Issue 159: Who *not* to vote for in NJ10

Also, contribute to the upcoming Best of issue! and more.

Hello friends! Well, we certainly are living through some very interesting times. I hope you’re doing well, staying cool, and enjoying your weekend as best you can. — Amy

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Contribute to the upcoming Best Of issue!!!!

I generally enjoy following politics, but maaaaaaaan, the last few weeks have been rough (note: I wrote these words and the rest of this post on Saturday morning — by Saturday evening, things had gotten far worse. Hoping for some calm days ahead of us, but I’m not feeling that great about our chances). Nationwide, it’s grim; locally — in NJ10 — it’s pretty bad too. Just a really, really bad time all around.

Luckily, it’s just about time for our yearly Best Of issue! Let’s all take a break from the harsh reality of how the world seems to be ending and instead focus on something positive and nice. The world is falling apart, but we still get to do something nice for ourselves, and in this case that means celebrating the best that our city has to offer.

I’ll reach out to some notable local folks and see what their favorite things are about Jersey City, but this year I’m mostly interested in what your faves are. What are the businesses you most love? Where are your favorite places to just sit and relax? Who are the folks in our community who put a smile on your face and make you happy to live here? Who makes the best cocktails, has the prettiest garden, gives the best hugs, or works the hardest?

I cannot stress this enough: it truly can be anything. This whole tradition started as a way to shout out local businesses, but I love to include individuals who make a difference as well. I also think it’s great to include little quirky things (I’m thinking immediately about the towering sunflowers that dot my neighborhood) that make JC special that maybe you take for granted until someone else points it out. My only ask is that you be specific so that other people can enjoy them too (saying “sunflowers” is less useful than shouting out “the beautiful garden on the corner of X and Y” so that other people can walk by and see how great they are).

Here’s a very simple form you can fill out to contribute to the upcoming issue. Tell me your faves and I’ll share them with everyone else — it’s just that easy. Let’s focus on positive, wonderful things about our community for just a moment, and take a break from all the gloom.

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The candidate you shouldn’t vote for in NJ10.

Hey — there’s an election on Tuesday for Congress! For the first time in years, my district gets to pick a candidate for congress from a field with a ton of choices. Finally — choices! What we’re always saying we want! So, are you excited to go vote? No? Yeah, me neither. Ugh.

There’s a really good article in New Jersey Globe that sums up why we’ve heard so little about what’s going on in the race in NJ10. It basically boils down to the establishment neatly lining up behind one candidate (LaMonica McIver), all the candidates having little to differentiate each other ideologically including the slew of people running against the establishment pick, and, as a result of both of these things, very little money flowing into the campaigns including almost none from big national donors. If you want to get more into that, I highly recommend the article.

It’s for all of these reasons that I’m deeply frustrated by this race. I think this could have been a great opportunity for some much-further-left/DSA/Green Party/group/activists who actually would represent an actual ideological difference to the other candidates to at least spark some kind of conversation about how we might do things differently. Somebody with a solid platform that converges just a bit from the rest and has just a few thousand dollars in the bank could have really made some waves in this election. Yes, they’d be pushed out during the convention, but they could at least pick up some supporters on the way and use the election to raise the profile of the issues they represent, but none of that happened. Unfortunately that kind of organizing just doesn’t really exist in the district, at least right now.

To make matters worse — much, much worse — party insiders are meeting two days after the election for that convention, during which the replacement for Payne will be picked and then serve for the remainder of his term, essentially rendering the election moot. We have a truly awful system in play here.

So, should you vote at all? It’s going to be 98 degrees on Tuesday, your vote essentially doesn’t matter, and the candidates are all pretty much ideologically the same. You could be forgiven if you decide to stay home in the AC. But I’d like to suggest you make the trek to the poll all the same.

My pitch to you is this: if you’re in Jersey City and in NJ10, please consider going to vote to vote for someone who isn’t Hudson County Commissioner Jerry Walker. Walker isn’t expected to win by any means — McIver seems to have this wrapped up — but he is expecting to do reasonably well in Jersey City. And here’s the thing — how he does in this election will most likely determine whether or not Walker jumps into the JC mayor’s race. We know it’s going to be a dismal voter turnout and, again, that he’s unlikely to get it or even place second, but if he can win close to 100% of the 5% that show up to vote in JC, that bodes well for him as he mulls running for mayor. Or at least he’s likely to take it that way.

Ok, so why am I asking you to vote against Walker? Generally speaking, I think a lot of people running for mayor is a good thing. With the race so far away, the more the merrier — much like my hopes for the NJ10 race, I would hope that having a long list of candidates would spark conversations about what kind of city we’d all like to see, and that could be very helpful overall (ok, it didn’t work out for Congress but I still have hopes that a mayor’s race with a lot of candidates would result in this). Every few days, someone texts me telling me that James Solomon is definitely! totally! 100%!!! going to announce he’s jumping in in the next 72 hours and it keeps not happening… but if it did/does, I would welcome him, as I’d welcome other people as well. A vigorous race is a good race.

But not Walker — and I’m sure you know why. Walker is aligned with and has accepted money from Paul Fireman, the Reebok billionaire who has poured millions into a plan to divide up Liberty State Park and do all sorts of things to it that aren’t good (I’ve talked about this so many times I don’t want to just repeat myself, but here are some articles — there’s four separate articles linked there in case you want to read about the issue as it has evolved over time). As a result, I don’t want to see Walker advance in the race for mayor at all. His alliance with Fireman should be a political dead end, and we can help send that message by voting for someone who isn’t him. Until and unless Walker denounces his association with Fireman, we really have to send a strong message that he can’t advance his career any further, certainly not in Jersey City.

I honestly don’t care who you vote for out of the remaining candidates. I spent a bunch of time going down the rabbit hole of reading their websites and checking their social media and literally none of them stand out to me as being good enough that I feel ok recommending you support them. I never want to discourage you from doing your own research, but I’ll warn you that if you do, you may wind up completely depressed and frustrated like I did. It’s bleak. We’ve reached the point in the campaign where the candidates are throwing absolutely baseless and vague accusations against each other, anonymous and unsourced Reddit posts are being taken way too seriously, and it appears that over half of these candidates don’t even understand what a congress member actually does. It’s genuinely painful to dig into. I don’t know how we got into this really awful situation but going forward, dear god we need better candidates.

So, go: go and vote against Walker. Write in your friend or your dog or anyone you want. Pick one of the other candidates at random, I don’t care. Do whatever you have to do, but let’s send a message to the guy who wants to be mayor that he needs to stop this nonsense with Liberty State Park immediately.

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ICYMI

• “The Hudson County Democratic Organization has hired Storm Wyche, a 10-year veteran of politics in Bergen County and Trenton, as their new executive director, Chair Craig Guy announced[.]” This story is extremely amusing to me: Wyche lives in Bergen County and was previously the Political Director for the Tammy Murphy for Senate campaign. Hey, why would the Hudson County Democrats reach all the way to Bergen County to hire someone for position that requires such local knowledge? Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I’d guess it has something to do with the ongoing Fulop-endorsed-then-unendorsed-Tammy debacle, paired with the fact that he seems to really want the HCDO’s endorsement for governor even though he’s also insisting that he’s running as an outsider who is bucking the party establishment. Have fun with that, you guys.

• Jersey City parks employees spoke out at a recent city council meeting about being understaffed. One of the things that’s interesting to me about this is I never realized they were unionized, and that the city was hiring private workers to work in the city parks which, I’m guessing, is a way to hire outside of the union and get cheaper labor. (Also, it’s always a good time to remind readers of something very complicated that exists in JC: we have city parks, county parks, and a state park. Each has its own structure and workforce. So for instance, Lincoln Park is a county park and LSP is a state park; most others are city parks. I know, confusing.)

• A Jersey City developer got hit with a bunch of stop-work orders for poor working conditions (including “rampant wage theft and tax evasion, being forced to work in unsafe conditions, and facing retaliation and harassment for attempting to address issues and organize their workplace”), and — wouldn’t you know it — he’s also the chairman of the city’s construction appeals board and was appointed to that board by the mayor. Link to the story here.

• The Mt. Carmel feast is on this week! The schedule will be Sunday from 7pm to midnight and Tuesday (no feasting on Monday!), which is Feast Day apparently, which starts with a procession at 4pm, Mass at 6pm, and concludes with fireworks when it’s dark out. Live music, zeppoles, games, and more. Check out their Facebook page for more info.

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Feral cats of the week

Last night, my poor dog got jumped by a feral cat in Lincoln Park — seriously, we were just going for a walk, he was on a leash, and a cat came out of nowhere and ran up to him and attacked him, hissing and scratching. He’s fine, and luckily we just got up to date on his vaccines literally hours before, but the poor guy ran home terrified.

This morning I had to coax him out and, I kid you not, these two tough guys were waiting right in front of our place to finish the job. I saw them as we emerged from the building like, You have got to be kidding me — what, the cat last night had backup?:

(To be clear, I’m making a bit of a joke here — the feral attack was very real, but these two cats had nothing to do with it and were simply minding their business as we walked by this morning. In fact, they quickly ran away when we approached them, as most do. As for the cat last night — a guy in the park took off trying to catch it, and the whole thing is such a blur I don’t think I could reliably identify the cat other than to say it was grey-ish which doesn’t help too much in a part of JC that has literally hundreds of cats living in it. But maybe just be a little careful if you’re in the area, and keep an eye out. Normally I don’t fear the ferals getting too close to my dog, but maybe now I have to be a little more cautious.)

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