At 4 p.m. Monday, a deadline passed in New Jersey that most residents never knew existed, and the consequences landed squarely on anyone who believed the June 2 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate might offer voters a genuine choice.
Four Republicans filed to seek the GOP nomination to take on Booker, Richard Tabor, Justin Murphy, Alex Zdan, and Robert S. Lebovics. However, those contenders are on a fool’s errand, since no Republican has won a Senate contest in New Jersey since 1972, and Trump has made the GOP toxic in the state.
Marvin Christopher Fields —more generally known as Chris Fields— who had spent two months presenting himself as a community organizer, a scholar of political economy, and the Democratic alternative to incumbent Sen. Cory Booker, did not submit his nominating petitions to the Secretary of State.
Not a single sheet. The deadline came and went, and Fields was outside the building broadcasting on Facebook pleas for residents to come to him and add their signatures to his deficient petitions.
Fields did not respond to multiple requests for comment. His social media sites have not been updated since 2:03 p.m., two hours before the petition deadline.
That failure cleared the last obstacle standing between Booker and an uncontested primary — and it left Lisa McCormick, a progressive activist who had already abandoned her own campaign on Fields’ assurances, staring at the wreckage of a plan that was never hers to begin with.
“I feel like I was hoodwinked,” McCormick said Monday, “but trickery and deceit are tools of the trade among today’s politicians.”
It is difficult to argue with that assessment. McCormick had been organizing for a Senate run for weeks before Fields entered the race on Feb. 13.
When it became clear the two candidates were competing for the same lane — progressive, working-class, explicitly hostile to the financial interests that have made Booker a reliable draw for Wall Street donors and AIPAC contributors — McCormick made what seems like a selfless calculation.
One credible challenger, she reasoned, was better than two splitting the same constituency. It was the second time she made that selfless decision, which only makes her more attractive as a candidate. In 2020, McCormick deferred to Larry Hamm.
At the Hunterdon County Democratic convention, Fields told her he was not stepping aside. He said he was working to gather petition signatures, and McCormick believed him.
That was three weeks ago. Later that week, McCormick was endorsed by Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon. A couple of days later, she stopped pursuing the nomination.
“There were numerous sites around the state where people were gathering signatures for Fields over the weekend,” she noted, which makes the failure to file not merely a logistical oversight but something harder to explain by accident alone.
When McCormick stopped gathering signatures — deferring to a man who would ultimately produce nothing — approximately 3,200 people had signed her petitions. Short of the 5,000 she had set as her goal to ensure the documents contained the 2,500 valid signatures required by law, but a real number representing real citizens who wanted a choice on a ballot.
Those signatures are now worthless. Those citizens have no one to vote for in June except the man already holding the office.
The arithmetic of that outcome is clarifying. In 2018, when McCormick challenged then-Sen. Bob Menendez — a figure whose subsequent federal bribery conviction suggests McCormick’s judgment about New Jersey’s political class was sound — she received two of every five votes cast.
She had no party support, no institutional backing, and no money worth mentioning. She ran against a sitting senator with a machine behind him and took nearly 40 percent of the primary vote. That is not a protest candidacy. That is a constituency.
The requirement she ran against in 2018 was 1,000 valid signatures. This year, the threshold is 2,500. McCormick notes that the signature requirement more than doubled after reformers removed the power of county party bosses to determine ballot positioning — the so-called “county line” that New Jersey courts struck down.
The bosses lost one instrument of control, and the legislature handed them another: a higher barrier to entry that makes mounting an independent primary challenge materially harder for candidates without institutional support.
“The truth is, political power brokers and party bosses do not want voters to have a say,” McCormick said. “They refused to enact a public campaign financing system to break the grip of wealthy special interests, they took away our right to obtain public information, they broke the independence of the Election Law Enforcement Commission, and they more than doubled the number of signatures it takes to get on the ballot.”
She is not wrong about the facts. New Jersey has not enacted public campaign financing for federal races. The Election Law Enforcement Commission has been systematically defunded and diminished. And the signature requirements went up precisely when candidates who lack party organization most need a workable path to the ballot.
Fields, who graduated from Rutgers with degrees in economics and political science, served on the executive board of the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee and as vice chair of the Readington Democratic Committee, and self-published a 78-page book on how laws, taxation, and federal priorities determine economic winners and losers, apparently could not organize the basic mechanics of his own ballot access.
His book argues that American political debate ignores structural forces in favor of narratives about individual merit. The irony of that argument colliding with his campaign’s structural failure is one he will have time to contemplate.
What remains is Booker, uncontested, moving toward a June primary that will produce a result before a single competitive vote is cast.
The senator who built his national profile in Newark and has since built his donor base considerably further afield — AIPAC spent heavily to support him, and Wall Street has long found him a congenial figure — will spend the next two years, in McCormick’s phrasing, “running for president instead of having anyone in Washington truly fighting to stop Trump, fix the economy, or save the world.”
There are voters in New Jersey who wanted a choice on Monday. About 3,200 of them signed a petition for one, and fewer than 2,500 signed another. They will not have an alternative on June 2.
The deadline was 4 p.m. It passed. And a state that permits its citizens to be governed by an uncontested incumbent in a party primary has managed to call that democracy, with a straight face and a published filing schedule, while the man who was supposed to provide the alternative was somewhere other than the Secretary of State’s office.
New Jersey will not get the Senate primary it deserves. Instead, voters will get the one that was arranged for them.
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