Hathaway vs. Mejia: Final Week of NJ-11 Special Election

The 11th Congressional District race is heating up fast, and April 16 can’t get here soon enough for both camps.

Democrat Analilia Mejia and Republican Joe Hathaway are spending the final stretch of this special election sprint doing what candidates do: working rooms, trading punches, and trying to convince very different slices of a complicated district to show up on a Tuesday. The seat opened up when Mikie Sherrill won the governorship, and now the two front-runners are fighting over who fills it.

Not a friendly fight, either. Hathaway has called Mejia an antisemitic socialist. Mejia has called Hathaway a liar and hammered him for backing the president’s mass deportation agenda. The district covers towns across Essex, Morris, and Passaic counties, where Democrats hold a registration edge. That’s the math Hathaway needs to work around.

His pitch is an unusual one. After an event in Madison Wednesday night, Hathaway told reporters he believes he can pull in anti-Trump voters who are curious enough to give a Republican a shot. He specifically cited Jewish voters, saying they’re “very concerned about what Mejia has to offer.” His argument, roughly: this is a low-stakes test drive. Vote for me now, hold me accountable in November.

Dan Cassino, a political science professor and pollster at Fairleigh Dickinson University, isn’t buying it. Cassino said the voters most likely to turn out in a special election are strong partisans, not ticket-splitters shopping for something new. “Democrats as a whole do not seem interested in finding common ground with Trump, or really questioning the Democratic candidate too much,” he said. “Partisanship is very, very dominant here.”

That tracks with what’s happening on the Mejia side.

Monday night at a Chatham community center, nearly 200 people showed up to hear Mejia speak alongside former Rep. Tom Malinowski and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin. The event was billed as a “democracy and accountability town hall,” and for over an hour the three Democrats hit President Donald Trump on the war in Iran and his push for new federal voting restrictions. Standing ovations, multiple times. The room was not full of swing voters.

Mejia pushed back on the idea that sharing a stage with Malinowski, one of the candidates she beat in the February primary, was some kind of centrist repositioning move. She pointed to her work in the Biden administration and her support for former Gov. Phil Murphy’s 2021 reelection campaign as evidence she doesn’t need to soften her image.

The bigger picture here is what makes this race worth watching beyond the 11th District. Political observers see this special election as an early read on voter energy ahead of November’s midterms. New Jersey has a history of functioning as a bellwether for national political mood, and a race this pointed, in a district this competitive, is exactly the kind of data point both parties want.

NJ Monitor has been tracking the final week of the race closely.

Whoever wins on April 16 gets a short leash. The seat comes back up in November, so this isn’t a four-year reprieve for either side. It’s a preview. And based on how bitter the campaign has already gotten, the rematch conversation will start before the results are even certified.