By Matt Rooney
That’s the big news from The Lakewood Scoop, Save Jerseyans…
A little quick background for the unitiated: the Lakewood Vaad is comprised of 11 Orthodox community leaders whose endorsement in local and statewide races can be worth thousands (or tens of thousands of votes).
It’s a numbers game. Lakewood continues to be an emerging political force in the state and, at present, is New Jersey’s most populous municipality that reliably votes Republican in statewide contests (it gave Donald Trump 88% of the vote in 2024). Lakewood’s population has exploded from 90,000 in 2010 to approximately 140,000 today, and it gave Donald Trump a net margin of over 9,000 votes or nearly 4% of the difference between Trump and Harris. The Vaad is also influential in nearby communities like Jackson where the Orthodox population is also growing rapidly.
In non-federal cycles? Orthodox Jewish politics is more complicated.
The Orthodox community powered Rabbi Avi Schnall to an LD30 Assembly seat in 2023 as a Democrat.
The Vaad also backed Phil Murphy in 2017 and 2021. Their endorsement helped Murphy eek out a victory there in 2017 by less than a single point despite voting 74.4% for Trump the year before in 2016. Jack Ciattarelli did win a decisive 61.38% of Lakewood’s vote in 2021 without Vaad backing; however, Chris Christie’s 82.38% win in 2013 with Vaad backing illustrates the power of an endorsement in the larger statewide math. Those thousands of extra votes could prove decisive if 2025 is as close as 2021 when Ciattarelli can just 80,000 votes short of defeating Murphy.
So yeah, while the Scoop says the endorsement is not yet official, the fact that it appears to be headed that way is highly significant news for Team Ciattarelli which needs a massive Jersey Shore win this year to overcome Democrat margins in bluer sectors of the state.
