Forgot Your Password?

New to The Nation? Subscribe

Print subscriber? Activate your online access

.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}

The Primary Win That Stunned Democrats Everywhere

Analilia Mejia’s stunning upset victory in New Jersey offers invaluable insights about the past and present of liberal politics in America.

Analilia Mejia speaks in Montclair, New Jersey, on Thursday, January 29, 2026.

The announcement on February 5 was emphatic. “Decision Desk HQ projects Tom Malinowski to win the Democratic Special Election Primary in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district. #DecisionMade: 8:52 pm ET.”

Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) is one of the more respected election forecasters, and as such, a flurry of outlets followed its call and crowned Malinowski, a former US House representative, the winner of the Democratic primary election. The North Jersey congressional seat is solidly Democratic—its previous representative, Mikie Sherrill, is now the governor of New Jersey—meaning that whoever emerged out of this primary would likely win the special election in two months’ time. For a moment, it appeared as though that would be Malinowski.

But within minutes of DDHQ’s announcement, the call started looking shaky. The election-day returns from Morris County—a largely suburban county speckled with affluent neighborhoods—were expected to tilt toward Malinowski. But as the precinct results started trickling in, it became clear that those voters were actually turning out for Analilia Mejia, a stalwart of New Jersey’s anti-establishment political orbit.

After about 90 minutes, DDHQ retracted its projection. By the end of the night, Mejia appeared on the precipice of victory, with a slim lead of several hundred votes. Five days later, the margins had hardly moved. Malinowski officially conceded, and Mejia claimed victory.

Garden State politics, never lacking for drama, had once again lived up to its billing. For decades, New Jersey’s democracy had been strangled under the chokehold of patronage networks and corporate-backed machine politics. But recent years have seen a remarkable surge in organizing work geared toward democratic reform, and this work has cracked open new horizons for progressive politics. Activists across the state are rightfully celebrating Mejia’s victory, which, three years ago, would’ve been unfathomable.

The implications of this election could stretch far beyond New Jersey. The result sent shock waves through Democratic circles across the country—most notably, for the involvement of an AIPAC-affiliated group that spent $2.3 million to sink Malinowski’s candidacy, despite his strong pro-Israel politics. His crime, it appears, was that he voiced some apprehension about extending unconditional, permanent aid to a rogue Israeli state.

To progressives, it’s a sign of a fracturing Israel lobby, and a validation of Mejia’s fierce, unapologetic platform. To skeptics, her victory is the result of a split field of moderates, one that may be impossible to replicate.

The story of this primary election—which involves Israel, ICE terror, liberal resistance politics, and New Jersey political history—is more complicated than either of these neat narratives suggests. But it’s one that offers invaluable insights about the past and present of liberal politics in America.

Tom Malinowski first achieved national attention in 2018, when he flipped New Jersey’s Seventh Congressional District, which had long been a Republican stronghold.

The 2018 midterms, which returned control of the House to the Democrats, signified the first major triumph of the “liberal resistance,” the amorphous political coalition of activists, liberal groups, newly engaged voters, and center-left politicians. All of these groups were outraged at Trump, but the resistance’s more dominant strands, particularly in those early years, mostly sought a return to the “normalcy” epitomized by the Obama administration.

The well-credentialed, buttoned-up Malinowski was the archetypal figure for the resistance in a political moment starved of respectability, expertise, and poise—a Rhodes Scholar who held a flourish of prestigious White House jobs throughout the 1990s, followed by a 12-year tenure at Human Rights Watch (HRW), and capped off by a powerful position as an assistant secretary in Obama’s State Department.

Once elected, he carefully avoided the limelight, settling into Congress as an uncontroversial backbencher. Despite the occasional bad vote, he largely refrained from overtly antagonizing the left wing of the party.

Malinowski’s problems first began in 2021, when he was accused of failing to disclose a series of stock trades. But the death knell to his congressional career came from the same institution that first propelled him to victory: the New Jersey Democratic Party. In 2021, redistricting carried out by the Democratic-controlled state legislature gutted Democratic voter-rich enclaves of the seventh district and redistributed them to two adjacent toss-up congressional districts (NJ-11, then represented by Sherrill; and NJ-5, represented by Josh Gottheimer)—in exchange, the seventh........

© The Nation