Four of the six Democratic candidates for New Jersey governor — U.S. Rep. Mike Sherrill, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka, and former Montclair Mayor Sean M. Spiller — participated in a debate on April 23 at The Woodland in Maplewood.
The event was organized and sponsored by SOMA Action, the Maplewood Democratic Committee, the South Orange Democratic Committee, the West Orange Democratic Committee, and the Montclair Democrats.
Village Green previously posted the candidates’ answers to questions posed by WNYC Senior Reporter and NJ Public Radio Managing Editor — and Maplewood resident — Nancy Solomon, as well as audience members. Read and listen here:
AUDIO & TRANSCRIPT: Sherrill, Fulop, Baraka & Spiller Introduce Themselves to SOMA
Below is a transcription and audio of questions from the audience and the candidates’ answers:
Audience question:
I’m asking all the candidates. Thank you for coming. What would you do as gov to ensure that the 2026 midterm Congressional elections take place as scheduled if Donald Trump tries to cancel or delay them?
Steve Fulop:
Good question. Let me start with, I outlined three things specifically that I think are different with regards to my approach to Donald Trump versus anybody else with regards to saying how we’re gonna fight. The first is that we have an attorney General today, Matt Platkin, that has been at the forefront of litigation, pushing back on the president — nationally recognized. Most people have the Attorney General as a political appointee. I’m very clear that I would give him the opportunity to stay, because continuity from a litigation standpoint is very important to transparency.
Secondly, I talk about, we’re not gonna be able to cover the entirety of it, but using the state surplus to offset some of those cuts from Medicaid and for our most vulnerable communities, which is unique. And third, I am not shy about pushing and pushing hard. I got a lot of scars for it. But the reality is that Trenton needs to lead with regards to legislation that protects New Jersey people here. And we haven’t done a good job of doing that. Trenton needs to be more bold, pushing the legislature from the governor’s standpoint. And I will do that to protect voting rights, expand voting rights, and make sure that we are heard loud and clear.
Mikie Sherrill:
Thank you. That’s a great question. I was on the floor of the house on January 6th, and when I hear people say, we just have to get through four years, I think what leads you to believe he’s leaving after four years? He’s shown no signs of wanting to do that. So what we have to do is, I think, utilize 2025 as the organizing principle. Get everyone out. This has to be a juggernaut of election here and in Virginia. So we can mobilize the Democratic Party with people across the country, show our different vision forward so that we can set the table for ’26. We are going to need everybody in the streets. We are going need everybody advocating. We are going to need people [mic goes off] that’s Trump, just after me. /vut we are gonna need to ensure that as the people we are making sure we hold these elections and hold this government accountable. But it is no sure thing.
Sean Spiller:
I guess it starts, we need strong people fighting for us in Congress, like Congresswoman Sherrukk staying there and helping to win that fight, right? But in all seriousness, we need to show what we can do here in New Jersey, right? We’ve gotta make sure that we’re leading. I’ve often said this, Donald Trump is a bully, and he’s leveraging, right now all the dollars that come to our state to ask us to bend the knee, to kiss the ring. We’re seeing it in state by state. We’re seeing it in institutions from higher ed down to small towns. Right now is the moment to say, no, this is what we can do together. When we organize, mobilize, have a governor who’s leading to say, I’m fighting for our residents. I’m fighting for every single one of us. I’m not dividing us, I’m not attacking us, I’m protecting us. When we do that, and he tries to tamper with our broader political system, there is an energy and a base that we can tap into to say, we need to rise up in this moment. Or our democracy is lost. It’s as much on you as that question is on us, because we are all gonna have a responsibility to make sure we protect our democracy in this moment. I’m counting on you.
Ras Baraka:
I mean, first we have to start with the premise that the Constitution of the United States doesn’t allow any of this stuff. We have to start with that. We can’t start from a deficit. We’re always letting them define their our fight. It’s absolutely not allowable in the Constitution. We need to push back against this, which is why I agree that we need to have a strong attorney general that joins with other attorney generals around the country and form a pact, like universities are starting to do. Form a pact, begin to push back against these things that are happening nationally. And I think they’re making my point that obviously in order to have a huge number of people turn out, we are going to have to go into communities we’re not used to going into. We are gonna have to get people to turn out the vote who don’t think that the votes represent them or candidates represent them. We have to go into these communities and encourage people to come out and vote in large numbers. And I think that we have the ability to do that.
Audience Question:
My question is for all of the candidates: Governor and First Lady Murphy have made it a priority to make New Jersey a safe place to give birth, especially for Black women. We know that most women die after six weeks postpartum. So how will you keep Black women and Black mothers and black birthing people safe in the postpartum period?
Mikie Sherrill:
Maybe as the only person who’s been through that postpartum period, I’ll take a stab. So that’s exactly right. We know that Black women die at seven times the rate of white women. Um, we also know that in the first year of life, Black children die at three times the rate of white children here in New Jersey. So we have to have continuing medical education for doctors who treat them to make sure that they are culturally competent. We have to get more people from all of our communities into midwife, doula, and medical professional programs. I agree and would support the governor’s plan to have Medicaid pay for doulas for women giving birth, but also that first year of life is critically important. And it’s critically important for mothers, for those of us who’ve been through it.
You go through a million different doctors’ appointments, you’re there every day it seems like, and then suddenly you give birth and it’s over, and, and you’re not even in the hospital. Your doctor disappears. Your OB who you’ve been with for months suddenly is nowhere to be found. And you’re sitting there with a pediatrician who only wants to know about the baby. And if it’s your first kid, especially, you are just clueless. I mean, changing a diaper, breastfeeding, it’s all just completely overwhelming. And that’s when so many women start to feel lost. So that’s why we need to continue the medical monitoring after birth into that first year of life, making sure you have the connection, making sure that you are continuing to be checked on with telemedicine and remote monitoring, making sure you have access to diapers and formula, and, yes, a stroller just so you can get outside once in a while. All of this has to continue to be taken care of after you give birth, as you so clearly pointed out, because that is a very fragile time for many new mothers, and we know we can have better outcomes if we continue to monitor and have them in the healthcare profession. Thank you.
Sean Spiller:
Well, I’ll just briefly say this: Governor Murphy and the First Lady have done a great job in terms of trying to improve overall maternal health, right? And certainly the impacts though, when we look at it, and the question was around the disparity, the disparity that exists for Black mothers, right? So, let’s be clear, I appreciate all of these things. They’re important, but for Black mothers right now, what’s happening is their doctors are not listening to them. They’re not listening to the concerns that they bring forward. They’re dismissing them. They don’t understand what they’re hearing. They don’t relate to what they’re hearing. And that’s leading to a consequence. It’s leading to a consequence where that pregnancy has a worse outcome, probability of a worse outcome for a Black mother than it does someone else. So, yes, we’ve gotta have cultural competency, we’ve gotta make sure we’ve got the training that’s there so folks understand the biases that they have and that they bring forward. We’ve gotta have all of those wraparound services that are there to try and provide those supports. That’s important. But it’s understanding that that’s not enough if we don’t get to the root of the problem. Because what we’re seeing is, even when we address that, we may improve outcomes for white women, but we haven’t improved them for women of color. So we’ve gotta address it at the core. That’s how we make a difference in the disparity that exists. We change the system.
Ras Baraka:
It’s clearly cultural incompetence that’s happening in these hospitals. These doctors and other folks that are in the hospital believe that Black women can endure more pain than anybody else. They believe they have a higher threshold of pain. They believe that when they tell them something, that it’s not necessarily the truth that they’re over complaining and talking too much. This idea of big, strong Black women are getting women killed in hospitals. And so there needs to be a committee of women statewide, mostly populated by Black and brown women who are helping to make policy around these hospitals and these doctors, period. We need to make Medicaid and Medicare pay for midwives and doulas right away and allow them to go into hospitals alongside of mothers while they’re in those hospitals together. We, the state has to be more responsible in this because this gap is huge in the, one of the most wealthy states the nation, which means that this inequity should not be taking place because Black women are dying no matter where they live or no matter their economic status. They can live in Millburn or Newark or South Orange or Maplewood or Gloucester County in Bridgeton. The outcomes are the same because racism is the same all over the state of New Jersey. Thank you.
Steve Fulop:
I think a lot of good ideas were said. I think midwives and, and doulas are important. I think education is important. At the core of the healthcare issue here in New Jersey, which disproportionately impacts minorities, is the fact that Horizon has an absolute monopoly on your healthcare system here. If you’re not willing to address the fact that Horizon has massive control here, nothing will change. Horizon, ironically, is actually in partnership with a unique phenomenon in New Jersey that you have these hospitals consolidating and gobbling up doctors and controlling your outcome because they’re no longer allowing insurance to reimburse those doctors the same way. When you have areas in the state that have poorer economics, less educated population, and less ability to push back on those hospitals and Horizon, the outcomes are going to be bad, clear as day. You need to be bold and actually address the fact that the insurance companies in the hospital systems are at the core of the issue.
Audience Question:
Thanks for being here this evening. Homelessness is exploding. Do any of you, by show of hands, know what the GA, aka welfare amount is? It’s standard throughout New Jersey for a dependent, for an adult without dependents. Do you know that amount? The GA, the general assistance, which was commonly known as welfare. Do you know that amount of what one person would get per month? Correct. Does anyone know the answer? [Crosstalk.] I just wanted to know if people knew how much people were getting, if they didn’t have kids on general assistance. So I thought that that might be the case, and I’d suggest doing homework and or showing up at the agencies where these people are spending hours and hours of time struggling to get benefits, struggling on many fronts. The amount is $185 a month, and there’s an affluent naivete, if not a willful ignorance. And I just hope that we can address that statewide and to make [crosstalk] So this is for adults with no children, right? Who are not, those who are disabled can receive $277. So that’s a monthly amount. There may be additional with food with SNAP or food benefits, but you see that that’s not an amount to live on. So I just want to bring that to your attention.
Audience Question:
There is a long term healthcare crisis in New Jersey. Do you support changing Medicaid laws in New Jersey? So families are not rendered broke in order to qualify for Medicaid as other states have changed their laws?
Candidates:
Yes.
Question:
So what will you do so that families that are suffering and taking care of a spouse who is incredibly ill are not rendered broke?
Ras Baraka:
I think we need to have a single payer system. We need to begin talking about public options and Medicare for All in New Jersey. It is you paying a deductible plus the copay plus insurance is too much. I know people are afraid to do that, but in a crisis, if people are taking money from Medicaid, we have to figure out how to expand that, not run away from it. So we need to figure out what a public option looks like. I do wanna say something else. I apologize because it is bothering me that, you know, women in … Black, women in Maplewood and South Orange are educated, I would imagine, right? And have a higher level of opportunity in education than folks in other cities, but they’re still dying in these hospitals, right? And so we gotta stop saying that. You know what, you know what, that bothers me because my wife, you know, the one who you accused of being a criminal, my wife, when she went to the hospital when she was pregnant, cried all the way in the hospital because the baby was breached. I thought I did something wrong, right? I was like, what the hell did I do? And finally she said the baby’s breached, and that she felt like maybe she would not make it out, or the baby wouldn’t make it out. It’s problematic and we can’t keep addressing this just economically without talking about the real racial disparities in this exist in this state.
Nancy Solomon: Let’s go back to the Medicaid question. Is there anyone at the table who doesn’t agree with the premise of the question that there’s a problem that needs to be fixed? Okay, so how are we gonna fix the problem? Who wants to speak on that that hasn’t spoken yet?
Sean Spiller:
Listen, I think it starts also with the fact that right now it makes you spend down your dollars, right? Spend down your, your life savings, right? To qualify and get the funding that you need, right? And that’s what I’m, I agree with you, right? So right now, we’ve gotta change that policy to say, why are we forcing that? Right? Forcing you to go into poverty when we know that’s a problem. And we know there are additional supports we can have to have at home care, right? Often leading to better outcomes, because we know the person who’s doing a lot of the care is somebody who cares for them. But we see the barriers and obstacles that are put in place for at-home care versus care at a center of someplace else, right? So we’ve gotta change these rules around making sure we allow better access for people who are doing that care, the dollars they receive at home. If you change the rules around having you spend down all of your lifetime of savings right before you qualify for the services that you need. By doing those two main things, we protect a little bit of that nest egg that you’ll continue to need and certainly allow the folks doing the care, getting better outcomes, receiving the dollars they need to do, do the work as well.
Steve Fulop:
I agree also with a single payer option, Medicare for All. But I think if I’m being fair and honest with the conversation, New Jersey’s at a place where we’re at risk for billions of dollars of Medicaid cuts from this federal government, and we don’t know what that will look like today. I would be disingenuous if I told you today that I could expand it in a different direction, even though I believe that to be the right thing. But I think the realistic step that we are at today is to understand from a budgetary standpoint, where are we with Washington today, and what types of things do we need to be doing from a surplus standpoint to confront that in a responsible way. I agree with you that nobody should go broke, and we do need to explore that. But I didn’t want to tell you something that I didn’t think I actually could execute on.
Mikie Sherrill:
Yeah, I think the state needs to expand. We have some of the lowest reimbursable rates in Medicaid in the nation, so we need to expand that. But I have to agree right now we don’t know what kind of cuts we’re getting federally. The House Republicans passed $880 billion in cuts from Medicaid. I don’t think it’ll be that deep, but we don’t know how deep it will be at this time, which is why I am a huge advocate for pursuing the federal government, calling back the federal funding so we can reimburse people in estate plan here.
Audience Question:
This morning I read story about an attorney in Texas who was providing pro bono immigration services. Later that afternoon, he was visited by two ICE officers accusing him of interfering with an immigration investigation. And Trump has made no secret that he is willing to use federal agencies and law enforcement National Guard whatsoever to basically trample people’s rights and their attempts to exercise their constitutional rights and the attempts of others to help people exercise their constitutional rights. So, what is your plan to either put a leash on the federal government or protect us from federal forces or agencies coming in and preventing us from being able to exercise our rights?
Sean Spiller:
Well, I’ll say this as a, as an immigrant myself, right? Watching as he’s right now, threatening folks who are going through the naturalization process where, God forbid, they say the wrong thing and he pulls it away, or he is scaring our kids by sending armed ICE agents into our classrooms as well as our places of worship, or we’re seeing right now where he is trying to divide us and threaten folks, right? rounding people up, right? Who served in our military, who are U.S. citizens, right? All of us should be worried right now, because this is about every single one of us. It’s not about someone else. This is him coming after us and trying to change who we are. And his actions are not who we are, right? So for me, it’s about, as governor standing up with this strong attorney general fighting in the courts to protect and stand up for New Jersey laws. Yes, it’s using executive orders as governor to make sure I’m reacting quickly to what he does at the federal level. It’s making sure that we are not cooperating with ICE, right? Providing information and details that is then used against our citizens. It’s getting the Immigrant Trust Act signed in the law. It should be signed before I get there, right? Getting that signed in the law. These are tangible things that can be done and that I will do to help protect all New Jersey residents because it’s an issue for all of us.
Ras Baraka:
I would agree that the Immigrant Trust Act should be passed immediately and unequivocally. I mean, there are things that people are saying we want to do and we should do, but they’re not gonna go far enough to get it done. I think this is the moment to push as far as we can on everything now. We can’t pick and choose which things we wanna be progressive about and which things we don’t wanna be progressive about. We have to do as much as we can in the time period that we can do it in. We also have to protect folks like that. I think that the state, not just the AG, but the state needs a fund, where we are hiring lawyers or using lawyers from community based organizations that are defending people like that, but also defending teachers and professors, defending people with student visas and green cards, defending people with being kidnapped on the street. We have to defend the citizens of the state of New Jersey and partner with other states around the country to build a block of folks that lean on each other when we find ourselves in these issues and problems.
Nancy Solomon:
Before you start, we are out of time, so we’re not gonna take more questions. I’m sorry. I know that’s terrible, but I didn’t want you standing there… . And now let’s continue. We’ll finish. Okay. Go to the same question.
Steve Fulop:
I don’t think there is a mayor or an executive in the state of New Jersey that has the same experience with immigration that I do. Um, I told you earlier that I come from a family of immigrants. I told you my dad had a deli. My mom had an immigration services business my entire life in Newark, New Jersey, helping people get immigration. In 2013, when I was elected, I established the first immigration affairs office that’s nationally accredited in the country, in a municipal building in City Hall. It still exists today, helping thousands of people. Jersey City was at the forefront of the resettlement program for refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine. And during Covid, when the state or federal government wouldn’t help undocumented people with money, we took the burden of responsibility in Jersey City to make sure that we were supplying and raising funds to make sure that those people had what they needed.
My track record is second to none on this. I tell you that I’ve been unapologetic as supporter of the Immigrant Trust Act. I think it’s extremely important, but I think the governor also needs to be bold at this moment in time with, uh, this US attorney, Alina Habba is saying that we’re threatening around immigration. It is the actual moment that Governor Murphy should be pushing for the Immigrant Trust Act to send a message to Donald Trump that this is who we are. I also think that from a budgetary standpoint, that there are tons of nonprofits in New Jersey that deal with immigration legally, that help documented people that are here, helping them with services, connecting them, that have seen their funding dried up entirely because of the conversation. And Trenton needs to be more bold, stepping in and saying, we will help those because these people are important to our community.
Mikie Sherrill:
So I think what’s going on now isn’t just dangerous to immigrants or visa holders. I think this is dangerous for all of us. I think Trump is an existential threat to our democracy. It’s why I impeached him in my first term, leading a group of national security Democrats to call for an impeachment. It’s why I called for Biden to step down, because I didn’t think he could defeat him. It’s why I continue to fight hard to stand against him today. And I have to tell you that I have served overseas in places where I’ve seen democracies fall, where I have seen how this looks, where I’ve seen people being picked up in the middle of the night and disappeared. I’ve seen exactly what it looks like when you can’t even speak out against the person in power. And maybe we’ve forgotten something here, but many of us grew up during the Cold War, and we knew exactly what was going on in Russia.
And so to see a president of the United States vote in the UN with Russia and North Korea, is something that I never thought I’d see. And so that’s why we have to fight incredibly hard here. We have to come together. The way he wins is when he divides us. But make no mistake, this doesn’t end with simply picking up certain people off the street. This ends with picking up U.S. citizens who are going against the government to imprison them. That’s where this ends. And I have to tell you, if you think I don’t really feel this deeply despite what I just told you, I was just speaking to a group who was asking about immigrant rights. And I was talking about the story of a friend who came and said, look, I’m afraid to travel outside the U.S. despite the fact that I have a U.S. passport. And I told that story in vague terms because I’m afraid if I tell details of that story, the president of the United States might come after that person. Okay? So this is where we are.
Nancy Solomon: So you all have a minute and a half to give closing statements. I have been told that there were many people in line who want to hear how you’re gonna fix transportation in the state. And I assume New Jersey train travel is tops on the list. So if you can work that into your minute and a half, but fair enough, we told you could give prepared remarks at this point. So I understand if you can’t, but let’s start at the other end.
Mikie Sherrill:
I’d love to address transportation. I have actually in Congress been called “the tunnel obsessed Congresswoman” because even when it looked like Gateway was never gonna happen and people were saying, oh, ARC already failed, don’t even go for it, I was advocating incredibly strongly, and that’s why I’m so pleased that we were able to get the funding for the Gateway Tunnel. I do worry about it going forward. I worry about the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, where we are building infrastructure here. And I will tell you the reason I’m so focused on it is because I hear about it all of the time. I’m happy to talk about the rest of the state, but since we’re in North Jersey today, I’ll talk about the Gateway because we all know how incredibly important it’s to people that whether or not you make it home for dinner or if you can even coach soccer, even though my husband’s friends say, you know, my kids were blessed that he couldn’t make it home in time to coach soccer, I thought it would’ve been nice. But this is what it means to people’s lifestyle here.
So that’s why we have to get funding. I got funding for the catenary wires, so we hopefully won’t see yet another summer of hell this summer and continue — I see a commuter! — and continue to push into that. And then beyond that, we need to continue to look at the infrastructure across the state and make sure as governor, I’m going to develop a statewide plan so we can build out the housing we need. We can build out the infrastructure and transportation we need. Many of our lines are from the 1800s. We need to make sure we’re re-envisioning how we move people across the state. We can build out the power of the future with clean green power, which is cheaper. Solar is the cheapest form of power that we have right now, driving down tasks and really building a healthcare system that works for everyone and isn’t a one-way ticket into poverty if you get sick. So thank you all so much. I’d love for you to go to mikiesherrill.com and look further into my affordability agenda. And I’d love to earn your support in your vote. Thank you again.
Steve Fulop:
I’m gonna take my entire time to talk about transportation. Our campaign is about political reform and being bold and transportation is at the core part of that, and I know a thing or two about this because I changed transportation in Jersey City. We built the largest micro transit system in the country. It’s done 2.5 million rides serving underserved areas of Jersey City, predominantly minority neighborhoods. We built the largest bike share program in the state of New Jersey, the largest protected bike lanes. We were the first in Vision Zero. I am in the ferry business, unfortunately, but I know a thing or two about it. I know the first thing we rolled out was a transportation plan, because it’s about being bold. I say on day one, there are things that I will do to drastically reform transportation in the state of New Jersey. First, I was the first one to be in opposition to the silly Turnpike widening project in Hudson County. It’s a $12 billion project that you all paid for to alleviate congestion going into the Holland Tunnel. And it’s so stupid because it doesn’t matter if you have 25 lanes, you’re not gonna alleviate congestion because the Holland Tunnel is still two lanes. So let’s you take a step back. Secondly, I tell you that I was the only one that said congestion pricing is a good thing. People that are fighting against congestion are fighting against congestion pricing are fighting against something that’s good for health, for the environment. And you ask yourself, what is the person that drives their personal vehicle to Midtown Manhattan every single day and pays $2,000 to park in Midtown at a garage? Is it a regular working class person or not? Regular people take the buses and the train, and we need to invest in that. I talk all the time about revamping the corporate business tax that we started on last year to fund New Jersey Transit. You cannot bond against the five year revenue, and that is wrong. You need to modernize those stations. And then finally, New Jersey Transit. I talk often about the fact that it’s privatized 20 years ago. It is counter to the interest of the mission of moving people around, though with regards to having a private entity operate that. It’s not the way public transit should work. And we would change
Our campaign is different. Please visit www stevenfulop.com. Thank you.
Ras Baraka:
Thank you. You started it [referring to Fulop going overtime]. So you have to let him do it now. I’m gonna do it. Okay. But you know, look, the reality is, I agree with most of the stuff that was said. In fact, most of us agree with a lot of the things that were set up here. When we start talking about transportation, in my mind, I represent people who the 15% fair increase on New Jersey Transit, it is not a matter of them coming home late. This is a matter of them being able to buy a Christmas gift for their child, a birthday present for their child, or hold their rent. This is very serious. This is not — the way we view, this is not how everybody views it. And we govern often from our perspective. And we see very few of the people in New Jersey, and not all of us in this state. We don’t see working class families, though we are supposed to represent working class families in the state of New Jersey. Yeah, we need to expand transit. Yeah, we need the Immigrant Trust Act. Yeah, we need to build more housing. Yeah, we need, to lower the cost on healthcare. But we need to go far on all of those things. We can’t go go far on one and halt on the other. Go far on this one and halt on the other. If you listen to what people are saying, they’re very aggressive about one thing, but they pull back on the other thing. It is not the time to pull back.
Now, I shared a story last night that I’m gonna repeat because I think it big is worth repeating, right? There was a picture that I used to see growing up in my household about the Little Rock Nine. And there was an African American woman, uh, Elizabeth Eckford was her name. If you see the picture, she’s sitting at a bus stop and there’s a mob of people around her yelling and cursing and saying all kinds of racist things to her as she sat there because she wants to integrate public school system, right? And all this time, I missed the real part of that picture. There was a middle age white woman in a checkered outfit who had her arm around Elizabeth Eckford. That lady’s name was Grace Lorch. Most people don’t know about Grace Lorch. She went on the bus with Elizabeth Eckford. She stopped two teenagers from getting on the bus and pushed them off the bus as well. She rode with her to her home. And because of that, they published her name and her address in the paper.
And the White Citizens Council harassed her and her husband for the rest of their life.
And I’m saying this because we like to do the normal thing. The thing that feels good, the thing that’s comfortable, not Grace. She did what was uncomfortable. She did something that was against what the popular people were doing. What the bosses were saying, what the party was saying, what the folks in the community was saying. She did something completely different. She sacrificed herself for the greater good at everybody else. And the problem with our state is we like the things that benefit us and we refuse to sacrifice our privilege for the rest of the people in the state. And because we don’t do that, we cannot advance economically, we cannot advance socially and we cannot advance politically. This is a moment, this is our moment right now. Now you can do what you normally do and you’re gonna get what you normally get.
If you think you’re gonna beat Republicans doing the same thing you’ve done that almost got you to lose to them in this state, then we deserve to lose. But if you got a little courage, a little backbone, a little spirit, a little something in your gut, then you’ll fight. You’ll fight and you’ll do something different than what’s normally being done. Because that is the only way we win. If you don’t take the shot, you absolutely cannot score. I say take the shot in June and dammit take it again in November. And we win this race. We don’t have to worry about the Republicans or independents win. We will win because we are gonna fight and we stand on what’s right.
Sean Spiller:
You know when we, when we talk about transportation and folks ask us to address that. I agree, right? We need a transportation master plan. I think that’s gotta include more transit in South Jersey. That means light rail and expanding it. because conversations down there are, we don’t even have it, conversations here. We’ve gotta make sure it’s more affordable, reliable, safe, and these are things that we’ve gotta work on. Including though when we talk about congestion pricing, because there is still that nurse who’s gotta get to the hospital off hours and is getting hit by that fee. There’s still that firefighter who goes in. There’s still that teacher who’s gotta get to class early, right? So we’ve gotta talk about this in the context of helping working class people as well. We can’t lose that. So there’s plans for all of these things and they’re all important. Yes.
But I wanna leave you with this. We can talk about the plans all day long and quite frankly, I know I’m surrounded by good people here who are all running for the right reasons. But at the end of the day, if we don’t change systems, we will get what we always get. And if we’re looking for bold change, that is the moment right now to do something different. Because I can tell you, I agree, right? A lot of pushing back against Donald Trump fighting to make New Jersey more affordable. You know, focusing on the working class. That was the issues that matter. But at the end of the day, even good people, when they’re beholden to the big dollars that get them there, when they’re beholden to the political systems that push them in, when they’re beholden to the same things that we’ve always done for election, after election, after election, we do get those same outcomes.
We absolutely get some differences of shift here or there, but we don’t get that bold distinction that allows residents in this state, quite frankly in the nation to say, this is the difference between electing a Sean Spiller and a Democrat versus electing a Republican. Because they don’t see it. They don’t feel it. It doesn’t trickle to them because we always think it’s gonna somehow get there. We don’t take the bold steps because when that moment is about to happen and they’re about to make that decision, that political boss makes the phone call or that big developer reaches out. We can’t expect to get housing that’s affordable when big developers fund and support candidates. We can’t expect right to change political systems when we’ve got political bosses who still control it. We can’t expect that we’re going to get changes in healthcare when it’s the healthcare industry that gets people in office. We’ve gotta change systems. And this is our chance folks to do it differently at the core, to elect somebody who’s gonna be fighting for us in everything that I do. And I truly believe this is our moment to fundamentally change the systems to make it work for us and not them. So thank you so much.
Nancy Solomon:
Thank you all. It’s great to have you in our town. I’m sorry I ran late. And goodnight everybody.
