Tips from the Trail: Taking on the Establishment

As one of six candidates vying to unseat incumbent City Councilman Charlie Bell in Newark, New Jersey’s Central Ward last year, Darrin Sharif was a long shot by any measure. Bell, a former school board member, had been a political fixture in Newark for years. He had been a city councilman from 2002 to 2006, when he briefly lost his seat to an opponent who was later forced from office due to ethics violations.
 
In 2008, Bell won his old seat back, defeating the chosen candidate of Newark’s popular mayor, Cory Booker. In 2010, Bell’s re-election effort had the support of Booker and the rest of the city’s political machine. In the May nonpartisan general election, Bell received 43 percent of the vote, short of the 50 percent plus one needed to prevent a runoff. Sharif came in second, with 23 percent. Bell had nearly $1 million to spend on the runoff, and it was clear that it would be very difficult for Sharif to win.
 
Sharif’s first task was to win over some of Bell’s voters. His campaign focused on the Central Ward’s seniors—a reliable voting bloc that had traditionally favored Bell. His staffers built up a detailed voter list by knocking on as many doors as possible and analyzing voter histories. Once they had isolated voter preferences, they sent out targeted mailers to seniors focusing on a number of issues.
 
One influential mailer allied Sharif with Mayor Booker in his struggle with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to institute reforms that would increase the port’s efficiency and bring greater revenue to the city.
 
Another effective mailer focused on exaggerations in Councilman Bell’s official biography on the city’s website. The bio claimed that Bell had graduated from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, but Sharif discovered that Bell had graduated from neither institution. Once publicized in Sharif’s mailer, these misstatements raised serious questions among voters about Bell’s character. The mailer, which was sent out before the May general election, drew the interest of the press and focused attention on Sharif’s campaign. “Once we raised that issue, the press picked it up,” says Sharif. “Once they started raising questions about him, it became easier for us.”
 
Sharif’s aggressive campaign soon had the attention of the city’s political elite as well. In the month between the general and the runoff, Sharif won the endorsement of former Mayor Ken Gibson, former city council candidate Richard Whitten, councilman-elect Ras Baraka and hip-hop artist and Essex County native Wyclef Jean.
 
As the June 15 runoff election neared, all of Newark’s political powers descended on the Central Ward. Mayor Booker spoke in favor of Councilman Bell, and Democratic Party powerbroker Stephen Adubato, a top vote generator among Hispanics in the North and Central Wards in the May 8 general election, brought his full influence to bear for Bell in the city’s last contested election of the cycle.
 
Sharif’s campaign manager and father, Carl Sharif, believes that the final press by the mayor’s political machine actually worked in their favor by drawing intrusive attention from the media that helped turn seniors against the mayor’s candidate. “Bell had been around for twenty years,” says the elder Sharif. “I think people were ready for a change.” Darrin Sharif recalls that what started as a whisper among Bell’s base of seniors quickly grew to outright insurrection. “Even for seniors that liked Charlie personally, they saw me as their grandson and were ready to pass the baton to a younger generation,” he says. 
 
On the day of the runoff, Sharif’s GOTV and phone bank effort demonstrated the strength his candidacy had gained in the thirty days since the general election. “Of every hundred committed voters we had in the data base, we got about seventy on Election Day,” says the senior Sharif.
 
It turned out that his son needed nearly every one of those votes. When the counting was done, the tally showed that Darrin Sharif had defeated Bell by just 11 votes to become Newark’s newest Central Ward councilman.
 Noah Rothman is the online editor at C&E. Email him at nrothman@campaignsandelections.com