There\u2019s never a shortage of reasons to love New Jersey\u2014and as a native Garden Stater, I can rattle off an infinite list at any given moment explaining exactly why it reigns supreme.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, New Jersey gave us yet another reason to hoot and holler: in a special election for the 11th congressional district, Democrat Analilia Mej\u00eda won in a landslide.<\/a> The race filled the seat vacated by Democrat Mikie Sherrill, who resigned after being elected governor in November. Mej\u00eda will serve out the rest of Sherrill\u2019s term\u2014the next eight months\u2014but will have to win the Democratic primary in June and the general election in November to serve a full two-year term.<\/p>\n Still, Mej\u00eda\u2019s win keeps the seat blue for now and narrows House Speaker Mike Johnson\u2019s (R-La.) razor-thin majority<\/a> in the lower chamber, which remains 217\u2013214, with one Independent and three seats currently vacant. Once she\u2019s sworn in, Johnson\u2014who monitors porn intake with his son<\/a>\u2014can only afford to lose a single GOP vote on party-line legislation. Jersey, I\u2019m having 17 hoagies tonight in your honor.<\/p>\n \u201cTo everyone in this incredible district,\u201d Mej\u00eda said<\/a> during her victory party in Montclair, \u201cI want you to know that I will fight for you every single day. I did not come to play.\u201d She declared herself\u2014along with the crowd\u2014an \u201cunbought, unbossed, sassy, new member of Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n Her opponent, Joe Hathaway, tried to criticize her as too progressive, arguing that the district\u00a0wanted<\/a> \u201cbalanced, pragmatic\u201d leadership rather than \u201cfar-left policies.\u201d Well, clearly not. By 8 p.m. on Thursday, the Associated Press called the race with about 94% of all votes counted, showing Mej\u00eda with roughly 60% of the vote to Hathaway\u2019s 40%.<\/p>\n Mejia is a longtime political strategist who served as the national political director for Bernie Sanders\u2019 2020 presidential campaign and later as a Biden-appointed deputy director of the Department of Labor\u2019s Women\u2019s Bureau. She ran on left-wing economic policies, has voiced support for abolishing ICE, and has been a vocal critic of Israel.<\/p>\n \u201cI came to fight for what is right,\u201d\u00a0she said during her victory speech. \u201cIt is not about left or right. It is about right and wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n There will be two more special elections on June 2 and June 16 for two of the vacant House seats, both in California\u2014Democrats are favored in one and the GOP in the other. There hasn\u2019t yet been a scheduled election for the third vacant seat, which is in a Republican-leaning Texas district. But we\u2019ve already seen what the Blue wave has done to those\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n Like what you just read? You\u2019ve got great taste.\u00a0Subscribe to Jezebel<\/a>, and for $5 a month or $50 a year, you\u2019ll get access to a bunch of\u00a0subscriber benefits<\/a>, including getting to read the next article (and all the ones after that)\u00a0ad-free.<\/a>\u00a0Plus, you\u2019ll be\u00a0supporting independent journalism<\/a>\u2014which, can you even imagine\u00a0not\u00a0supporting independent journalism\u00a0in times like these<\/a>? Yikes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s never a shortage of reasons to love New Jersey\u2014and as a native Garden Stater, I can rattle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32294,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[143],"tags":[13898,4749,478,12005,6929,21772],"class_list":["post-32293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mike-johnson","tag-analilia-mejia","tag-congressional-district","tag-mike-johnson","tag-mikie-sherrill","tag-new-jersey","tag-vacant-seat"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116428422821770915","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32293\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}