I think you’d have to go back a long, long way to find a South Brunswick municipal election as eventful as the one being waged this year.
I’m not talking about dirty campaigning or charges flying fast and furious, however. Rather, this year’s race has been turned upside down by a disgruntled Democrat.
Debra Johnson, who served on the Township Committe from 1995 to 1998 (with one year as mayor) and as the township’s first elected mayor from 1999 to 2002, attempted to take out incumbent Mayor Frank Gambatese with a primary challenge in June, coming closer than any Republican has to knocking off an incumbent Democrat in 13 years.
And now, as the campaign comes into its final stretch, with the Republicans putting up only token resistance (this is not an implied endorsement, just an observation about their campaign), Ms. Johnson suddenly finds herself in the middle of things again.
A group of her primary supporters is pushing a write-in campaign they hope will end with Ms. Johnson in office and the mayor contemplating retirement. Ms. Johnson says she has been drafted for the run and has not participated in the planning of the campaign. But she says she will serve if elected.
Signs — the ones used during her primary run, but with the words “write-in” affixed — have started cropping up around town and her supporters have placed a full-page ad in our paper.
Her presence in the race has turned it into a free-for-all. Ms. Johnson was a popular mayor and garnered significant support during the primary, especially from a number of voters in the East Villages area. (Many of them have been spoiling for a fight with the mayor since his initial support for a warehouse complex on the Van Dyke farm on Davidsons Mill Road. He has since backed away from the warehouses and has become an advocate for preserving as much of the property as possible.)
The write-in campaign creates several scenarios:
1. Ms. Johnson wins outright
2. Ms. Johnson steals enough votes from Mayor Gambatese to swing the votes to Republican Lynda Woods Cleary (this is based on voting trends from the last four elections)
3. Ms. Johnson’s campaign will have no impact.
I don’t want to prejudge this and I hate horse-race analogies, but money is money and write-ins are rarely successful — especially in an election in which 10,000 to 12,000 people are likely to vote.
But Ms. Johnson has made what has been a quiet race up until this point a bit more interesting than it otherwise would have been.
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By the way, we will be doing a story on the write-in campaign this week, but we are not including Ms. Johnson in our five-part election issue series because she is not officially on the ballot.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 