Sue Kiley Wins NJ 6 Republican Primary; Will Challenge Pallone

NEW JERSEY — With 71 percent of the vote in by 10:30 p.m., Sue Kiley is the projected winner in the Republican primary for New Jersey's 6th Congressional District.

Both Politico and the Associated Press declared Kiley the winner.

Kiley, a Republican, will challenge Congressman Frank Pallone, a Democrat, in the November midterms.

Kiley has 57 percent of the vote (9,500 votes), compared to 26 percent for Rik Mehta (4,397 votes) and 16 percent for Tom Toomey (2,694).

Kiley was the candidate endorsed by both the Monmouth County Republican Party and Middlesex County Republican Party.

You can watch Kiley speak in this five-minute campaign video, where she criticized the direction the country has gone in one year into Biden's presidency, citing problems of illegal immigration and skyrocketing inflation.

The four Republicans who ran Tuesday are:

• Former Hazlet mayor and current Monmouth County Commissioner Sue Kiley.
• Lawyer Gregg Mele. He was the 2021 Libertarian Party nominee for NJ governor
• Tom Toomey, a millennial who has worked for Thompson Reuters, Samsung and Workforce. He used to work for the Republican National Committee.
• Rik Mehta, a small-business owner who recently moved to the Iselin section of Woodbridge. In the past, he ran for U.S. Senate in New Jersey and lost. He is now trying for Congress.

The Sixth District stretches from Carteret and Woodbridge into Edison, New Brunswick and down to Long Branch and Asbury Park. It includes many Raritan Bay towns, including Aberdeen, Matawan, Hazlet, Union Beach, Keansburg, North Middletown and Sea Bright. From Wikipedia, here are all the towns in New Jersey's Sixth Congressional District.

Pallone is one of New Jersey's elected officials who has been in office the longest. He was first elected to represent Central Jersey in Congress in 1988 and voters have re-elected him every year since.

For decades, this part of New Jersey was considered a blue-collar district, with most of its residents working in factories. However, as the factories closed, those jobs have been replaced by IT industries, with a surge of new immigrants moving in in the past 20 years, particularly Asian and Indian residents.

The midterm race will be Nov. 8. Political watchers speculate that Democratic lawmakers nationwide could be at risk this November, as inflation and gas prices surge to new highs and immigration problems continue at the U.S. southern border.

In the last midterms, in 2020, Pallone defeated a Republican immigrant from Nigeria who challenged him, Christian Onuoha, but only by 73,000 votes: Pallone got 199,648 votes and Onuoha got 126,760.