Voters in New Jersey were hungry for change—so they elected a progressive Democrat.
Analilia Mejia won in a landslide in New Jersey’s 11th congressional district Thursday, beating out her Republican opponent Joe Hathaway to serve the remainder of former Representative Mikie Sherrill’s term. Sherrill’s seat was left suddenly vacant after she won the state’s gubernatorial election.
The daughter of Colombian and Dominican immigrants, Mejia ran on an adamantly anti-Donald Trump message and secured a whopping 70 percent of the vote as a result. The Associated Press called her victory shortly after the votes started rolling in.
Mejia, a co-director of the nonprofit progressive advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy, had previously served as the national political director of Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign—a detail that Republicans cited ahead of the election to claim that the 47-year-old activist was too extreme and too left. Voters in the northern New Jersey district did not agree.
“I think we’ve been tilting a little bit more to the right lately, which worries me,” Saran Cunningham, an 86-year-old retired special educator in the area, told The Guardian before the results rolled in. “I think that we need people in Congress who will fight for things that will help people as opposed to hurting them.”
Mejia was endorsed by Sanders, as well as New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren.
The progressive Democrat’s positions echo several of the policies that made Sanders a national phenomenon, including support for universal health care coverage, tuition-free college, student loan forgiveness programs, and strengthening unions and expanding labor protections in order to bolster America’s middle class.
But she believes that it’s some of her more independent views that have made her stand out to voters. In February, ahead of the primary election, Mejia credited her ardent opposition to ICE and the agency’s violent “overreach” as a defining policy point that connected with voters.
Mejia has also been vocal in her criticism of Israel, publicly denouncing the state’s war on Palestine as a genocide. That caught the attention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which funneled money into the race to bolster her opponents. In the end, the pro-Israel lobby’s efforts may have been one of the reasons that voters in New Jersey sent Mejia to Congress.
In a fiery victory speech Thursday, Mejia told a cheering crowd that her election was the beginning of a crusade against power that has a “stranglehold over every aspect of our lives.”
Mejia does not yet have a concrete date for when she will start her term.
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