Malinowski’s problems first began in 2021, when he was accused of failing to disclose a series of stock trades. But the death knell to his congressional career came from the same institution that first propelled him to victory: the New Jersey Democratic Party. In 2021, redistricting carried out by the Democratic-controlled state legislature gutted Democratic voter-rich enclaves of the seventh district and redistributed them to two adjacent toss-up congressional districts (NJ-11, then represented by Sherrill; and NJ-5, represented by Josh Gottheimer)—in exchange, the seventh received a glut of Republican-heavy suburbs. The seventh district, which too, had previously been regarded as a toss-up, now leaned Republican. The same party that eagerly offered Malinowski its county lines had now, just as eagerly, offered his political career as a ritual sacrifice to the GOP.

He was duly defeated, and spent the ensuing three years banished to the political hinterlands, roaming between opportunities to stay relevant. Sherrill’s 2025 gubernatorial victory, however, generated an opportunity that couldn’t be passed up. Two days after she won, Malinowski announced his candidacy to fill the NJ-11 seat. Even though neither the special=election date nor its primary date had yet been announced, the two-term congressman sought to get out and dominate the field early. He did precisely that. According to an internal poll administered by the Malinowski campaign, he comfortably remained the race’s odds-on favorite, sitting at 28 percent—the next three candidates (Gill, Way, and Mejia respectively) lagged far behind at 12 percent, 5 percent, and 5 percent. 31 percent of those surveyed remained undecided.

Mejia’s experience stands as a fascinating contrast to Malinowski’s Beltway career: from union organizer, to New Jersey union leader, to state director of the New Jersey Working Families Party, to senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign. By the time she joined the Sanders campaign, she was a well-known entity. Melissa Byrne, a political operative and veteran of both of Sanders’s presidential campaigns, described the news of Mejia’s initial hiring as “exciting” for Sanders campaign staffers. Mejia was “well-respected,” and “brought a deep labor and community organizing experience to the Sanders team.”

Mejia formally joined the Democratic primary race during the last week of November. She was one of the last people to enter the field, but she promptly made up for any lost time. She announced her campaign with the endorsement of Sanders—and his support invited a cascade of small-dollar donations and other endorsements. Over the coming weeks, Mejia received support from nine House members, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as Senator Elizabeth Warren. Each of those endorsements would be parlayed into more donations. Several union locals, as well as organizations including, the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s PAC, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, the College Democrats of New Jersey, and the NJ Working Families Party (NJ WFP) all backed her—WFP even embedded staff onto her campaign over its first weeks.

According to one report from late January, Mejia led the pack in small-dollar fundraising, though she remained squarely in the middle of the Democratic primary field on the total amount raised. Yet. according to that same disclosure, she’d hardly spent anything on her campaign. Mejia could afford to spare expenses in those early days thanks to both the institutional support she cultivated and the dogged grassroots support generated by her campaign. Instead of doling out tens of thousands of dollars to pay canvassers and phone bankers, her campaign recruited an army of over 1,000 volunteers to do that work for free.

From the outset of her campaign, Mejia’s approach to politics remained clear. She campaigned on big solutions to big problems: abolish ICE, tax billionaires, cancel student debt, establish Medicare for All and universal childcare, reform the courts. But it was also her tone that won people over. It was clear that she intended to name enemies—even if those enemies were Democrats. “Too many Democrats in Washington are selling us out and folding under pressure. Plain old blue just won’t cut it anymore,” her campaign announcement read. “We need real fighters in Congress, and I’m running to be a brawler for working families. I won’t be afraid to stand up to Trump or his billionaire friends.”

Recent message testing has found that Democratic voters find the language of “fighting” to be among their most preferred framings. Malinowski, too, reached for the mantle of “fighter,” but could never grasp it fully. “I’m running to deliver again what New Jerseyans need—better and lower cost health care, housing, and transportation—and to take on Trump’s corruption, abuse of power, and attacks on democracy,” read a statement from his campaign launch. “I will be ready for the fight from day one.” Yet nothing about his technocratic affect or bureaucratic experience suggested he was the right kind of fighter for the moment.

Gone are the days when people are biding their time for the “adults in the room” to take back control. An unshackled Trump administration is plunging the nation into authoritarianism at breakneck speed. ICE is kidnapping people off the street and shoving them into unmarked cars. It’s murdering and abusing both protesters and migrants at will, with no accountability. Meanwhile, a billionaire-backed conservative legal movement has captured virtually every inch of the judicial branch, cannibalizing the administrative state’s capacity to regulate. The rich continue getting richer at world historic rates. Affordable healthcare remains a fantasy for tens of millions of Americans.

Resistance activists who might once have marched with signs about getting back to brunch are filming ICE agents and running them out of shops; they’re setting up mutual aid drives to ensure vulnerable immigrant communities can survive; they’re taking to the streets to protest authoritarianism at home and genocide abroad; they’re naming the oligarchic class as the enemies of working people. Against all this, Malinowski’s politics felt like a quaint oddity from a bygone era.

In mid-January, just a few weeks before primary election day, astute political observers noted that the United Democracy Project (UDP), well-known as one of AIPAC’s shell organizations, had reserved $350,000 in television airtime across New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District.

This held the potential to upend the entire primary. In recent election cycles, the Israel lobby has spent tens of millions of dollars, especially in Democratic primaries, to ensure that any critics of Israel remain far from federal office—and they’ve enjoyed success in this strategy, most notably ousting two sitting members (Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush) in primary challenges in 2024. As such, speculation swirled about who the target of the NJ-11 ads might be. Mejia was the most likely possibility, given her growing slate of heavyweight progressive endorsements and her vocal opposition to the Israel lobby’s interests; at one forum in late January, sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Mejia was the only candidate in the field to affirm that Israel was, indeed, committing a genocide in Gaza.

But the target was actually Malinowski; By the end of the primary race, the UPD spent $2.3 million in attack ads targeting the former congressman. For anyone familiar with Malinowski’s congressional tenure, this made little sense.

As the HRW’s Washington director, Malinowski would, on occasion, provide rhetorical support for Palestinians, tepidly maintaining that American tax dollars shouldn’t be used in depriving Palestinians of dignity. But once he declared his intention to run for office, he shed any such pretense, wholeheartedly embracing the pro-Israel line. He applauded Trump’s unilateral decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, took an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel, and repeatedly passed up opportunities to signal disapproval of an increasingly Jewish supremacist Israeli government. Over his four years in office, he’d remained a steadfast ally of Israel’s interests, standing as a singular exemplar of how elected office disciplines pro-Palestinian sentiments out of its aspirants.

So what was Malinowski’s cardinal sin? He refused to support unconditional aid to Israel. He told The New York Times that, while he supports military aid, “I wouldn’t promise a blank check in advance for anything a prime minister would ask for.”

Even the possibility that he might want to condition aid at some hypothetical point in the future was enough for AIPAC and the UPD to try to destroy him. In a statement to the Times, the UPD described the rationale of its targeting: “Tom Malinowski is talking about conditioning aid to Israel. That’s not a pro-Israel position.”

The decision to knife Malinowski after years of loyalty was cynical—but even more cynical was the subject of the lobby’s ads. UDP’s ads rarely mention foreign policy, a concession to the reality that permanent aid to Israel remains deeply unpopular. Instead, they usually tack to domestic issues of the day. As such, the subject of UDP’s first ad buy was about ICE—more specifically, the allegation that Malinowski represents a “blank check” to Trump’s immigration policies, citing his vote on a 2019 budget bill that increased funding to the agency. UDP’s ad deeply resonated with voters in the district—and in fact, it may have even raised the salience of the immigration issue in voters’ minds.

One theory posits that, rather than funneling voters toward former New Jersey Lieutenant Governor Tahesha Way—another primary contestant who turned out to be AIPAC’s preferred candidate— the ads sent them instead to Mejia, the strongest anti-ICE figure in the race. The ad campaign might have accounted for Mejia’s thin margin of victory.

Malinowski ripped the ads as “the most disgusting version” of politics, and affirmed that he would actually support defunding many ICE operations. Yet this indignation did little to stem his hemorrhaging support. “I met several voters in the final days of the campaign who had seen the ads and asked me, sincerely: ‘Are you MAGA? Are you for ICE?’,” his concession statement reads. “If AIPAC backs a candidate—openly or surreptitiously—in the June NJ-11 Congressional primary, I will oppose that candidate and urge my supporters to do so as well. The threat unlimited dark money poses to our democracy is far more significant than the views of a single member of Congress on Middle East Policy.”

It’s no small irony that Malinowski, only after his stunning defeat, finally managed to sound like a fighter.

Progressives across the country are rejoicing at Mejia’s win, and understandably so—rarely do they fall on the fortunate side of electoral kismet. Had UPD stayed out of the race, or highlighted an issue other than immigration, those 1,100 votes making her margin of victory could’ve swung toward another candidate.

Progressives are also scrambling to make sense of Mejia’s win. Some have asserted that it signals a paradigm shift in the power of the Israel lobby; others have claimed that New Jersey politics has forever been altered. Another popular line maintains that if Mejia can win a suburban Democratic primary, then the party should be running her brand of politics in safe districts everywhere.

Each of these claims certainly holds elements of truth. There’s no doubt, for instance, that criticism of Israel and ICE is much more popular than it used to be, or that Democrats must run hard on economic populist messaging in the upcoming midterms. But it’s difficult to precisely discern the strength of Mejia’s mandate, let alone make universal proclamations about suburban voters across the country. She could have to run again three more times this year—in an April special general election to finish Sherrill’s term, in a June primary for the next congressional term, and, if she wins that, in a November general election. She’d be favored to win in April and November, but her primary vote share (29 percent in a low-turnout special election) isn’t necessarily convincing enough to allay all anxieties about the upcoming June primary. Still, it’s clear that a meaningful segment of the electorate found her platform appealing, and appreciated her willingness to forcefully represent working families.

Both Malinowski and Sherrill (as well as Senator Cory Booker) have endorsed Mejia for the April special election. But whether they’ll continue to support her for the June primary remains unclear—and already, there are ominous signs that another fierce primary contest may loom on the horizon. Way, the ex–lieutenant governor supported by pro-Israel interests, is reportedly considering running again. Despite its insistence to the contrary, there’s no doubt that the Israel lobby has recognized its blunder here. Even as it’s sure to self-immolate again in the future—engorged on its own hubris and sense of invulnerability—the lobby still wields tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars. Next time around, it’s all but certain that Mejia will face a challenge unlike anything she faced these last 13 weeks. The AIPAC cash cannon, first aimed at Malinowski, will now take aim at Mejia.