Only in New Jersey would progressives seek justice from corrupt power brokers

In a spectacle of political absurdity that exposes the moral bankruptcy of New Jersey’s Democratic machine, a coalition of Piscataway progressive Democrats has been forced to appeal to Elon Musk’s lobbyist to resolve a dispute over campaign flyers.

The letter, dated Oct. 16, 2026, and addressed to Middlesex County Democratic Chairman Kevin McCabe, demands that he stop the systematic erasure of two sitting female council members and a Black Democratic nominee from taxpayer-funded promotional materials and party-sponsored campaign paraphernalia.

The signatories—including Council Members Sarah Rashid and Laura Leibowitz, Ward 1 nominee Shantell Cherry, and more than 100 local officials and activists—detail a campaign of institutional bullying by Mayor Brian Wahler and Senator Bob Smith and want some kind of relief from the party boss.

Rashid, the first Muslim municipal official in Piscataway, and Leibowitz, the first female Jewish council member in decades, have been scrubbed from the township’s Facebook page and quarterly newsletter.

At the Piscataway Y Community Center, staff replaced their framed photos with “two empty picture frames,” a gesture that mirrors President Donald Trump’s disrespectful slights at his predecessor.

The mayor has allegedly used taxpayer money to produce AI-generated videos disparaging their votes, also mimicking the style of the current president.

In September 2020, McCabe moved quickly to call for Democratic South Plainfield council candidate Steve Remming to drop out of the race after comments he made on Facebook surfaced as an issue.

Remming, who dropped out of the race, had said he would celebrate if Bernie Sanders’ supporters committed suicide and hurled profanity-laced tirades against President Donald Trump’s supporters.

“Let me be crystal clear: there is absolutely no room in the Democratic Party for this kind of intolerance,” said McCabe of Remming but the county chairman has not commented on a hateful anti-Muslim flyer funded by Smith and circulated by the Piscataway Mayor’s wife, even after it was condemned by a slew of Middlesex County Democratic Organization members, elected officials, and progressive organizations

In May 2019, Smith and Wahler’s group distributed a leaflet to Piscataway voters containing coded anti-Muslim language that sparked condemnation from the Star-Ledger Editorial Board.

Cherry, a Black woman and longtime school board leader, won the June primary for Ward 1 but the Piscataway Democratic Organization has completely ignored her and refused to endorse her, despite her Republican opponent.

Wahler will remain in power even though his council majority will be reduced from 5-2 to 4-3 when Cherry takes the seat of three-term Councilman Frank Uhrin, whom she defeated in the primary, by a 54%-46% margin.

The Piscataway Democratic organization, led by State Sen. Robert Smith and Wahler, has essentially answered that question.

Piscataway is a Democratic stronghold, and Republicans are only contesting Ward 1, where Republican William Lawrence is running with the surreptitious backing of the mayor and state senator.

The question echoes a national pattern: establishment Democrats preferring Republicans over genuine progressives, as in 2016 and as appears to be happening in Michigan today.

But the real absurdity lies in the recipient. McCabe is not a neutral party elder.

He is a lobbyist whose firm, River Crossing Strategy Group, once represented Musk’s Tesla and now represents a rogues’ gallery of corporate interests that progressive Democrats have spent years fighting.

Asking McCabe to police a local party dispute is like asking an arsonist to inspect the fire alarms.

River Crossing’s client list reads like a catalog of the very forces undermining public education and affordable housing. The firm represents Better Education for Kids, a charter school advocacy group founded by billionaire hedge fund manager David Tepper, a key ally of former Gov. Chris Christie.

B4K spent $36,000 attacking a Democratic Trenton mayoral candidate in 2014 as part of a push to expand charter schools and break the teachers’ union.

River Crossing also lobbies for the New Jersey Public Charter Schools Association and Teach for America—two pillars of the corporate education reform movement that treats public schools as a market to be exploited.

Even more galling is the firm’s representation of the LeFrak Organization, one of the state’s largest developers.

In 2019, a super PAC linked to LeFrak planned to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Jersey City school board race to support a slate opposed by the teachers’ union.

LeFrak has fought a payroll tax designed to fund Jersey City’s public schools and was recently sued by the New Jersey Attorney General for allegedly colluding in a statewide rent-raising scheme that forced tens of thousands of tenants to overpay.

River Crossing also represents McKinsey & Company, Hackensack Meridian Health, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, and South Jersey Industries—a fossil fuel utility that has fought climate action at every turn.

McCabe himself is a relic of some of New Jersey’s darkest political chapters.

A member of former Gov. Jim McGreevey’s cabinet, he rose to prominence during an administration defined by scandal and largely funded by Charles Kushner—Trump’s father-in-law and a man convicted of witness tampering and tax evasion.

The signatories are right to demand integrity. But asking a Musk-linked lobbyist for charter schools and rent-raising developers to enforce democratic fairness is a fantasy only a progressive would believe in.

In Piscataway, the fix is in—and it is being paid for by the highest bidder.

The party bosses would rather elect Republicans than genuine Democrats, and they have installed a lobbyist for the enemies of public education and affordable housing as the arbiter of their fate.

That is the moral audacity of the power brokers involved: they do not even pretend to be on the side of the voters they claim to represent.