Something has changed in Hudson County politics.
Three years ago, progressive candidate Ron Bautista faced stiff opposition from the Hudson County Democratic Organization in his run for a seat on the county’s board of commissioners. The powerful political machine had chosen to back his more moderate opponent, Anthony Romano.
” They spent a lot of money in that race. And on Election Day, they had a person like every block, just handing out flyers” for Romano, Bautista said in an interview.
Still, Bautista came within roughly 230 votes of winning.
Now, the longtime Hoboken resident is running for the same seat again, his third attempt in as many election cycles. This time, the county’s influential Democratic organization is backing him.
“ I found out the day I turned in 500 petition signatures to be on the ballot,” Bautista said about learning that neither Romano nor another machine-backed candidate was running against him.
Hudson County Executive Craig Guy, a local Democratic power broker, hailed the endorsement in March as “a remarkable show of Democratic unity and shared purpose to provide safety and affordability for county residents.”
But some of the party’s progressive insurgents see it instead as an indicator of how powerful their candidates have become, and what may be a seismic shift in New Jersey politics since President Donald Trump was re-elected two years ago.
“I see it as a reflection of or an observation of pragmatic political actors making practical decisions on the ground that reflect ground realities,” said Ravi Bhalla, a former Hoboken mayor and new member of the state Assembly.
Far-left, progressive Democrats have upended races across the state, even as they’ve faced opposition from their party’s well-connected establishment.
Last month, Bernie Sanders-backed Analilia Mejia capped off a surprising run in the state’s 11th Congressional District to win the seat previously held by Gov. Mikie Sherrill, defeating a crop of better-funded moderate Democrats in the special primary.
At the state level, other Hudson County progressives like Jersey City’s Katie Brennan and Bhalla — both of whom have endorsed Bautista — won seats on the state Assembly. James Solomon defeated former Democratic Gov. Jim McGreevey in Jersey City's mayoral race by running a progressive campaign.
Guy did not respond to a request for comment on the decision to back Bautista – or whether the county organization tried and failed to recruit a candidate to run against him.
In an interview with Gothamist, Brennan said members of the Democratic establishment “saw that they didn't have the momentum and the progressive candidate and the progressive movement is so strong that they bowed out.”
A fight against the ballot
Ron Bautista came to Hoboken in 1999 from his native Ecuador at age 12. He spent his first 11 years in New Jersey as an undocumented immigrant.
“ I came on a tourist visa. And we overstayed our visa,” he said. “It was a situation back in Ecuador that all our money became nothing.”
As a teenager, Bautista said he avoided wearing an Ecuadorian soccer jersey for fear it would summon the suspicions of local immigration authorities.
He said he paid his way through college cleaning houses in Hoboken with his mother. After he got his degree, he got his green card and became a U.S. citizen in 2016.
Now that he has the Hudson County Democratic Organization's backing, Bautista said he is keeping the machine at arms length, calling the relationship a “work in progress.”
“ I believe that there was a good effort from the machine side to read the room and see that we have to have a bigger tent,” Bautista said.
Nothing has changed about his platform, he said. Bautista didn’t tout the endorsement on his Instagram page the way he has other high profile endorsements. And his name will not include the Hudson County Democratic Organization’s slogan on the ballot.
But Bautista appears to harbor little animosity from those years fighting the more powerful members of his own party.
“ For the first few races, the fight wasn't so much with the machine as with the ballot,” he said.
In 2024, a federal judge blocked the state’s long-standing system for designing ballots. Under what was known as “The Line,” candidates endorsed by the powerful county political organizations appeared directly below often more well-known members of the party running, while other candidates were cast off to the side.
A new state law passed last year outlawed the practice and mandated that candidates be grouped on the ballot based on the office they’re running for.
“For so many years, nobody even tried [to challenge the machine] because of how fixed the ballot system seemed to people,” Bautista said.
‘Building power’
While county commissioners may seem to hold less clout than some other politicians, the boards possess real power. The Hudson County board has a $700 million budget and oversees all county-owned land, including roads, parks and jails.
Bautista said he wants to use the job to guarantee free legal representation for all tenants in rent dispute cases across the county, make county roads safer and build affordable housing on county-owned land.
“For me, the county government should be the government that tackles challenges that are too large for just one city to take care of,” he said.
Bautista’s campaign is also part of a nascent strategy among progressives to focus on down ballot races in order to gain more power in the state — a tactic that establishment Democrats have successfully used for decades.
“What we see as a next step for us is, can we get majorities on some of these county commissioner boards to start to do that work to put pressure at the state level,” said Sunni Vargas, political director for the progressive New Jersey Working Families Party, which has backed Bautista and two other candidates for other seats as Hudson County commissioners.
Vargas says that the organization views the county as a “beacon for the rest of the state” that progressive candidates and policies are a winning strategy up and down the ballot.
“That's how we see ourselves building power,” she added.
