The good news for Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop is that his ticket won more council seats in the 2021 election than his ticket did in 2017 – providing his Ward C councilman, Richard Boggiano can win a runoff election against – progressive candidate Jason Bing on Dec. 7.

Boggiano, who has faced runoffs in the past, said he feels confident that he will ultimately retain his seat on the council. This would be good news for Fulop since it would increase the number of council seats aligned with him.

Fulop candidates won outright in three wards, A, B and D, and swept all three at-large seats.

Yousef Saleh’s victory in Ward D is significant because Fulop picked up a seat formerly held by his opponent Michael Yun, who tragically died of COVID in 2020.

While Fulop won a third term, he with a lower percentage than he did in 2017, 66 percent this year, as opposed to 78 percent in 2017.

His ticket also lost the Ward F seat to challenge Frank Gilmore, a powerful community activist in a section of the city plagued with gun violence.

The head-to-head matchup of progressive incumbent Councilman James Solomon in Ward E against Fulop-backed Jake Hudnut did not pan out for the Fulop ticket as Solomon captured a huge percentage of the progressive vote in the most progressive part of Jersey City – a vote in the past Fulop himself has relied on when he served as councilman.

As impressive as the Fulop victory was – and as historic (he being the first Jersey City mayor to win a third term since Frank Hague in the 1940s) – the election showed significant changes in the city that made bode ill for politics as usual the Fulop administration has run on.

Try to remember, Fulop’s 2017 victory was against the remnants of the Jeramiah Healy political machine – supported at the time by County Executive Tom DeGise and the Hudson County Democratic Organization (HCDO). The 2021 election ran with the remnants of Healy machine, and included DeGise’s daughter, Amy DeGise as one of the Fulop candidates.

Fulop ran against a relatively unknown candidate for mayor this year, and yet despite the powerful alliance between his organization and the HCDO did less well percentagewise than he did in 2017.

Boggiano – who in the past was an opponent of Fulop – ran on the Fulop ticket this year and still ended up in a runoff election.

As the Solomon and Gilmore victories suggest as well as the strong turn out for Bing (finishing over third and more mainstream candidate Tom Zuppa), Jersey City is seeing shifts in its population towards more progressive politics, not just in Ward E and the waterfront, but also in the troubled Ward F, as well as the Journal Square area, where Boggiano has been strong over the last four years.

The development Fulop boasted about bringing to other parts of Jersey City apparently is also fueling a new progressive movement in those areas as well that may challenge traditional candidates in the future.

Lewis Spears, who lost to Fulop, sent out a warning message in his concession, noting that the progressives and others who opposed Fulop this year will have to be listened to, since they represent a growing powerful faction in the political population of Jersey City.