With a resume built entirely through appointment and succession rather than a decisive public mandate, congressional candidate Tahesha Way is the portrait of a modern career politician.
Her path has followed a precise, insider track: an appointed administrative law judge, an elected Passaic County commissioner, before being appointed secretary of state and lieutenant governor, without facing the voters of New Jersey in a statewide election for either role.
In a political advertisement blanketing North Jersey airwaves, Way now claims what appears to be a false recollection of history.
The ad states that as a Passaic County Commissioner, she “expanded services without raising taxes.” This is a curious bit of arithmetic that deserves a closer look, not through the heated lens of partisan politics, but through the cold, hard ledger of fact.
Despite an 11-candidate field, the campaign is widely considered a three-way contest among two corrupt insiders, Brendan Gill and Tom Malinowski, as well as progressive champion Analilia Mejia, but it is disconcerting that anyone seeking votes can lie to voters without remorse or shame.
Way began serving as a Passaic County freeholder in 2006 and took on the role of Board Director in 2009.
During her time in office, which lasted until she left in 2018 to become Lieutenant Governor under former Governor Phil Murphy, county homeowners didn’t see much in the way of tax relief.
It was, in fact, the precise era when Passaic County cemented its status as one of the most punishing places in the nation to pay a property tax bill.
By 2018, the average homeowner in the county was writing a check for more than $10,000 annually. Way was sworn in as New Jersey’s third Lieutenant Governor on September 8, 2023, following the death of Sheila Oliver.
In municipalities like Prospect Park, the effective tax rate soared above three percent.
These are not partisan allegations; they are the documented outcomes of county budgets.
The claim of expanding services without raising taxes presents a fundamental question of municipal finance.
Who, precisely, paid for the expansion? The answer, drawn from a decade of tax records, is the homeowner.
The county portion of a property tax bill is a direct result of budgets set by the Board of Commissioners. To suggest otherwise is not only to ignore the very structure of local government. It is a flat-out lie, and Tahesha Way is telling it to voters.
While state-level fluctuations in homestead rebates and the complex aftermath of property revaluations caused individual bills to shift, the overarching trajectory under the county’s stewardship was relentlessly upward.
Now seeking federal office, Way pledges to lower costs by championing a raise to the cap on State and Local Tax (SALT) deductions.
Here, the discrepancy between rhetoric and reality grows wider.
This policy, however popular in high-tax states, is widely analyzed by nonpartisan experts as a benefit disproportionately flowing to the wealthy.
Analyses from the Tax Policy Center and others conclude that raising the SALT cap primarily assists high-income earners, particularly the top 10% and even the top 1%, while offering little to nothing to the lower-income families Way claims to champion in her advertisement.
It is a policy that would overwhelmingly benefit the very households least burdened by the county tax policies she oversaw.
The contest to replace Governor Mikie Sherrill is crowded, with eleven Democrats vying in the February primary.
While outside spending from groups like the AIPAC-aligned United Democracy Project has sought to boost Way’s chances by targeting a rival, the central narrative of her campaign rests on this reconstructed record.
Voters are asked to believe that a county commissioner who served during a period of peak property taxation was a champion of holding the line, and that a tax policy benefiting the affluent is a tool for easing the strain on working families.
Although Murphy signed bills to make health care more accessible and affordable for New Jersey residents, it is not true that Way “expanded healthcare access” as lieutenant governor.
In journalism and in democracy, precision with facts is the bedrock of trust.
Campaigns are exercises in persuasion, but they must not become exercises in historical revision. The people of Passaic County lived through those years and paid those bills, so they know that Way is lying, and the rest of the district’s voters understand that politicians do not always tell the truth.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful Washington lobby, is funneling over half a million dollars into attack ads against Tom Malinowski, seeking to punish his past congressional record and install a more compliant ally.
This cynical gambit exposes Malinowski as vulnerable to a single-issue lobby, portrays their preferred beneficiary, Tahesha Way, as an instrument of outside interests, and reveals AIPAC’s own prioritization of political coercion over constructive debate on U.S. foreign policy.
Voters deserve a debate grounded in the full truth of that record, not a sanitized version airbrushed for election season or a series of slanders against a warmongering supporter of genocide in Gaza, accusing him of abandoning Israel simply because he hinted that he won’t blindly obey AIPAC.
To do otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of every voter trying to discern a candidate’s real priorities from the crafted poetry of a political ad.