The allies of Mayor Ras Baraka see an opportunity on the political landscape suddenly lit up by the 2024 presidential election. If Donald Trump can drill into his own base and create raw energy, so can Baraka, who cut his teeth on bullhorn street politics and symbolically swore in the entire city on the night he first won the mayoralty in 2014 as a statement of people power.

A 2025 anti-establishment candidate for governor, Baraka has not proved a good money generator early. He has $166K in the bank right now, compared to fundraising juggernaut Josh Gottheimer, an imminent contender in the governor’s contest, who had $20 million in his FEC account in the middle of last month. In addition, Baraka will not likely secure the endorsements of any of the 21 county party organizations (though he does have the support of veteran U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman). Without organization ties (not a huge issue his backers maintain, on the heels of a judge ordering the Legislator to dispense with county party organization lines) or a lot of money, Team Baraka has an “ok, let’s go for broke” attitude, trusting in the cult of personality presence of their candidate.

They trust that Baraka, an expert communicator, rousing speechmaker, and sharp-elbowed debater, can push through the crowd and distinguish himself in the growing field of Democratic Party contenders. They read the results of last week’s presidential election as a statement of fear by white voters about increasing numbers of browns and blacks in the country and intend to furnish a vital countervailing bulwark message meant to spike urban turnout in a Democratic Primary. New Jersey’s politically neglected cities, they maintain, will be starved for Baraka’s energizing candidacy.

Their take on Trump? His supporters can’t say what he says and they back him because that’s how they feel. He’s saying out loud what they think. Baraka is prepared to be the establishment disrupter from the Black urban left, igniting voters fed up with a tepid democratic Party that just got trampled nationally.

Okay. But Baraka hasn’t really impressed in a local election. With the exception of his 2014 campaign, he’s never transferred his electric energy into commanding citywide numbers. His allis maintain that’s because he hasn’t had a real citywide rival. They admit he might fight down to his level of competition a little, running over challenges in 2018 and 2022 that never looked strong.

But they say he’s saving himself for this, a real contest, and promise a hard-hitting door-to-door ground game to get their candidate loudly in position to reduce the other contenders by sheer force of personality coming together with populist opportunity.

At the root of it, their view is not unlike that of Dr. Eddie Glaude of Princeton University, who “challenges the notion that economic anxiety alone explains support for Trump, suggesting instead that identity politics—mainly white identity—plays a central role. He argues that voters often overlook Trump’s transgressions because his message aligns with underlying racial and cultural insecurities. Ruhle, meanwhile, argues that some voters are driven by economic hardship, to which Glaude responds that this view oversimplifies the influence of race in American politics.”