In late February, Andy Kim, a Democratic congressman representing a suburban New Jersey district, made national headlines when he sued 19 of New Jersey’s county clerks. Kim is currently running in the Democratic primary for the 2024 Senate election, and is alleging that the design of the state’s primary ballots (used by 19 of the state’s 21 counties) is unconstitutional.

Kim’s lawsuit has shaken the New Jersey political world, an unsavory terrain replete with party bosses, patronage networks, and all-powerful machines. Much of New Jersey politics runs through its 21 county parties, which wield incredible control over primary elections. They do this by designing the primary ballots themselves. The “line” format of New Jersey’s primary ballots is strange, often indecipherable, and used nowhere else in the nation. Though these ballots aren’t user-friendly, they serve their purpose well: They help ensure that the choice of the county party will always win a primary election.

In a safe blue state like New Jersey, the decisive power of the line-formatted primary ballots means that Democratic county parties wield great influence in gubernatorial and senatorial elections—and down-ballot, a Democratic or Republican county party’s endorsed candidate will virtually always win their respective primary elections, amounting to a startling subversion of democracy in safe blue or safe red state and local-level races.

Two months after Kim announced his bid for the Senate, another candidate, Tammy Murphy, jumped into the Democratic primary. Murphy has never held elected office, nor does she come from a background of public service—and yet, within days of her announcing, scores of elected officials and county party bosses flocked to endorse her campaign. Her chief qualification? She’s the first lady of New Jersey, the wife of Governor Phil Murphy, who presides over a massive patronage network funding many county Democratic parties.

Despite leading in polling, small-dollar fundraising, and grassroots support, Kim was losing out on some of the most coveted county party endorsements, as the governor whipped support for the first lady. Anticipating that he’d receive poor ballot placements in the June primary election, Kim, joined by two other congressional candidates running in this cycle (Sarah Schoengood and Carolyn Rush), filed this lawsuit, in what was initially regarded as a Hail Mary attempt to stave off surefire defeat in the primary.

Just over one month later, Kim’s lawsuit has upended New Jersey politics in a way that no one could have foreseen. After facing relentless criticism from grassroots Democratic activists, Tammy Murphy dropped out of the primary on March 24, citing her unwillingness to wage a “very divisive and negative campaign.” Five days later, a federal judge officially granted Kim’s request for a preliminary injunction, which essentially declared the ballot line to be unconstitutional for the upcoming primary, and required that June’s ballots be designed in a more neutral fashion. Democracy activists in the state have heralded this as the end of ballot lines in New Jersey—and if this monumental decision holds, it will mark a seismic development in the state’s political history.

Not only will it finally allow the electoral left to build power and flex their muscle throughout the state, it may be a boon to the progressive movement nationwide.

For decades, the ballot-line format has been a fundamental element of New Jersey’s primary elections across both parties. All of New Jersey, except for Sussex and Salem counties, currently use this format. Though there are slight variations by county, they’re best understood as grids: The highest-level races—usually a presidential, senatorial, or gubernatorial contest—will occupy the top rows, and each subsequent race will occupy the rows below in descending order (from federal, to state, to local, to party races). Each candidate for office is placed in a particular column so that candidates competing in the same race are aligned horizontally.

The incumbent at the top of the ticket—who will almost always be the best-known candidate on the ballot—will usually receive the endorsement of the county party. The county party’s other endorsements will follow in that same column, which provides an enormous advantage to all those down-ballot sharing a column.

This dynamic becomes clear when considering this coming election’s primary ballot: One column will list President Joe Biden—and a given county party’s endorsed candidates for Senate, House, and lower offices will appear in the same column, underneath Biden’s name. The ballot format may suggest that Biden himself has formally endorsed the entire county party’s slate. And whether it’s out of loyalty to the politicians they recognize, or pure habit, voters will usually just tick their selections down the same column, even if they’re less familiar with the down-ballot races being contested.

Even if there’s not an incumbent on the top of the ticket (that is, if there is a contested presidential, senatorial, or gubernatorial primary), county parties have other ways to influence voters. For example, they’ll ensure that their endorsed slate is given a favorable place on the ballot itself. Candidates that remain unendorsed by the county party may find themselves in different parts of the ballot, perhaps awkwardly floating on an easy-to-miss section, or maybe alone in a separate column altogether. To stand outside of an official, party-endorsed slate also delegitimizes candidates, making them unappealing for the average low-information primary voter. “Ballot Siberia” is the term used by New Jersey politicos to describe this sort of treatment—and it’s often used by county parties to punish candidates as they see fit.

To be listed off of the county party line is a death knell to any campaign. Peter Jacob, a two-time Democratic candidate in New Jersey’s Seventh Congressional District, describes the county party line as having “the equivalent of having $2 million in a campaign to run.… Instead of spending money on organizers and advertising for name recognition, that candidate is just riding the coattails of whoever’s on the top of the ticket.”

Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers University professor and scholar of the ballot line, backs this up empirically. She has determined that ballot line placement has provided an average advantage of 38 percentage points, which all but guarantees victory for candidates who receive the county party line. According to Rubin, “New Jersey primary voters are encouraged by the county parties, and conditioned by years of practice to vote for all the candidates on the county line.”

The likelihood of a county party’s endorsement is almost always a direct reflection of how much money a given candidate possesses, or how much they can fundraise on behalf of the party. In the lead-up to his 2017 gubernatorial campaign, Governor Murphy, who spent over 20 years working for Goldman Sachs, loaned himself $10 million to run his campaign, and showered every county chair with tens of thousands of dollars in donations. Unsurprisingly, he won nearly every county line, and cruised to victory in the primary and general elections.

Two decades prior, it was another Goldman Sachs man, Jon Corzine, who used his vast fortune to parachute into public office by buying county party lines during his first senatorial primary in 2000—Corzine would eventually win the Democratic nomination that year, and went on to serve a term as senator and another as governor of New Jersey. This isn’t a phenomenon just limited to Democrats, either—ahead of the 2018 Republican senate primary, a wealthy pharma CEO named Bob Hugin cut $37,000 checks to each Republican county party, won the county lines, and easily grabbed his party’s nomination.