Peter Cammarano

At Large Councilman Peter Cammarano made the June 9th runoff by amassing 3,755 votes to Dawn Zimmer's 3,671. Beth Mason trailed with 2,541 votes.

HOBOKEN – Beth Mason’s Washington Street campaign headquarters was a scene of anguish as supporters desperately tried to figure out what happened Tuesday night to their candidate, the frontrunner in at least two early polls and the designated big money player headed into Election Day.

“We’ll take the next couple of days to assess the situation,” said Jake Stuiver, Mason’s campaign manager, helmsman of what even in the most charitable terms can only be characterized as a colossal meltdown.

Stuiver stood on the sidewalk in darkness amid figures clutching each other in devastation, trying to find or provide some comfort.

The losing candidate wasn’t ready to make an official statement but sources close to her say she feared a deepening divide in her city on learning of the results tonight. Repeatedly castigated by both the Cammarano and Zimmer camps for abandoning her reformer roots to assemble a slate of old school Hobokonites, Mason argued that she didn’t have to agree with her running mates on every issue in order to feel comfortable running with them.

But her efforts to forge her 2nd Ward supporters with the remnants of the Anthony Russo era proved politically hazardous. 

Councilwoman Dawn Zimmer, her husband, their children, and her parents, campaign near the PATH station this evening.

HOBOKEN – With two hours to go and the candidates working it as the ferries and trains arrive under the Clock Tower overloaded with potential voters, a storm comes up suddenly and threatens to short circuit the final lap of this campaign.

People walk with their hands over their eyes to protect themselves from the dust kicked into the air and it’s shocking to anyone who never thought bad weather would be a factor, even if everything else would be in play.

Whoever planned to go vote on the way home surely now has only an overriding desire to get indoors as fast as possible and to stay there, but then a few minutes later, the threat of a storm is over, and everyone reverts to the earlier get-out-the-vote game plan.

2nd Ward Councilwoman Beth Mason campaigns near the ferry. Mike Novak, a candidate for the city council on a slate with At-Large Councilman Peter Cammarano, works a street corner in the 4th Ward.

A Cammarano fan on Washington Street.

HOBOKEN – Here it is at midday in the Hoboken mayor’s contest and no one looks like he or she has broken a cellphone yet in despair as all three of the big ticket players’ operations appear competive.

The campaign headquarters of Beth Mason and Peter Cammarano look particularly active. 

At Cammarano central on Washington Street, there’s a room in the back and phone bankers sit at tables and go through their call lists. Out front, Cammarano soldiers in white t-shirts ask passersby if they’ve voted.

“He’s worked all his life for this,” the at-large councilman’s mother says of her son. She’s in from Vermont to help her son get elected.  

Next door at a sidewalk café, three green-shirted workers for the Zimmer Team are feeding quietly. When they finish and walk past, they don’t exchange words with Cammarano’s people.

Hoboken Clerk Jimmy Farina poses with some of his memorablia at City Hall.

HOBOKEN – The streets have slowed here since this morning but one man keeps on the move: City Clerk Jimmy Farina, who is as analogous to Hoboken on Election Day as was Dino to Ol' Blue Eyes.   

“I’ve been working mayoral elections since 1984, when I started this job,” said Farina. “So far, even this morning, I didn’t get the sense that turnout was high. A little after 4 p.m. I’ll take a reading on where we are in terms of voter turnout but right now, based on what I saw down at the Firehouse early, turn out’s comparatively low.”

Six candidates are running for mayor of the mile-square city” At-Large Councilman Peter Cammarano, 2nd Ward Councilwoman Beth Mason, 4th Ward Councilwoman Dawn Zimmer, tech head Tom Vincent, financial consultant Ryn Melberg, and broker Frank Orsini.

Ravi Bhalla

The race for the mayor of Hoboken features a field of six candidates, three of whom have received the most press attention owing to their continuing brawls on the council amid the ruins of this city’s finances.

At-Large Councilman Peter Cammarano put together a slate of teammates that hit all the requisite chords given the temper of the times – a Latino (Union City cop Angel Alicia), a financial expert (Mike Novak), and a School Board member who presumably cares about kids in a town where the number of drunken revelers on a Friday night is outdone only by the number of baby carriages on Saturday morning (Francis Rhodes-Kearns).

Cammarano, an elections lawyer who learned his trade in the school of old pro Angelo Genova, has financial support from key Democratic Party fundraisers and is the candidate most likely to entice the backing of the Hudson County Democratic Organization (HCDO) in the event that outfit secures the re-election of its chief, Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy – and in the event that Cammarano makes the runoff.

Convinced of his essential argument – that he fulfilled his obligation as a local elected official when he voted for the budget last year and against the state takeover of the city’s finances, the Jersey Journal Friday endorsed At-Large Councilman Peter Cammarano for mayor of Hoboken.

“Once apprised of the city’s dismal fiscal condition, mayoral candidates Beth Mason and Dawn Zimmer, and others, dropped the ball on their responsibilities as council members by not passing a budget because they were more concerned about blaming the Roberts administration than coming up with a fiscally responsible plan," the editorial noted of Cammarano's two chief opponents.

2nd Ward Councilwoman Beth Mason

HOBOKEN – Councilwoman Beth Mason’s just left her campaign headquarters, and if anyone ever needed evidence that big money moves in and out of this narrow front door, in her absence, the candidate’s mobile face on a flat screen TV speaks to passersby on Washington Avenue. 

She’s on cable TV, too, and a Brian P. Stack-sized banner hangs on the side of campaign headquarters. Overlooking Washington Avenue in fullblown Diego Rivera glory stand Mason and her three crusading running mates. 

Circulating on these same streets, meanwhile, a Mason mailer shows Councilman Peter Cammarano’s head with rabbit ears popping in less than auspicious fashion out of a hat held by exuberant magic man Mayor David Roberts.

The implication is that Cammarano represents an elongation of the now gasping Roberts era. But the larger campaign implication is just as telling from this and a constant barrage of counterpunching mailers targeting Cammarano and not Mason’s other chief competitor in a six-person field:  if there must be a runoff, the Mason campaign wants to eliminate Cammarano now and deal one-on-one with Councilwoman Dawn Zimmer later.

Councilman Peter Cammarano

HOBOKEN – The rat mashed to death in the parking lot across the street from the PATH station was a sign of where the mayoral campaign was with five days left: somewhere between ugly and grisly.

Hours after a blog piece broke on Hoboken 411 highlighting what its author sees as the distance between Councilman Peter Cammarano’s family man image and the fact that he fathered a child out of wedlock when he was 18 who is not mentioned in his online biography and depicting him as a deadbeat dad, Cammarano stood in front of City Hall at noon and denounced the story as scurrilous and vile.

“I’m specifically laying it at the feet of Mason and Russo,” said the councilman, who had called the press conference to set out a “blueprint for the future” as a contrast to what he said were the personal destructive political machinations of one of his rivals in the mayor’s race, Councilwoman Beth Mason, and her ally, Councilman Michael Russo.

Richard Tremitiedi

HOBOKEN - The man Beth Mason defeated in her 2007 bid for the City Council, who famously griped that given Mason's coffers he was "practically up against Corzine-Bloomberg over here," today formally endorsed At-Large Councilman Peter Cammarano for mayor.

“As a longtime resident, fire chief, and civic activist, I am honored to endorse Councilman Peter Cammarano and his diverse team, Frances Rhodes-Kearns, Michael Novak, and Angel Alicea,” said former fire chief Richard Tremitiedi. “They will be there for every resident of Hoboken and truly represent the hard working families of our city.”   

Tremitiedi applauded Cammarano for holding the line against layoffs of public safety workers. 

HOBOKEN – If you see CIA types wearing abbreviated Burger King head-sets idling in front one of the hipper fitness joints here, that probably means the governor’s inside, pumping iron. He lives here, of course, and that’s an unstated given in this urban yuppie pleasure dome that still has some harder core, untamed edges in the span of its crunched together six wards, where several mayoral candidates now gather to face off in this debate at Our Lady of Grace Church.

“Will the candidates please come to the stage?”