New Jersey’s primary elections in June open up opportunities for dozens of new faces, partly because the freshly redrawn legislative map helped persuade more than 20 incumbents to opt out. With the filing deadline now come and gone, the list of candidates seeking the 120 seats in the Democratic-controlled Legislature has been finalized.
“It’s going be the largest class of freshmen that we’ve had in 16 years … I think most voters would probably view an infusion of new perspectives as a good thing,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. While the candidate list has a couple of last-minute surprises, it still lacks the boost in diversity of candidates that many advocates had hoped for.
