James Solomon, a councilman, defeated Jim McGreevey, a former governor of New Jersey, on Tuesday to be elected mayor of Jersey City, one of the most ethnically diverse communities in the country.
Mr. Solomon was ahead of Mr. McGreevey by a 2-to-1 margin less than an hour after polls closed, and The Associated Press declared him the winner.
It is the second time in a month that a former governor who quit in disgrace has failed to persuade voters that he deserved a second chance in politics, after Andrew Cuomo lost his campaign for mayor of New York City to Zohran Mamdani.
Mr. Solomon, 41, has represented downtown Jersey City on the council since 2018. A Democrat, he ran for mayor as a progressive reformer willing to “stand up to big developers,” in a city that has experienced a brisk pace of residential and commercial growth over the past two decades.
Less than five miles from Manhattan, on the banks of the Hudson River, Jersey City is on track to perhaps eclipse Newark as the state’s largest city within the next decade. Mr. Solomon will replace Steven Fulop, who did not run for re-election after losing a bid for governor.
Mr. Solomon overcame several significant hurdles to win.
He was outspent by Mr. McGreevey, who had been campaigning for the job for more than two years. Mr. McGreevey had raised more than $5 million in his quest for political reinvention in his first campaign since resigning as governor amid a sex scandal two decades earlier. And he had amassed broad institutional backing from fellow Democrats, including the governor, Philip D. Murphy, and prominent Hudson County party leaders. His campaign photo seemed to appear on every available billboard in Jersey City.
But Mr. McGreevey was unable to recover from his second-place finish in the campaign’s initial round of voting in November, when he trailed Mr. Solomon by more than 2,600 votes in a seven-person race. Because none of the candidates received more than 50 percent of the vote last month in the nonpartisan race, a runoff election was held on Tuesday.
The nonpartisan race’s two other top vote getters, Bill O’Dea, a Hudson County commissioner, and Mussab Ali, a former president of the city’s Board of Education, quickly backed Mr. Solomon over Mr. McGreevey, bringing their varied bases of support with them. Mr. O’Dea was a favorite of lifelong Jersey City residents like himself, and Mr. Ali, a Harvard Law School graduate born in Pakistan, had worked to appeal to younger voters and immigrants.
Mr. Solomon’s campaign was also boosted by endorsements from Mayor Ras J. Baraka of Newark and U.S. Senator Andy Kim, an anti-establishment Democrat who has shown a willingness to support candidates trying to buck the status quo.
As he was running for Senate against New Jersey’s first lady in 2024, Mr. Kim successfully sued to overturn a mainstay of electoral politics in New Jersey — a ballot design that favored candidates endorsed by political party bosses — making him a favorite of left-leaning voters. Mr. Kim recently traveled to Jersey City to record a get-out-the-vote appeal with Mr. Solomon, reminding residents about Tuesday’s runoff, which drew limited media attention.
Even before the results were tallied, Mr. McGreevey was calling his election night gathering a watch party, not a victory party, suggesting that he was aware that his campaign had lost momentum.
“I relish Jersey City, where families come home at night, neighbors look out for each other and City Hall does the basics right,” Mr. McGreevey said from the Ringside bar.
“It’s time to make the city work for working people again,” he added.
In 2004, after announcing that he was a “gay American” who had had an affair with a male staff member and resigning as governor, Mr. McGreevey and his second wife split up. He enrolled in divinity school, where he studied to become an Episcopal priest, and then went on to lead work-training programs that help former prisoners restart their lives, a job he has described as his true passion.
A former state lawmaker and mayor of Woodbridge, N.J., who has lived in Jersey City for about 10 years, Mr. McGreevey also had to fend off charges that he was a carpetbagger.
Mr. Solomon and his wife are raising their three young daughters in Jersey City. But he is also a relative newcomer who speaks often about how his connection to the community solidified after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2015 and was overwhelmed by an outpouring of support. He has been in remission for years now, and has taught as an adjunct professor at two colleges in Jersey City while also representing the city’s most affluent and left-leaning neighborhood on the council.
Most residents of the 291,000-person, working-class city come from humble means. Nearly 40 percent of residents were born outside of the United States, and roughly 17 percent live in poverty.
Mr. Solomon, like Mr. Mamdani, focused on affordability, and he stressed his efforts to reduce housing costs while on the City Council. He has pledged to stop double-digit rent increases in all residential buildings and to create a public database of rent-controlled buildings.
Tracey Tully is a reporter for The Times who covers New Jersey, where she has lived for more than 20 years.
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