Zimmer holds lead, Campos holds on

In a runoff election for the Hoboken City Council, Dawn Zimmer leads by 7 votes

It was looking bad for Councilman Christopher Campos in the Fourth Ward Tuesday, though the embattled kid from the Marshall Drive neighborhood came back at the end of the night to stand on the steps of Hoboken City Hall, savoring the sense of holding off defeat for at least one night.

"Keep the faith," he cried to his red-shirted supporters. "Keep the strength. I love you!"

Councilman Christopher CamposHe’s still in it pending City Clerk James Farina’s perusal tomorrow of the provisional ballots. Challenger and community activist Dawn Zimmer holds a slight edge: 870 to 863.

Zimmer’s people figured they had won. Her husband let out a whoop when he thought Farina told him the Tuesday night election results didn’t include absentee ballots, where Zimmer stomped Campos, by all accounts a hard-working councilman who’s fighting a drunk driving rap and charges of being too cozy with developers. But Farina later clarified the results included absentee votes; just not provisionals - about 50 in all.

The news was enough to send Campos storming out of City Hall into the Fourth Ward crowds with the stride of a man who’s just warded off doom.

That’s what it had felt like at times Tuesday.

Not given to displays of public dismay and particularly not in the wake of his spectacular victory as a member of Brian P. Stack’s 33rd district ticket, Campos partisan Ruben Ramos nonetheless had the look of a man in mourning as he fingered pages of registered voters and wondered when people would show up to the polls.

The numbers were way down. It looked moribund in the old neighborhood; and by contrast a few blocks away at the headquarters of Zimmer, the biggest trouble seemed to be fighting off the urge to break out James Brown at the Apollo.

By late afternoon, Zimmer looked the winner and the weather was a factor on every front.

First of all, in contests like this it’s important to forge a street presence early. You get a lot of people wielding signs and wearing your colors and you put them out there at key intersections and the idea is they hold territory. If your team is red and your opponent’s team is blue and the red shirts far outnumber the blues you score a victory. You make every person walking past that intersection know that red is stronger than blue in this election.

On a good day Campos can flex that kind of muscle down on Jackson Street, which is the shopping district of his home neighborhood, where the salsa music blaring out of radios and the good feeling for Campos can transmit that sense of hometown hero in residence. But the on-again-off-again rain storm made the street war harder, and the candidate who would stand to gain on that front, appeared to be losing.

There was just no buzz, no energy.

Then there were Zimmer’s absentee ballots. Campos had complained at the end of last month and sent up a distress flare to U.S. Attorney Chris Christie and CC’d Attorney General Stuart Rabner about the Zimmer campaign’s strong-arm tactics at senior centers.

But whatever tactics she used, Zimmer had collected well over 100 absentees and delivered them to Farina’s office by the deadline, and on a day when the rain was so hard at times that only the most diehard voters were going to get out there, that was a heads up call on the candidate’s part that counted in this close race.

The campaign workers committed to a Zimmer victory - that is to say, not the billboards on legs who looked as though they were in pain having to stand on a street corner for long stretches of time - but the activists - like the man pulling guard duty under an umbrella in the driving rain when almost everyone else was inside - a lot of them could barely contain their glee in late afternoon.

They could sense Zimmer winning.

It helped too that Zimmer racked up a victory on the issues front Tuesday. She’d trooped up to City Hall and excoriated the council on the flooding problem more than a few times. The governing body’s acquiescence to over-development was in part to blame, in her view, and here they were in Hoboken’s Fourth Ward, in the middle of a deluge on Election Day, where whole intersections were unnavigable and it was as though the rain gods were working overtime for Zimmer.

But Campos wasn’t going down without a fight. It helps to have a truck traveling around the neighborhood showing big, larger than life live action movies of the candidate, with an accompanying soundtrack, and it helps to have a candidate who hustles, and Campos was working hard by everyone’s estimation.

Everywhere he was supposed to be Tuesday, he had just left, moving on to the next corner, the next apartment, the next hand.

He also had the help of the Stack machine, people like Ramos, and Jose Munoz, who just won a Democratic primary for Hudson County +Freeholder, standing out there on street corners keeping the Campos name alive.

Though it isn’t true that all the coloring books in Hudson County are filled with portraits of political bosses instead of presidents, and every child up on the knee of Santa Claus aspires to be either a cop, firefighter or boss and certainly not in that order, the role of the boss in an election like this can’t be understated.

Stack’s people were out there.

But so were the Hudson County Democratic Organization stalwarts, and any designs Zimmer had on refraining the much borrowed Shirley Chisholm line about being "unbought and unbossed," were dampened somewhat by the presence in her circle of the same HCDO crowd that last month had been booted out of the town by Councilman Michael Russo.

Whatever the presence of those opposing forces, larger than Hoboken and still waging a countywide war in what the locals say here will be a rivalry for at least five years, in the end Campos pulled his support out of the neighborhood, to make one more impassioned stand.