Americana

Will Rob Menendez go down with the family ship?

THE SCENE

WEST NEW YORK, N.J. – On Sunday morning, Rep. Rob Menendez was surrounded by his friends. Two governors. One county executive. Three mayors. One of them, Albio Sires, had represented the majority-Latino city in Congress, then handed off the seat to Menendez.

“When the chips were down, the folks on this stage stayed with me,” Menendez told a crowd of around 200 people. “They stuck with me, just like all of you.”

Menendez didn’t explain what misfortune had befallen him. He didn’t need to. Nine months after his father was charged with accepting bribes from foreign lobbyists, the 38-year-old Democrat is defending his seat, and his reputation, in a pricey and bitter primary fight that the voters will decide on Tuesday. Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla, who endorsed the congressman two years ago, has spent nearly $2 million running against “nepotism” and a toxic brand.

“It’s an open secret in Washington that the Menendez name is just a drag on the Democratic Party,” Bhalla said in an interview. “We can close the chapter on the Menendez machine. I think that’ll be a breath of fresh air.”

The congressman, who’d never sought office before the 2022 race for this safe seat, hasn’t been linked to any of his father’s scandals. The “Menendez” name has shrunk on his campaign material; Hudson County Democratic literature urges voters to support JOE (Biden) and ROB, with the now-problematic family name in a sized-down font.

“There’s constantly an attempt to undermine my achievements,” Menendez said in a joint interview with Bhalla last week. It had dogged him “from the time I was in elementary school and won science fairs, and people would discredit it, to the time I was in law school and won the alumni senior prize for the senior showing the greatest achievement during their law school career.”

When opponents attack his father’s legal problems, the congressman has accused them of being “afraid” to challenge him; when asked about his father’s intent to run as an independent, Menendez has changed the subject.

“He stands on his own two feet,” Gov. Phil Murphy told Semafor after the Sunday rally. “I love the guy, and I have for a long time.”

KNOW MORE

The North Jersey Democratic machines are built to prevent a race like this; in 2022, they did. Within 24 hours of Sires announcing his retirement, Menendez locked up the departing congressman’s endorsement: “He comes from good stock.” Bhalla, who also endorsed Menendez, now says he was pressured into doing it.

“It was a full-court press to make sure that he could snap up a congressional seat,” Bhalla said. He’d heard of the younger Menendez, an attorney who Murphy had appointed as a commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Before Bhalla could vet the candidate, he recalled, he was pulled from a meeting, told that Rob was about to call, and told that Sen. Menendez would be listening.

“I was jarred,” Bhalla said. “I perceived that as very intimidating, to have a senior senator listening to my response to whether I’d support his son for a congressional seat.”

In October, the senator was indicted. Two months later, Bhalla entered the race against his son. Weaker opponents had lost handily to Menendez in 2022; the campaign had even gotten two of them off the ballot, after challenging their signatures.

Bhalla, 50, was better known in the district, getting national attention after his 2017 election in Hoboken — one of few Sikhs to be elected mayor in the US, right across the river from Trump Tower. And he benefited not just from the tarnishing of the Menendez name, but from Rep. Andy Kim’s successful battle to kill “the line,” a ballot-shaping tool that county machines had used to protect incumbents.

“We are literally raging against the machine,” Bhalla said on Saturday, as he met a voter at Jersey City’s jazz festival wearing a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt. “We want to bring a little bit more democracy to average voters.”

Bhalla out-raised Menendez, $2 million to $1.6 million; he got a few endorsements from local Democrats who had their own grievances with local party leaders. When Menendez the senator first threatened to run as an independent, Bhalla asked why his son hadn’t endorsed Kim, the front-runner for the open seat; when Donald Trump was convicted, Bhalla told voters they had a chance to throw out the whole corrupt establishment in their upcoming primary.

The vast majority of Menendez’s allies stuck with him — and the congressman attacked his detractors as cynical and suspicious. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s BOLD PAC put $500,000 into the majority-Latino district, portraying the incumbent as a fighter for healthcare and Social Security; the crypto-funded Protect Progress PAC followed, with nearly identical messaging. (Protect Our Future, the defunct crypto PAC largely funded by Sam Bankman-Fried, spent $250,000 to help Menendez last cycle.)

In the race’s final stretch, Menendez asked who, exactly, needed to answer questions about corruption. On May 3, Hoboken’s former health director filed a lawsuit in Hudson County superior court alleging that Bhalla had politicized the city’s cannabis review board to help Jersey City Mayor Stephen Fulop’s wife, and had worried that some employees could “hurt him politically if laid off.” (Fulop, who is running for governor, had pointedly declined to support Menendez.)

“Mayor Bhalla was accused of a quid pro quo arrangement,” Menendez said in a televised debate with Bhalla last week, invoking both the lawsuit and a 2018 ethics case against Bhalla for withholding $6,000 from an employee’s retirement account. “If the issue of ethics is important to our viewers, as it should be, only one of us on this stage has an ethical issue.”

That was “pure nonsense,” said Bhalla, relying on a compromised source to make his case: “This is a gentleman who was handpicked by party bosses to be your next congressman.”

“You’re one of the people that supported me in 2022,” Menendez shot back. He had enough of Bhalla’s supposedly harrowing story about Michael Soliman, a lobbyist for Qatar and advisor to both Menendezes, setting up that endorsement with a joint phone call.

“You say you’re gonna stand up to Donald Trump,” said Menendez. “You can’t stand up to Michael Soliman? That’s a ridiculous claim.”

DAVID’S VIEW

The bar for “most problematic Democratic politician’s relative in a courtroom” is pretty high right now. Rep. Menendez hasn’t been linked to any of his father’s alleged misdeeds, and local Democrat electeds who’ve abandoned the senator are overwhelmingly comfortable supporting the congressman.

Bhalla is a far more low-key politician, and Menendez has found plenty of openings for counter-punches. In their final debate, when Bhalla chided the congressman for staying out of the US Senate primary “because your father just started collecting petitions to run as an independent,” Menendez said that Bhalla had double-crossed a low-polling Latina candidate still running in that race: “You have a habit of doing this to powerful Latino women.”

The message: Bhalla’s a political opportunist, trying to take advantage of an unfortunate family situation and blow it all out of proportion. The mayor benefits from every screaming “MENENDEZ” headline; campaign polling has found that around a quarter of the electorate confuses the father and the son, and when I trailed Bhalla, he met voters who needed a quick explainer. (“Not the gold bars guy,” one voter at a block party said to his partner, as he explained which Robert Menendez was which.)

Both candidates warn supporters that the election will be close; Menendez may benefit from the presence of Kyle Jasey, a real estate insurer who’s spent little on the campaign, as another option for protest voters. But Democrats aren’t treating the father’s problems the way Republicans are treating Trump’s. They don’t assume the senator is being victimized; they aren’t rallying around him. They see the scandal as a tragedy, and disagree over how much to punish the whole family for it.

NOTABLE

• In The New York Times, Nicholas Fandos and Tracey Tulley ask where the family name could be Menendez’s undoing: The son has been “nowhere near the courthouse” where his father is on trial.
• In The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein wonders what the election might mean for New Jersey political machines: “Several top advisers to Sen. Menendez have maxed out individual contributions to his son’s campaign.”

It’s primary day in five states and the District of Columbia, where the presidential primaries will come to an end. Here’s a quick guide, outside Jersey City.

New Jersey. Rep. Andy Kim scared his two best-known opponents out of the US Senate race months ago: Sen. Bob Menendez and New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy. He’s facing progressive think tank director Patricia Campos-Medina and activist Larry Hamm, and Democrats are watching their vote totals for a sense of where Kim will need to improve in November — like how strong Campos-Medina is in Latino areas of north Jersey, where Menendez’s last-minute independent bid picked up its ballot signatures. Encouraged by Menendez’s problems, Republicans have a four-way primary for their nomination; Trump endorsed Mendham Mayor Christine Glassner Serrano, largely because he saw Cape May hotelier Curtis Bashaw as a “[Chris] Christie guy.”

In Kim’s 3rd Congressional District, which was re-drawn in 2021 to be safe for Democrats, state assembly members Herb Conaway and Carol Murphy are in a competitive race; the county parties have endorsed Conaway. Rep. Bill Pascrell drew a challenge from Prospect Park Mayor Mohamed Khairullah, who has campaigned on a Gaza ceasefire and changing the guard from the 87-year-old incumbent, but raised little money. There are 126 presidential delegates at stake, with an “uncommitted” option, and polls close at 8 p.m. Eastern Time.

Washington, D.C. The deep blue Democratic city has 20 presidential delegates and no “uncommitted” option; there’s been a grassroots campaign urging “Gaza” protest votes. Polls close at 8 p.m. Eastern Time.

South Dakota. Democrats will pick 16 presidential delegates here, where Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson remained on the ballot, but most of the competition will happen in state-level GOP primaries and in counties voting whether to end machine voting and bring back paper ballots. Polls close statewide at 7 p.m. local time; results won’t roll in until the part of the state in Mountain Time finishes up, at 9 p.m. Eastern.

Iowa. Democrats and Republicans picked their presidential delegates months ago, and there’s not much competition down the ballot; Democrats are trying to nominate competitive candidates in the 1st and 3rd Congressional Districts, which they held for years, and in the 3rd District USDA veteran Lanon Baccam is facing nonprofit director Melissa Vine. Polls close at 8 p.m. local time, 9 p.m. Eastern.

New Mexico. There are 34 Democratic delegates to win here, and “uncommitted” is an option; the Republican ballot includes several candidates who’ve dropped out, for one more test of Trump’s appeal in a state where his leadership has been bad for the local party. But there’s not much other competition. Polls close at 7 p.m. local time, 9 p.m. Eastern.

Montana. The final vote counted in the presidential primary will likely be cast here, where both Biden and Trump face “no preference,” and Democrats have 20 pledged delegates. The race to replace retiring Rep. Matt Rosendale in the deep red 2nd Congressional District is more competitive, with ex-Rep. Denny Rehberg facing off against eight other Republicans, including state Auditor Troy Downing — endorsed by Trump. Polls close at 8 p.m. statewide, 10 p.m. Eastern.

America’s Promise, “Bad Apples.” The classic role of a super PAC is to do the nasty things a candidate won’t do. That’s the role America’s Promise played in the Menendez-Bhalla race, repeating the facts of Sen. Menendez’s criminal trial and roping in his son: “Rob says he strongly believes in his father’s integrity and values and he’s refused to give his father’s dirty money back.”

Bhalla for Congress, “The Time is Now.” Bhalla’s mixed it up with Menendez on X and in forums, but his paid advertising has stayed positive. “I sued big oil, stood up to Trump, and declared Hoboken a welcoming city for all,” he says, in a montage of action shots that show him heading to work and greeting happy voters. If voters want to see him attacking the congressman as a nepo baby, they have to go online.

Protect Progress, “Por Nuestras Familias.” The new network of crypto-funded PACs has been most effective, so far, in Democratic primaries. In California, it rained down on Rep. Katie Porter, when she was already trailing in her U.S. Senate race. In New Jersey, it’s amplifying Menendez’s basic message – that in a single term, he’d become an effective liberal congressman – with some of the same messaging and b-roll as his own ads.

It may take a while for polling to reflect the impact of Trump’s conviction. The first wave of interviews found almost no movement for or against Trump, and an electorate divided between its sense that Trump was guilty and its sense that the trial was unfair. Most adults surveyed here agree with both sentiments, but they also would prefer Trump not be the GOP nominee. Asked how they’d feel if he went to prison, one in four Republicans say they couldn’t vote for him. But we saw similar numbers a few months ago, when Republicans were asked about a potential convention, and they didn’t budge.

One year after its passage, South Carolina’s “heartbeat” abortion ban is less popular than ever. The dissatisfaction is driven by Republicans, who initially supported the ban by a 13-point margin, but now support it by a 5-point margin. Democratic opposition has grown, too, from 30 points to 34 points. In an open primary state, that matters; Rep. William Timmons, a Republican incumbent fending off a conservative challenger in his upstate seat, has been advertising his opposition to a stricter, fuller ban than the one passed in Columbia.

White House. Trump’s campaign network reported raising $141 million in May, nearly doubling what it raised in April. Half of that was raised in the 48 hours after Trump’s conviction in New York – a combination of online fundraising egged on by Trump’s endorsers, and large party donations given by wealthy supporters who said the verdict had outraged them.

The Biden campaign didn’t release its May numbers, and doesn’t need to until the middle of the month. The president used a weekend fundraiser in Connecticut to say what some Democrats had been coy about: That he was now running against a “felon,” who “will be given an opportunity to appeal,” and was being “reckless and dangerous and downright irresponsible” by saying the case against him was rigged.

Meanwhile: The Montana Libertarian Party said Tuesday that it rejected Chase Oliver’s presidential nomination, raising the possibility that it and other state LPs will put an alternative candidate on the ballot.

House. Democrat Adam Hollier ended his campaign against Rep. Shri Thanedar over the weekend, after submitting too few signatures to make the ballot. Thanedar won his 2022 primary with just 28% of the vote, edging Hollier and seven other candidates in the majority-Black, Detroit-based seat. He faces two Black challengers in the August primary; Hollier had raised more than $800,000 to face Thanedar, but neither remaining challenger has filed with the FEC. With Rep. Rashida Tlaib facing only a fringe challenge from an anti-abortion activist, Hollier’s mistake makes it likely that Detroit will have no Black representation through 2026.

• seven days until primaries in Maine, Nevada, North Dakota, and South Carolina
• 14 days until primaries in Oklahoma and Virginia
• 21 days until runoffs in South Carolina and primaries in Colorado, New York, and Utah
• 23 days until the first presidential debate
• 41 days until the Republican National Convention
• 76 days until the Democratic National Convention
• 154 days until the 2024 presidential election