Two Democrats remained in a neck-and-neck battle late Thursday night in a hotly contested primary race for a House seat vacated by Gov. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey.
With about 91 percent of the vote tallied, Analilia Mejia, a left-leaning political organizer, was leading her main opponent, Tom Malinowski, a former two-term House member, by a slim, 486-vote margin four hours after polls closed.
Ms. Mejia led the state’s Working Families alliance until 2019, when she left to help run Senator Bernie Sanders’s second presidential campaign. She was endorsed by an array of left-leaning luminaries, including Mr. Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Many surrogates from the Democratic Party’s progressive flank traveled to New Jersey to campaign with Ms. Mejia in the final weeks of a race that became a dramatic showdown between factions within the party.
On Thursday, Mr. Sanders, a democratic socialist from Vermont, urged voters to the polls in a social media message: “You have an opportunity to send a powerful message to the billionaire class.”
Mr. Malinowski, a former State Department official who represented a neighboring district in Congress until 2023, was considered an early front-runner, but he was inundated by a barrage of negative advertising in the closing stretch of the combative, 11-candidate primary. Much of the advertising was funded by the United Democracy Project, a super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which spent at least $2.3 million trying to defeat him.
Patrick Dorton, a spokesman for the organization, has said that its aim is winning a pro-Israel majority in Congress and electing representatives who will not place conditions on U.S. aid to the Jewish state.
But the group is presumably no fan of Ms. Mejia’s.
At a forum last month, she was the only candidate to raise her hand when asked if she agreed with a United Nations report that said Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. If elected, Ms. Mejia would be likely to join Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Ayanna Pressley, who also campaigned with Ms. Mejia in New Jersey, in a left-leaning wing of the House known as “the squad.”
In 2024, United Democracy spent roughly $24 million to help oust two of the group’s other members, Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri, according to AdImpact, a group that tracks political spending.
Many Jewish leaders in New Jersey had denounced AIPAC’s tactics against Mr. Malinowski, a longtime supporter of Israel. Mr. Malinowski has maintained that the United States should continue to support Israel’s security and has said he “would not deny anything Israel needs to defend itself,” even as he has refused to rule out placing conditions on that aid.
The negative ads funded by United Democracy made no mention of Israel. Instead, they criticized Mr. Malinowski for failing to disclose stock trades when he represented the Seventh Congressional District and for his vote for a bipartisan measure to authorize spending for immigration enforcement during President Trump’s first term.
Mr. Malinowski, who emigrated from Poland as a 6-year-old and has strongly denounced the president’s efforts to increase deportations, attempted to turn the negative advertising into a badge of honor, claiming he was “proud to be the only candidate in the race to be attacked by Trump’s dark-money allies.”
As the first House contest of 2026, the Democratic primary was seen as a preview of campaign tactics that could be replicated this fall in midterm elections that will determine which party controls Congress.
Mr. Dorton, of United Democracy, declined to comment late Thursday, pending the final outcome of the race.
The Associated Press estimated there were roughly 6,000 ballots still to be counted.
Mail ballots that are postmarked by Thursday, and arrive by next Wednesday, may still be counted, and Essex County officials indicated that they would restart their tally on Friday afternoon. Election officials in New Jersey cannot count any provisional ballots until after the mail deadline has passed.
The New Jersey Globe, a political news site, declared Mr. Malinowski the winner less than an hour after polls closed at 8 p.m., only to retract the story about two hours later. Soon after, Ms. Mejia posted a photo on social media of an infamous newspaper headline about the 1948 presidential race that proved to be incorrect: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
Just before midnight, Ms. Mejia had 28.75 percent of the vote, and Mr. Malinowski had 27.96 percent.
Two other prominent candidates were trailing them by a wide margin. Tahesha Way, the state’s former lieutenant governor, was in third place with 17 percent of the vote. And Brendan Gill, an Essex County commissioner who was endorsed by former Gov. Philip D. Murphy, was in fourth place with 14 percent of the vote.
Ms. Way also benefited from an infusion of outside financial support. The Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association spent at least $1.3 million on ads that depicted Ms. Way as the candidate best poised to take on Mr. Trump.
Ms. Sherrill resigned from Congress after winning the race for governor, leaving the seat vacant. She was sworn in as governor last month and did not make an endorsement in the race.
The winner of Thursday’s primary will face the Republican nominee, Joe Hathaway, the mayor of Randolph, on April 16 in a special election for Ms. Sherrill’s seat in the 11th Congressional District, which includes parts of three northern counties: Morris, Essex and Passaic. Mr. Hathaway, who played football at Yale University, worked as an aide to former Gov. Chris Christie, the last Republican elected statewide in New Jersey.
The district was redrawn after the 2020 census, making what was once a Republican-leaning seat far safer for Democrats; Ms. Sherrill, for example, was re-elected by a nearly 15-point margin in 2024.
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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