New Jersey’s GOP primary will test the ‘county line’ versus the power of Donald Trump

When New Jersey Republicans head to the polls for Tuesday’s primary election, they won’t just be choosing their nominee for United States Senate — they’ll be testing whether former President Donald Trump has more power than the traditional control of the state party establishment.

The GOP’s top contenders are Curtis Bashaw, a Cape May County hotelier and developer who is backed by a majority of his party’s establishment, and Christine Serrano Glassner, a mayor from the state’s northeast corner who has the endorsement of the former president as well as a personal connection to him and is vying for his MAGA base.

The winner faces a Democratic candidate in the general election who, in the absence of a head-to-head challenge from sitting Sen. Bob Menendez amid his ongoing corruption trial, is all but guaranteed to be Andy Kim. Kim, currently a congressman representing New Jersey’s 3rd District, wields the advantage in November, given the state’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate.

The primary comes at a moment of change for the state’s political establishment. Kim and state Democrats this year eschewed New Jersey’s long-held “county line,” a system that allows counties to place party-backed candidates in a prominent location on primary voters’ ballots — in some cases boosting the likelihood of an endorsed candidate’s success by as much as 40%.

But a state judge ruled in March that, at least for this primary, New Jersey Republicans must keep the county line system, and Bashaw — who comes endorsed by 13 of the state’s 21 county Republican committees — should be poised to reap the advantages of prime ballot real estate.

That is, unless Trump’s endorsement of Serrano Glassner can supersede the county line’s long-held advantage.

“It’s unusual for a line-backed candidate to lose,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics. “[Bashaw’s] got the organizational support … but she has this lightning in a bottle with Trump’s endorsement. That’s the real wild card.”

Serrano Glassner, the mayor of the borough of Mendham, in Morris County, has plastered her campaign website with the former president’s seal of approval, including a video of the moment Trump called Serrano Glassner a “fantastic woman” during his rally on the Wildwood beach in May.

Trump continues to mention a personal connection to Serrano Glassner — her husband, Michael Glassner, is one of the former president’s longtime advisers — before claiming he chose to endorse her after learning that Bashaw was a “[Chris] Christie guy,” a reference to the former New Jersey governor and onetime Trump ally who turned against the ex-president in recent primaries.

Bashaw donated $3,300 to Christie’s presidential campaign last year, according to campaign finance records.

In response to Trump’s comment, a Bashaw campaign spokesperson said the candidate is “a Curtis Bashaw Republican supported by thousands of Republicans throughout NJ.”

Bashaw made no mention of Trump in the initial months of his campaign. Then, in March, Bashaw said for the first time publicly that he supported the former president.

“Elections are binary choices, and you have to make a choice,” Bashaw told The Inquirer less than a week before the primary, mentioning his disapproval of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign wars and U.S. border security.

“I believe President Trump is the right person to win this election for the country,” Bashaw continued, before adding the caveat that his “mission was different” than Trump’s. “I’m going to work for New Jerseyans,” he said. “I think it’s time for Republicans to unify — we’re not all the same.”

For all the Trump talk, political scholars such as Rasmussen warned that candidates backing the MAGA movement have rarely performed well in New Jersey, and that the brand could do more harm than good for a GOP candidate.

“[Trump has] been really uniquely bad for New Jersey Republicans because he’s done poorly in the suburbs — that’s really New Jersey,” Rasmussen said. “Because he’s done poorly among more educated voters, he has done poorly in New Jersey. He has never taken off here. … He’s been a drag for other Republicans.”

The catch, Rasmussen said, is that MAGA-supporting Republicans tend to do well in primaries against more moderate GOP contenders, garnering outsized support from highly engaged voters within the base.

Whichever Republican secures the nomination will face an uphill battle in the Democratic stronghold.

New Jersey hasn’t elected a Republican senator since the early 1970s, giving Garden State Democrats the longest streak of control in the U.S. Senate only behind Hawaii, according to Rasmussen — even as the state elected three Republican governors over the same time period.

As New Jersey voters head into the primary, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 934,000. A GOP candidate who pulled off an upset, Rasmussen said, would need to do exceptionally well with the state’s large number of unaffiliated voters.

Both Bashaw’s and Serrano Glassner’s campaigns center on inflation and immigration — two of the electorate’s top concerns this cycle — blaming high prices on Washington bureaucrats and calling for stricter control at the Southern U.S. border.

Bashaw, who bills himself as a political outsider, is leaning into his entrepreneurial experience as the founder of Cape Resorts, which includes Cape May’s Congress Hall, and his record as a job creator in the South Jersey area.

“Whatever the Biden administration wants to say about the macroeconomic indicators, it’s not being felt around kitchen tables or in the storage rooms of our small businesses,” Bashaw said. “There’s a pressure point on inflation that’s demoralizing people.”

Serrano Glassner, meanwhile, has positioned herself against the likely Democratic nominee, Kim, as well as “the corrupt Democrat machine that enabled Gold Bar Bob Menendez,” according to materials provided to The Inquirer by her campaign that reference the bribe Menendez is alleged to have accepted from an Egyptian national.

It’s the type of name-calling that’s become inextricable from the political playbook of Trump, who Rasmussen, the political scholar, said GOP candidates often emulate in primaries before doing a “two step” back to the center once securing the nomination.

“We’ll see how it goes,” Rasmussen said of a possible shift in rhetoric after Tuesday. “New Jersey Republicans are not necessarily the biggest MAGA voters out there.”