruit fresh blood to politics, and he’s issuing policy papers with the hope that he will win over New Jersey voters directly.
That has him “racking up the enemies here, no doubt about it,” said Michael Suleiman, the Democratic chair in Atlantic County. “He has nothing to lose.”
It’s shaping up to be a new era for New Jersey politics, where party leaders are weakened and long-shot candidates stand a chance.
Fulop is not the only candidate for governor flouting conventions, highlighting the vulnerability of the Democratic Party machine after Kim upended the system with his bid for the state’s open Senate seat and became the party’s nominee. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has described state leaders as too afraid to see through progressive policies and urged Gov. Phil Murphy to veto a public records reform bill that he called “anti-democratic” and a “step backwards” after Murphy signed it June 5.
Baraka also called for the permanent end of New Jersey’s so-called county line, the ballot design that effectively gives local party leaders the ability to pick candidates and increase their odds of winning by putting them together on ballots.
Kim scored a state-changing victory in court earlier this year, when a federal judge ruled that the party-line system likely violated the Constitution, scrapping it for the June Democratic Senate primary while the case continues.
The other declared Democratic gubernatorial candidate, former state Senate President Steve Sweeney, has kept a low profile since announcing his candidacy in December. And another anticipated candidate, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, has embraced the line system and is likely to contend with Sweeney for the party’s more centrist path.
At times, Fulop’s unorthodox approach has seemed prescient.
Months before a grassroots revolt helped kill the line — at least temporarily — in the Democratic Senate primary, he was the most prominent elected official to say it should go. And he publicly bashed New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy in her flailing Senate run and endorsed Kim less than a week before she dropped out of the primary.
That is not to say the 47-year-old mayor of New Jersey’s second-largest city is driving political or policy decisions — and Fulop’s growing number of critics view him more like a broken clock that’s right twice a day than some fortune teller.
It’s a drastic turn for someone who until recently played by all the rules of Jersey politics and says he abandoned a much-anticipated run for governor in 2017 because of them. Fulop vaulted to statewide prominence in 2013 when, as a young City Council member, he upset incumbent Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy, who had the support of then-President Barack Obama and Sen. Cory Booker.
Then Fulop immersed himself in New Jersey’s machine politics. He awarded city contracts to politically connected firms in counties that could boost his anticipated bid for governor in 2017. When he was laying the groundwork for that run, he did what many would-be candidates do and donated nearly $350,000 to state and local Democratic Party organizations around the state, according to campaign finance records.
That’s because securing the county line in primary elections has been crucial for any candidate, particularly one for governor. Phil Murphy, for example, kept Fulop out of the 2017 race because he’d spent heavily on the parties and secured every county line.
“I spent a lot of time with the traditional political structure in New Jersey, and that ended up proving to be my demise,” Fulop said. “I said to myself that if I ever got a second chance at this, I would do it my way.”
But even after he announced his 2025 gubernatorial run in 2023, Fulop courted party bosses and touted the endorsements of Democratic Party chairs in Hudson and Warren counties. So Fulop saying in October that the line is “undemocratic” and that he’d seek to end it if elected comes across as hypocritical and opportunistic to Democratic insiders with intimate knowledge of him courting party leaders’ support.
“His politics are very clear — it’s Steve-focused,” said a Democratic operative who has known Fulop for many years and was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Anthony Vainieri, who recently left as Hudson County Democratic chair and is backing Fulop, said Fulop is “taking a different approach” to running for governor that could pay off.
“He’s reaching out to the people that maybe never voted before, they don’t like the politics of the line and the organizations,” Vainieri said. “You could say, yes, he’s not making friends with some of the chairs. But he may be getting more people in the county that respect him.”
At any other point in the last century, Fulop’s candidacy would likely be dead on arrival because he picked a fight with some of the biggest party bosses who effectively control their county lines. Multiple studies have shown the line has reliably delivered for party-backed candidates, with one showing it gave them a 38 percentage point advantage.
But Kim’s lawsuit changed that calculus, raising questions of whether the line can survive long term, and giving candidates like Fulop who don’t have strong party support a much better chance to win.
Fulop said he’s “going to be more than competitive in every corner of New Jersey” regardless of whether the line exists in 2025 and one element of his campaign is to recruit reform-minded candidates for the state Legislature and local offices because “wholesale change” is needed at the moment.
Fulop called the line “undemocratic” before Kim’s lawsuit, and later argued in favor of Kim’s lawsuit in a brief. In doing so, he took aim at Middlesex County Democratic Organization Chair Kevin McCabe, one of the most influential party leaders in the state.
After the judge ruled in favor of Kim and ordered new ballot designs, Fulop called out another immensely powerful leader: LeRoy Jones Jr., chair of the Democratic State Committee and the Democratic Party in Essex County, whose support is typically crucial to any governor hopeful. Fulop criticized the new design in deep-blue Essex, where Newark is located, saying it was a “manipulation of the intent of the court.”
His defection from the Tammy Murphy Senate campaign was an even rarer and more audacious move. He’d grown publicly critical of how she handled her campaign as she faced intense backlash from a segment of the Democratic base that felt she embodied New Jersey’s machine politics. Then he rescinded his endorsement and backed Kim instead, issuing a statement saying Murphy should leave the race. She did, six days later, though a person familiar with the campaign’s strategy said Fulop was a “non-factor.”
Fulop was also early on two significant policy issues — a corporate tax surcharge to help pay for New Jersey Transit and an overhaul to the state’s affordable housing rules — weeks or months before Murphy backed similar proposals.
One of the housing overhaul’s prime sponsors, Sen. Troy Singleton, said lawmakers have spent “several years” trying to reform the system and pointed out that some of Fulop’s ideas aren’t new. But whether people agree with him or not, Fulop’s engagement in the campaign has shaped the discourse in the gubernatorial election.
“He’s staked out a position on a whole host of things and said, ‘Here’s what I believe in,’” Singleton said. “I’m hopeful that others will do the same.”
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