Bloomfield was once a middle-class, factory town, Republican stronghold that delivered huge margins to candidates of the Grand Old Party: President Ronald Reagan won it by over 6,000 votes and 64% in 1984, and Gov. Thomas Kean carried it by over 7,000 votes and 76% against Essex County Executive Peter Shapiro in 1985.
Now, just two scores later, the tables have turned dramatically, and Bloomfield is as heavily Democratic as it was Republican. Kamala Harris won it with 67% of the vote and an 8,682-vote margin against Donald Trump in 2024, and Gov. Mikie Sherrill received 76% of the vote with a margin of nearly 10,000 in 2025.
Bloomfield isn’t just a solidly Democratic town, but a progressive-leaning Democratic town with an increasingly diverse population. Over the last thirty years, Bloomfield’s White population has dropped from 86% in 1990 to 37% in 2020; at the same time, the town’s Black population has grown from 4% in 1990 to 19% in 2020, and the Hispanic population has grown from 5% in 1990 to 31% in 2020.
But the real story of Bloomfield is the leftward shift of Democratic primary voters. That could mean big trouble for Assemblyman Michael Venezia (D-Bloomfield), who just narrowly won his 2025 primary against a progressive challenger.
Analilia Mejia, a veteran progressive organizer who served as Bernie Sanders’ national political director in his 2020 presidential campaign, won Bloomfield in a landslide in the special Democratic primary for Sherrill’s 11th district congressional seat earlier this month. Mejia received 2,197 votes (43.2%) and won 30 of 35 voting districts; she was followed by former Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way (1,135 votes and 22.3%), Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill (927 votes and 18.2%), and former Rep. Tom Malinowski (527 votes and 10.4%). Women of color received 66% of the Democratic primary vote in Bloomfield.
In last year’s gubernatorial primary, Sherrill won Bloomfield with 41.5% of the vote – not surprising since she’d represented the town in Congress for seven years – but her margin over Newark Mayor Ras Baraka (27.4%) was 1,003 votes, slightly less than Mejia’s. Three progressives in the race – Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, NJEA President Sean Spiller, and Baraka – received a combined 52% in the Democratic primary; that’s not a definitive indication of ideology, since Sherrill had plenty of progressive supporters.
Still, a 2024 mayoral primary between interim incumbent Ted Gamble, who supported Andy Kim for U.S. Senate, and organization-backed Jenny Mundell, was an exception: Democratic primary voters backed Mundell, now the mayor, by 747 votes, 57%-43%.
Bloomfield’s changes stem from a combination of geography—it has a train station that offers easy access to Manhattan —and the availability of rental housing. It attracted the kind of young resident who moved out of Hoboken but found Bloomfield more affordable than Montclair. Garden apartments – former Rep. Dick Zimmer called garden apartments like the one in Bloomfield, where he was raised, the New Jersey version of a log cabin – are still there; but newer, high-end apartments have attracted younger, more progressive voters.
Gone are the Eskimo Pie factory and the Peerless Tube Company, once a major manufacturer of toothpaste tubes (owned by former Assemblyman and Essex GOP Chairman Frederic Remington). After addressing environmental concerns, those buildings in the booming Watsessing section, are now used for housing. Bloomfield now has a rent control board.
Bloomfield’s diversity comes from its elongated geography: Clifton to the North, Glen Ridge and Montclair to the west, Nutley, Belleville, and a little bit of Newark to the east, and East Orange at its southern border.
Bloomfield has a population of over 50,000, and ranks 36th out of 565 municipalities in New Jersey.
It’s always been expensive to live in Glen Ridge, a small town sandwiched between Bloomfield and Montclair, with East Orange at its southern tip. Like Bloomfield, Glen Ridge used to be solidly Republican.
Reagan won Glen Ridge with 68% in 1984, and Kean received 68% in 1985; in 2024, Harris carried Glen Ridge with 78% against Trump, and in 2025, Sherrill received 78% against Republican Jack Ciattarelli.
The results of the February 5 special election carry an asterisk locally, since majority-White Glen Ridge is Mejia’s hometown. She’s an elected Democratic county committeewoman, so in a way, she’s an establishment Democrat locally.
In the primary, Mejia won 48% of the vote (694 votes) to Gill’s 20% (290 votes), Malinowski’s 18% (253 votes), and Way’s 8% (111 votes). finished third with 290 votes (20.3%), followed by Malinowski with 254 votes (11.7%).
These trends ought to disturb Assemblyman Michael Venezia (D-Bloomfield), a former mayor who still serves as the Democratic municipal chairman. Last year – the first legislative primary without county organization lines – Venezia almost lost.
The 34th legislative district includes Bloomfield and Glen Ridge, along with East Orange, Belleville, Nutley, and Orange. It’s solid blue, and it’s diverse: 39% Black, 31% White, and 25% Hispanic.
In 2025, Venezia won renomination to a second term in the Assembly by 866 votes, 10,112 to 9,246, against former East Orange Councilwoman Brittany Claybooks. Now he has a target on his back in next year’s Democratic primary.
One of the big local issues now is a $25 million lawsuit filed by a Black firefighter in Bloomfield who was the victim of racial discrimination after allegedly having a noose thrown at him and repeatedly being referred to in racially derogatory terms. Venezia, whose brother serves as fire chief, is a defendant in the lawsuit and has been accused of not reacting to the issue when he was mayor. A white firefighter who appears to have been the ringleader, Walter Coffey, has been fired.
It’s worth noting that Venezia’s running mate, Assemblywoman Carmen Morales (D-Belleville), a school principal who was mostly unknown until Essex Democrats picked her in 2023, finished 2,617 votes in front of Venezia in the 2025 Democratic primary. And Claybrooks, who had run a middling campaign for Congress in the special Democratic congressional primary in 2024, finished 3,313 votes ahead of her running mate, Frank Vélez, a Belleville school board member. (Vélez is now challenging Mayor Michael Melham in a May non-partisan municipal election.) Morales was the top vote-getter in each of the six municipalities in the 34th.
Venezia outpolled Claybrooks by 1,600 votes in Bloomfield and by 446 votes in Glen Ridge. In Belleville, which is majority Hispanic, Venezia edged out Claybrooks by 97 votes; in Nutley, which is majority White, Venezia prevailed by a 474-vote margin. But the contest tightened after Claybooks won two majority-Black cities: East Orange by 1,241 votes and Orange by 510.
Claybrooks had served one term as a ward councilwoman in East Orange and was considered a rebel on the council. Essex County Democratic Chairman LeRoy Jones, East Orange Mayor Ted Green, and Orange Mayor Dwayne Warren backed Venezia in the primary.
In the 2025 gubernatorial primary, the 34th district went for Baraka by a 2,082 vote margin, 41%-33%. The progressive candidates – Baraka, Fulop, and Spiller – combined for 60.7% of the vote.
Mejia carried all four 34th district municipalities in the 11th congressional district by a wide margin, 44%-21% over Gill. In total, women of color received over 64% of the vote.
Venezia appears assured of a primary fight in 2027.
