Statement from the North NJ DSA Executive Committee
Jake Ephros and Joel Brooks are both longtime North NJ DSA members and organizers at heart, leading campaigns for labor and tenants’ rights in both Jersey City and the state at large, and they centered these fights in their campaigns. They ran on a platform with the interests of the working class at the forefront, fighting for universal rent control, universal childcare, and safe, clean, green streets. Wards B and D represent some of the most diverse and working-class areas in the city, and a platform addressing their basic material needs resonated with them so strongly that Jake and Joel each won by over 20 points!
Jersey City voters made state history on Tuesday, electing the first two socialists in city history and the first two socialists in the state of New Jersey in nearly 100 years! Not since William Brueckman, the former Mayor of Haledon (1912-1918, 1924-1928) who ran on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America, has New Jersey seen a socialist in elected office. Mayor Brueckman famously assisted the organizers of the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, who used Haledon as an organizing base and rallying area for striking workers.
Jersey City voters decisively rejected Jim McGreevey and corporate control of the City Council. MAGA billionaires and establishment Democratic politicians opposed our campaigns, spent millions of dollars to front landlord and developer interests, and all of it went to waste in the face of the movement democratic socialists are building here in New Jersey and all around the country.
Jake and Joel’s campaigns represented what democratic socialism is all about, bringing the power to change the course of all of our lives back to tenants, back to workers, and back to all of us!
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Solidarity Forever!