TRENTON, NJ:  Chairman LeRoy J. Jones, Jr. issues the following statement:

I wanted to sit with the results from Tuesday for a few days and see the preliminary data before I made any type of statement.

First, I want to congratulate Andy Kim, Nellie Pou, and Herb Conaway for winning their elections. They will be welcome additions to the Senate and the House of Representatives in these important times.

I want to congratulate our incumbents – Donald Norcross, Josh Gottheimer, Frank Pallone, Rob Menendez, LaMonica McIver, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and Mikie Sherrill – for winning re-election in this tough environment.

And I want to offer Joe Salerno, Matt Jenkins, and Sue Altman my heartfelt thanks for running strong campaigns. We knew these races would be tough, and we wish the outcomes were different, but I know they will each come back stronger than ever.

Second, I want to acknowledge the heartache and pain we all feel at seeing our national candidates, Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, lose. There will be media pundits and armchair pundits who will spend a lot of time analyzing why this ticket lost nationally, but I strongly believe it comes down to a few key things:  Misogyny, racism, and the undeniable fact that people simply believe Donald Trump’s lies.  It is unfortunate that this is the world we live in, but it is also simply a fact that this is where we are. We, as a society, must look deep within ourselves and acknowledge this stark reality and strive to do better.

Third, the Democratic Party has some lessons to learn as well. We need to acknowledge that Donald Trump’s lies take hold even in our State because we do not speak consistently to voters. We do not package information in a way that takes root with voters in the same way as Republican messaging. We do not talk about fiscal issues in a way that gives people a real sense of how it will affect them on a personal level – in their pocketbooks. We have a record of success in enacting policies that benefit the middle class, but have not been effective in communicating and educating our voters about those successes.

This has been a growing problem over decades, one that I have struggled with myself as Chair of the Essex County Democratic Committee and more recently as State Chair. The fact is that many county parties don’t speak to voters until May and then at the end of September. And we don’t always speak to our constituent communities at all. In other counties, the parties rely solely on campaigns to do the work for them. In my county, we have been running programs each cycle targeting infrequent women voters, and we have seen incremental success. In addition, the State Party this general election cycle, through the coordinated campaigns with Andy Kim and Sue Altman, and on its own, spoke to 325,000 voters. We’ve been running programs like this since the primary of 2022 and have spoken to 522,393 additional total voters over this time period. The results bear out this simple truth – when we talk to voters, we win.

I say all of this not to call anyone out, but to remind us all that the ONLY job of the Democratic Party is to elect Democrats who support the Democratic Party agenda. WE are the only thing standing between the worst of Donald Trump’s policies and the people of our State.  WE are the ones that will protect the communities that Donald Trump targets.

But we need to be willing to put in the work, because if we don’t, if we continue to rely on past successes and not look to the future, we will see all of the important policies we have enacted over the last seven years unraveled. These next weeks and months will not be easy as we come to grips with the fact that someone who openly admires world dictators and has promised to harm people who disagree with him from all walks of life is, once again, President. But, as one of only two states in the nation with a gubernatorial campaign in 2025, it is safe to say that all eyes will be on New Jersey as the first test of Democratic strength and resolve. We must be ready to organize. We must be ready to work. And we must be ready to fight.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”