Can a Sanders Democrat Win the New Jersey Governors Race?
John Wisniewski is fighting Wall Street money and the party machine.
By Bob Dreyfuss and Barbara Dreyfuss
Excerpts:
The state’s Democratic primary, which takes place in June, is shaping up as a choice between the favorite, Phil Murphy, a multimillionaire and former Goldman Sachs executive with strong backing from the party establishment, and his leading challenger, Assemblyman John Wisniewski, a veteran legislator and former chair of Sanders’s presidential effort in the state. For Wisniewski, the primary is an uphill climb, and he’s running an insurgent, populist-tinged campaign that he hopes will inspire the same enthusiasm that energized the Sanders movement.
To hear Wisniewski tell it, his campaign is part of a national effort to bring the Democratic Party back to its roots.
Perhaps the biggest challenge that Wisniewski faces is New Jersey’s entrenched system of party bosses. The state is notorious for the power wielded behind the scenes by a handful of figures, such as South Jersey’s George Norcross, an insurance executive, and North Jersey’s Joseph DiVincenzo Jr., the Essex County executive (whose domain includes Newark). Along with other, less powerful Democratic machines and the party chairpersons in each of New Jersey’s 21 counties, they exert enormous influence in primary elections, in part by controlling which candidate gets the favored first line on the ballot. In the 2016 presidential primary, the entire New Jersey Democratic leadership, including all of the state’s elected officials (except Wisniewski), lined up for Clinton, who won 566,247 votes to Sanders’s 328,058.
But if you look a little deeper, you’ll see that Wisniewski has a strong independent streak. He hails from the city of Sayreville in central New Jersey, a former industrial town along the Raritan River whose factories have mostly shuttered since the 1960s, and he’s repeatedly been elected with strong support from labor and progressive groups. (Among his other achievements, he’s earned a lifetime score of 0 percent from the American Conservative Union for his voting record.) And he’s bucked the Democratic Party leadership and its boss-driven agenda time and time again.
But it was Wisniewski’s decision in late 2015 to support Sanders’s primary campaign that put him squarely against the state’s Democratic establishment.
Back home, Wisniewski signed up to chair the Sanders campaign. His decision didn’t sit well with the state’s Democratic leaders. “I announced my support for Senator Sanders, and I won’t use any names, but I had one assemblyman call me up and say, ‘I’m on board, I love everything that Sanders stands for. I’m glad you’re leading the effort. What can I do to help?’ And 48 hours later, I got a call from the same assemblyman, who said: ‘I got a call from my county chair, who said that if I support Sanders, I won’t get the party line for reelection next time.’ And I had a number of elected officials tell me, ‘I’m with you, but quietly. Unofficially.’ Below the radar, so to speak.”
One cause for concern was John Currie, chairman of the state Democratic committee and a strong Clinton supporter. “John Currie was furious that I came out for Bernie Sanders,” Wisniewski said. Months later, Currie got his revenge. In June 2016, Currie unceremoniously booted Wisniewski (along with Reni Erdos, another Sanders supporter) from the DNC, replacing him with an insurance executive who was also a party fund-raiser. “They weren’t content just to be cheerleaders for Hillary Clinton,” Wisniewski told The Nation. “They wanted to make sure that there was no opposition at all.” In the end, not a single party leader, big-city mayor, member of the State Legislature, or member of Congress from New Jersey backed Sanders. “They feared that what John Currie did to me, he’d do to them,” Wisniewski said.
To prevail against these forces, Wisniewski will have to run an outsider’s campaign, much as Sanders did last year. That effort is well under way, he said: “We’re doing town halls, meet-and-greets; we have field organizers, phone banks, and we’re raising funds—$5, $27, because we’re not supported by a $10 million check.”
In January, Wisniewski led a meeting of some 270 organizers and activists at Hudson County Community College in Jersey City, part of a National Day of Action called for by Sanders to oppose the Trump administration’s assault on health care. Standing before union members, retirees, and dozens of millennials who’d worked for the Sanders campaign, Wisniewski went far beyond defending the Affordable Care Act. To robust cheers from the crowd, he attacked “ideologues in Washington who really care only about insurance- company profits [and] fantasize about privatizing Medicare,” before adding: “I’m going to do everything I can to work toward a single-payer system right here in New Jersey!”
https://www.thenation.com/article/can-a-sanders-democrat-win-the-new-jersey-governors-race/
