U.S. Senate primary rules ‘are not set for women like me,’ Campos-Medina says

Patricia Campos-Medina wants everyone to know there are more than two Democrats hoping to succeed Sen. Bob Menendez.

Much of the focus in this year’s U.S. Senate race has been on the two front-runners — Rep. Andy Kim and first lady Tammy Murphy — but Campos-Medina said that’s largely because she has been shut out of debates and excluded from some meetings where local Democrats chose whom to endorse, including one in Camden County where Campos-Medina was physically blocked from entering.

“The rules are not set for women like me. They’re set by men, and they decide which women they let in, and so far, they decided to let in a well-connected white woman,” Campos-Medina said in an interview.

Campos-Medina is one of four Democrats in the race, including activist Larry Hamm. The bulk of the attention has been on Kim, who is leading in the only public poll, and Murphy, who has scooped up key endorsements in counties rich with Democrats.

A labor leader who wants to be the first Latina New Jersey voters send to Congress, Campos-Medina said she expected to face resistance. But she was still surprised at the extent to which party officials have stood in her way — in Camden, quite literally.

“I knew exactly that I was going to be in this place, disrupting the plan of the machine to present only one woman option to the voters, and disrupting their plan that there was not a viable Latina who could run,” said Campos-Medina.

The episode in Camden happened on Saturday, when the county’s Democratic Party officials gathered to officially offer Murphy the county line, which will give her ballot placement directly below President Joe Biden for the June 4 primary. It was a closed-door meeting, but Campos-Medina said attendees were told they could bring a guest, so she intended to enter with someone who had been invited and who supports her. Instead, a group of men stood in front of the door to prevent her from stepping inside.

“I am a Democrat candidate for the United States Senate. They don’t like it, so they don’t let me in, so they put five goons in front of me,” she said. “That is emblematic of this party’s failure to live up to its commitment to the progressive coalition that gets Democrats elected, which includes Black, Latino, and urban voters.” 

She said she’s faced resistance in other counties, too. Party leaders in Bergen and Middlesex also did not acknowledge her candidacy and would not let her participate in their conventions, she said. Those conventions are where party officials vote on which candidates to support in June’s primaries.

Party officials in Bergen County dispute Campos-Medina’s version of events. In a statement, Conor Gorman, the executive director of the Democratic Committee of Bergen County, said her campaign did not reach out about participating in the convention until a week beforehand, 13 days after a deadline set by the committee’s bylaws.

“We would have welcomed Ms. Campos-Medina’s participation in the convention but her campaign reached out after the filing deadline, after the credentials committee had met, after the resumes of all candidates were sent to committee members and after an email inviting delegates to candidates night was sent — all of which are required by the bylaws,” Gorman said. “I can not speak to what happened in any other county but Ms. Campos-Medina not being nominated for the Bergen convention was a failure of her campaign.”

Campos-Medina faces other challenges. Even in counties where she has participated in the endorsement process — like Monmouth and Morris — she has garnered little support. In Monmouth, she won 20 votes out of about 450, and in Morris, she won 26 votes out of 540.

She also has a steep fundraising disadvantage. Kim and Murphy were each sitting on $2.7 million at the end of 2023. Campos-Medina has yet to report raising anything.

The difficulty Campos-Medina has had breaking through in the campaign does not surprise Kate Delany, the president of South Jersey Progressive Democrats who has tussled with Democratic Party leaders in Camden County before. Delany said ideally the state party would intervene when county parties are accused of acting poorly, but the state Democratic chair, LeRoy Jones, told her they do not get involved.

“What is the point of having a state party then?” Delany said. “If they’re all just completely different little social clubs and they can all operate differently, that seems problematic.”

Jones, also the Essex County Democratic chair and a Murphy supporter, told NJ Spotlight News this week that Camden Democrats refusing to let Campos-Medina into their meeting was “unfortunate.”

“That was not a pretty picture,” Jones said.

Campos-Medina said despite winning just a handful of votes at the conventions where she participated, she believes her views are more aligned with Democratic voters than Kim’s and Murphy’s are. 

“I’m not running on the county line, I’m running for the people on the picket lines,” she said.