Bill Pascrell Jr. defeated Steve Rothman for a chance at a ninth term in Congress in a primary election between onetime New Jersey Democratic allies whose voting records were almost identical.
Pascrell, 75, got 70 percent of the vote to Rothman’s 30 percent, according to preliminary results from the Associated Press with 78 percent of the vote counted. The race was the result of redistricting, when New Jersey’s congressional seat count dropped to 12 from 13 after the 2010 U.S. Census.
The boundaries would have put Rothman, 59, in the 5th District to face incumbent Republican Scott Garrett, hailed as a “a beacon of light” by Tea Party activists. Rothman instead moved from Fair Lawn to Englewood, where he had been mayor, to challenge Pascrell in the newly drawn 9th District.
Pascrell was endorsed by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and the two appeared June 1 in Paterson, New Jersey’s third largest city by population, where Pascrell had been mayor. He also had help from John Lewis, the 72-year-old Democratic congressman and civil-rights leader from Georgia, who recorded telephone messages on his behalf.
Rothman distributed a photo of himself strolling with President Barack Obama outside the White House on June 1 after a meeting in the Oval Office. The president didn’t publicly endorse Rothman, who was a supporter when Obama, a former U.S. senator from Illinois, was running against Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination. Pascrell backed Clinton.
Pascrell may have an edge over his Republican opponent in November’s general election because the district’s registered Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one, according to the state division of elections.
The opponents arrived in Washington at the same time and had developed “a good friendship,” Rothman said in an interview in January.
“Friends don’t treat each other this way,” Pascrell said.
He voted with the party’s majority 94 percent of the time, and Rothman 93 percent, according to OpenCongress.org, a nonpartisan research website.
To contact the reporter on this story: Elise Young in Trenton at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stephen Merelman at [email protected]