It was a week of wild contrasts, Save Jerseyans.
Steve Sweeney, dethroned from the Senate and its presidency, is presently heading to court after being booted from the legislative redistricting commission by his own state party. Once thought to be a contender for governor in 2025 and still perhaps in his own mind, Sweeney’s political future has officially hit the skids.
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Meanwhile, on the same day (Wednesday) that Sweeney lost his redistricting chair and presumably huddled with South Jersey Machine lawyers, his former colleague and ally Jeff Van Drew held a very different type of gathering in Atlantic County.
Roughly 70 GOP party leaders gathered at Gourmet Italian in Galloway at the two-term congressman’s invitation. The attendees included GOP chairs whose counties hold NJ-02 territory – Mike Donohue (Cape May), Mike Testa (Cumberland), Jacci Vigilante (Gloucester), Keith Davis (Atlantic), and Linwood Donelson (Salem) – as well as four state senators: Testa (LD1) as well as the newly-installed Vince Polistina (LD2), Ed Durr (LD3), and Jean Stanfield (LD8). A small army of municipal leaders from the recently-redrawn district which stretches as far “north” as Berkeley (Ocean) rounded out the crowd who heard ex-Trump campaign manager and current Van Drew consultant Bill Stepien’s take on the lay of the land headed in the 2022 midterms.
The agenda stayed informal and most attendees spent their time mixing between county groups and exchanging contact information. Some were meeting for the first time, and plenty rarely leave their own counties for anything political. Van Drew, famously a former Democrat before December 2019, nevertheless made it very clear in his comments that a historic and urgent task lies ahead which calls for a new level of cooperation between the various South Jersey GOP fiefdoms both long-established and emerging.
2022 and 2023 loom large for the long-embattled but suddenly insurgent South Jersey Republicans buoyed by Sweeney’s November defeat and the net pick up of five legislative seats. Attending Republicans understandably believe environmental factors, shifting demographics, and a reignited New Jersey Democrat civil war point to rare opportunities ahead.
Priority #1: both Gloucester and Cumberland counties will see control races this year; if Republicans – who romped in both places last fall – succeed in flipping both counties, then the mighty South Jersey organization built by George Norcross III (who now resides in Florida) will suddenly be pushed back to its early 1990s Camden County borders.
“This was long overdue, and I give Jeff all the credit in the world for finally making it happen,” one attendee told Save Jersey.
Another attending leader remarked that Sweeney might be kicking himself for not switching parties before getting tossed out of office.
“Not that we want him,” they added with a heavy dose of satisfaction.
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