Bernie Sanders breaks New Jersey neutrality after years of snubbing his supporters

In a move that has exposed the tangled and often hypocritical loyalties of progressive politics, Sen. Bernie Sanders has issued his first-ever endorsement of a New Jersey Democrat who once supported him for president.

The recipient is Analilia Mejia, a candidate in the crowded special election primary to replace former Rep. Mikie Sherrill.

This endorsement, a seemingly routine act of political support, is in fact a stark departure from a yearslong record of calculated neutrality in the Garden State, where Sanders has repeatedly stood aside while his most ardent local supporters were steamrolled by the party machine he often decries.

For years, a cadre of New Jersey progressives, inspired by Sanders’ “political revolution,” have launched quixotic challenges against what they call a “cartoonishly corrupt” Democratic establishment.

Yet when the moment called for solidarity, the senator from Vermont was conspicuously absent.

The most telling example came in 2020, when his own presidential campaign co-chair in New Jersey, Lawrence Hamm, mounted a primary challenge against Sen. Cory Booker.

Hamm’s bid was a direct test of Sanders’ influence against a mainstream Democrat. Sanders, however, remained neutral. Booker crushed the challenge, winning 87.6% of the primary vote.

This pattern repeated in congressional races.

In the same election cycle, progressive insurgent Lisa McCormick — who had stunned the party by winning 38% of the vote against indicted Sen. Bob Menendez in 2018 — challenged Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman.

McCormick managed only 11% of the pandemic-delayed primary vote.

Sanders intervened by endorsing two New Jersey congressional candidates, neither of whom had supported his presidential bids.

By throwing his support behind Watson Coleman and Dr. Arati Kriebich, a neuroscientist and local municipal councilwoman who challenged Donald Trump’s favorite House Democrat, Rep. Josh Gottheimer.

Watson Coleman and Kriebich had supported Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. The message to New Jersey’s grassroots left was clear: You are on your own.

This history makes the Mejia endorsement a glaring anomaly and an act of profound political irony.

Mejia is running in a special election primary field that reads like a directory of New Jersey’s political class, including the governor-endorsed county commissioner Brendan Gill, carpet-bagging former Rep. Tom Malinowski, and Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way.

Mejia’s campaign platform champions working families, a union-made middle class, and taking on “bosses and bullies in both parties.”

By backing her, Sanders has finally thrown a lifeline to a New Jersey progressive.

The unspoken question is why now, after so many others drowned.

The answer may lie in the shifting tides against an establishment that Sen. Andy Kim has recently described as a “rigged system” intent on gutting anti-corruption watchdogs.

The same party machinery that once protected Menendez now faces a sustained assault from figures like Kim, who won his seat by challenging that very system.

Sanders’ endorsement of Mejia is less a bold strike for revolution and more a belated alignment with an insurgency that has been fighting without his banner for years.

This endorsement also throws into sharp relief the record of Sen. Cory Booker. For all his rhetorical flourish, Booker’s tangible victories in thwarting the agenda of President Donald Trump are impossible to pinpoint.

While Booker has issued statements condemning Trump administration policies on health care and tariffs, the legislative scoreboard tells a different story.

In 2025, a majority of Senate Democrats, Booker included, found themselves voting against a significant number of Trump’s Cabinet nominees. Yet these were largely symbolic rejections; nominees like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were confirmed regardless.

The critique from the left is that Booker has mastered the art of opposition theater while the machinery of power, funded by billionaires and corporate PACs, continues uninterrupted.

The case of Lisa McCormick is the specter at this feast.

Before Mejia, she was the outsider who came closest to shaking the throne. Her 38% showing against Menendez in 2018 was a warning shot that the party largely ignored.

She followed with a failed 2020 congressional bid and a 2021 gubernatorial run in which she was disqualified from the ballot. Her political path underscores the brutal efficiency of New Jersey’s Democratic machine in isolating and extinguishing challenges — often without the need for national progressive heroes to lift a finger.

Today, the primary for New Jersey’s 11th District is a microcosm of the national Democratic divide.

The establishment is consolidating around Gill, who boasts the governor’s endorsement and the support of the Essex County Democratic machine.

Malinowski’s prolific congressional stock trading has not diminished his local connections among affluent Morris County voters.

Mejia, with Sanders’ endorsement in hand, represents the progressive flank, but polling suggests an uphill battle, with one November 2025 survey showing her under ten percent support among likely voters, trailing Malinowski at 25% and Gill at 15%.

Thus, Bernie Sanders’ first endorsement of a New Jersey Democrat who was for him before he was for her is not a clarion call.

It is a faint echo, arriving years after the first waves of the rebellion he inspired crashed against New Jersey’s fortified shores.

It is an acknowledgment, perhaps, that the real revolution was never about a single national leader, but about the long, thankless work of local insurgents who learned to fight without expecting cavalry to arrive.

The irony is not just that Sanders finally acted, but that by the time he did, the most bruising battles had already been lost.