Analilia Mejia, a progressive Democrat whose main opponent conceded days ago, was declared the winner on Thursday in a primary for Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s former seat in the House, a week after polls closed.

Mejia was ahead of her closest opponent, Tom Malinowski, by roughly 1,100 votes when The Associated Press called the race in her favor.

Mejia, a political organizer who led New Jersey’s left-leaning Working Families alliance until 2019, had held a narrow lead since the Feb. 5 election, and that advantage grew as officials tallied mail ballots postmarked by Election Day.

It was an anticlimactic finale to a brief but raucous race. Malinowski, a former two-term House member, congratulated Mejia on Tuesday for what he called a “hard-won victory” to represent the 11th Congressional District in North Jersey. Mejia claimed the mantle as the Democratic nominee, and endorsements began pouring in from prominent Democrats, including both of the state’s U.S. senators and Sherrill.

But with only about 1,000 votes separating the two top candidates, ballot counting continued in the district’s three counties, Morris, Essex and Passaic. State law allows mail ballots that were postmarked by Election Day, and arrived by Wednesday, to be counted.

Mejia’s Win Seen as an Upset

Mejia’s win was seen as an upset. She entered the race late and was significantly outspent by many of her 10 opponents, including two who were running with the support of established Democratic leaders. She was buoyed by endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and from many of the most liberal members of the House, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.

On Tuesday, Mejia said that a win by a “lefty” candidate like her, in a largely affluent and suburban district, might seem like an anomaly. But she said her victory underscored voters’ hunger for change and their widespread dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump.

“A ZIP code,” she said, “does not protect us from rising violent authoritarianism.”

She will now compete April 16 against the Republican nominee, Joe Hathaway, to finish out the eight months remaining in Sherrill’s House term. Candidates hoping for a full two-year term must compete again in November.

The district was redrawn after the 2020 census, making what was once a Republican-leaning seat far safer for Democrats.

Hathaway, who has served as the mayor of Randolph, New Jersey, has already begun featuring Mejia in social media posts and positioning himself as a centrist “workhorse.” In a district filled with residents who commute into New York City, he noted the importance of the construction of the Gateway train tunnel beneath the Hudson River — a project that has been halted by the Trump administration.

“Washington needs to stop playing politics,” Hathaway wrote on social media. “In Congress, I’ll fight to get it finished on time, fully funded, with no excuses.”

The compressed, two-month special election was defined by negative advertising and millions of dollars in spending by outside interest groups.

In the final three weeks of the campaign, United Democracy Project, a super political action committee affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, began flooding airwaves and mailboxes with attack ads aimed at Malinowski.

Malinowski, a moderate who represented a neighboring congressional district until 2023, is a longtime supporter of Israel, but had refused to rule out placing conditions on U.S. aid to the Jewish state. That led the group to spend at least $2.3 million to discredit Malinowski, a former vice chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Malinowski’s seniority in the House would have put him in line for a leadership spot on the committee, which wields significant control over the allocation of foreign aid.

“I wish I could say today that this effort, which was meant to intimidate Democrats across the country, failed in NJ-11,” Malinowski said in a statement. “But it did not.”

Mejia, however, is far from the group’s ideal member of Congress. She is the most progressive of the Democrats who competed for the nomination and the only candidate to say she believed Israel had committed genocide in the Gaza Strip.

Patrick Dorton, a spokesperson for the PAC, has already suggested that the group might continue to try to influence the outcome of the New Jersey race. Democratic and Republican candidates who plan to run in June’s primary for a full two-year term must formally file paperwork to do so by March 23.

Mejia beat two other prominent Democrats: Tahesha Way, the state’s former lieutenant governor and secretary of state, who came in third, and Brendan Gill, an Essex County commissioner, who was fourth.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Tracey Tully/Rachel Wisniewski
c. 2026 The New York Times Company