For Jim McGreevey, who is trying to make a political comeback after resigning in disgrace as New Jersey’s governor 21 years ago, redemption will have to wait — if it is to come at all.
The mayor’s race in Jersey City, N.J., where Mr. McGreevey was among the candidates, is headed to a runoff after no one in the crowded field managed to win more than 50 percent of the votes cast in the nonpartisan election.
As of late Tuesday, Mr. McGreevey was in second place and trailing James Solomon, a two-term City Council member, by about 1,200 votes in the contest to decide who will lead New Jersey’s most diverse and second-largest city for the next four years.
The mere fact that Mr. McGreevey, who was born in Jersey City but did not grow up there, is even in a position to proceed to the Dec. 2 runoff is something few political observers would once have imagined given the spectacular collapse of his once-ascendant career in 2004.
A former state lawmaker and mayor of Woodbridge, N.J., he stepped down as governor less than two years into his first term after announcing, with his second wife at his side, that he was “a gay American” who had had an affair with a male staff member.
Mr. McGreevey had hired the man, Golan Cipel, as a homeland security adviser at an annual salary of $110,000. Mr. Cipel later quit the job and threatened to expose Mr. McGreevey’s double life and to sue him for sexual harassment.
After resigning, Mr. McGreevey studied to become an Episcopal priest but was not ordained. He has spent much of the past two decades running job-training programs for people who have been released from prison.
The available polling had showed a tight race between Mr. McGreevey, whose campaign was by far the best funded; Mr. Solomon, who represents the city’s Downtown area and was backed by the Working Families Party; and Bill O’Dea, a Hudson County commissioner.
With about 70 percent of the ballots counted late Tuesday, Mr. Solomon was the clear leader and Mr. O’Dea was in third place. The others in the crowded field were Joyce Watterman, the City Council president; Mussab Ali, a former president of the city’s school board; Christina Freeman, a Jersey City police officer; and Kalki Jayne-Rose, a musician.
Jersey City, a predominantly working-class community, has drawn a substantial number of New York exiles in search of cheaper housing. Roughly 40 percent of the city’s roughly 300,000 residents were born outside the United States; nearly three out of four identify as Asian, Black or Latino.
As in the mayor’s race across the Hudson River in New York City, affordability was a top issue in Jersey City. The leading candidates all pledged to take steps to attract people and housing development to the city while ensuring that longtime residents were not priced out.
The stage was set for a wide-open race when the current mayor, Steven Fulop, decided against seeking a fourth term after running an unsuccessful campaign to be the Democratic nominee in New Jersey’s governor’s race this year.
Mr. Solomon, 41, sought to cast himself as part of a younger generation of Democrats eager to shake up their party’s entrenched leadership and battle President Trump more aggressively.
The outgoing governor, Philip D. Murphy, endorsed Mr. McGreevey, as did a number of local Democratic leaders. Their support, along with Mr. McGreevey’s fund-raising prowess, helped give him an apparent edge as voting began.
But the whiff of scandal he continued to carry made him unpopular with some voters and gave others, especially Mr. O’Dea and Mr. Solomon, an opening.
Mr. O’Dea, 66, is a lifelong Jersey City resident who once represented his West Side neighborhood on the City Council and has ties to Hudson County’s vaunted Democratic machine. In assessing his career versus Mr. McGreevey’s, he told The New York Times, “I’ve spent my entire life in public service without any scandals.”
Ed Shanahan is a rewrite reporter and editor covering breaking news and general assignments on the Metro desk.
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