A unique power that New Jersey gives local partisan officials, to design primary ballots giving preferential treatment to favored candidates, is being challenged in a lawsuit as an unconstitutional form of political discrimination.
The federal claim, filed Monday by six defeated politicians and a consortium of progressive groups, offers an unusual twist on one of the prevailing complaints from the good-government movement: The people who run the two major parties have way too much power to repel the sort of outsider or insurgent candidates who would be more committed to fixing the system.
This may be nowhere more true than in New Jersey, where the Democratic and Republican party bosses in the 21 counties have an exceptional ability to steer election outcomes.
Endorsements from these local political machines come with a tangible and enormous benefit. The primary ballots are designed so the blessed legislative and other down-ballot candidates appear on what's known as "the county line" — generally the first column, directly under the names of the party's incumbents or best-known candidates for statewide offices including governor or senator.
Sometimes, the county bosses put their endorsed candidate in one column and all the others in a separate column, causing confusion and double-voiding that results in the ballot being tossed.
A study of last year's primaries by Rutgers sociologist Julia Sass Rubin, focused on congressional candidates who got the preferred treatment in some counties but not others, concluded the county line boosted a politician's vote share by an astonishing (and very often dispositive) 35 percent.
Working assiduously to secure the county line is almost certainly a major reason why no incumbent state legislator has lost a primary in the state since 2009.
The suit wants federal Judge Freda Wolfson of Newark to order the counties to design their primary ballots like almost all the others in the country, with all candidates for a particular office grouped together. It alleges the current system violates the free speech and equal protection rights of the disfavored candidates.
State party bosses, who have been fighting an earlier version of the suit since last summer, say the power over the ballot design is within their discretion.
"This antiquated practice is truly indefensible," countered Sue Altman, who runs New Jersey Working Families, one of the plaintiffs. "If we learned anything over the last four years, it's that our democracy is fragile and requires a vigorous effort to maintain. This expansive coalition is fighting to make democracy stronger in New Jersey. Up and down the state advocates agree: It is long past time for real, competitive primary elections. Our democracy is at stake. This is a matter of equity and whose voice counts."
"New Jersey's use of the line is a voter suppression tactic, used to pre-determine election outcomes and diminish the voice of voters," said Jesse Burns, executive director of the state League of Women Voters chapter.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.