Boots on the ground to predict the Jersey City 2025 mayoral election

Last time, I wrote about trying to predict the 2025 Jersey City Mayoral election based on online research. This time, I actually went there.

I walked, took busses, and talked to people on the street to get a feel for the election.

My "Methodology"

Simply put, I wanted to know what people thought about the election and candidates, but more importantly what they thought other people thought, or who they thought people close to them would vote for.

This is directly inspired by the "neighbor poll" method that I read about from the French Trump Whale article.

I also wanted to know who would vote for McGreevey.

Beyond this, I wanted to understand the city better, so the 2029 Jersey City Mayoral Election would be easier to predict.

So I would walk around, look around, and talk to people. Going into it, I didn't know what this would look like, but it went well for my first time, and there's a lot of lessons for next time.

Talking to People

I got off the PATH train at Grove street, and talked to some husbands waiting for their wives to order coffee at a shop.

The older (maybe father figure) one didn't really engage with me until I said I was "writing an article," but the younger (maybe mid-30s) had some things to say when I asked him about the election.

He mostly complained about McGreevey. He was getting stacks and stacks of flyers on his door, and didn't like that he was taking trump-adjacent money. A lot of what he talked about was similar to what I've seen on the Jersey City subreddit, and I would not be surprised if that was how he was staying informed about the race.

After this, I walked towards city hall. There was a coffee shop in front of it, with a younger woman working as a barista, and she told me "all the young people would be voting for Ali." I asked where I could find McGreevey voters to talk to, and she said West Side or Greenville.

Outside city hall, there were tons of canvassers for O'Dea and McGreevey. The canvassers were chatting and hanging out, making me think they were part of the same agency and the campaign was paying them by the hour.

I chatted with one of them for a while, trying to gauge if he was volunteering. He was friendly but didn't commit to an answer, and said I should talk to someone else, pointing to the corner where other canvassers were.

It's not my style to hassle someone about if they are getting paid or not when it's not a good look for them to admit they are paid. But around the corner, I met someone who was volunteering for the Ali campaign, handing out flyers, and was more open and honest about the race.

He told me that he and his family were voting for Ali because they knew him, and we had some more conversation about the race and his thoughts about how it was going so far.

The volunteer pointed me to the other corner and said I should talk to Ali, the candidate, in person.

When I walked over, he was getting photos with other voters, and had a small crowd. A jovial photographer was helping coordinate the interactions and was in a good mood.

It was a brief chat with Ali, I tried to talk to him a little about his progressive endorsements to wiggle out differentiation between him and Solomon, but as soon as I told him that I wasn't voting in this election he immediately shifted his focus to talking to the other people that were approaching.

I waited around for a bit to get his vibe with voters, but it didn't inform anything for me.

After this, we walked around the surrounding neighborhoods. Two people chatted outside a community center / church, when I talked to them they didn't seem engaged but said that "people were talking their ears off about Solomon." They both seemed to agree that they knew people who would vote for McGreevey and other candidates, but they didn't have any strong opinions about the race.

When I asked about O'dea, they mentioned something about he had some issue with LGBTQ or some hate speech, I'm not sure what they were referring to but it seemed like they would not consider voting for them for this reason.

This reinforced how I think Solomon would attract the more LGBTQ-friendly white urban lib vote.

We continued walking down Newark St towards Journal Square, which is a very busy transit hub and shopping area. It was crowded and people were walking quickly and it didn't feel like the right place to start talking to strangers. In hindsight I should have tried harder.

Once we finished our meal I took the bus south to the West Side. It was around 3pm and there were some people walking around with their families, and I chatted with some people but most didn't want to talk politics.

The best conversation I had down here was with an older guy who was formerly a construction worker, but told me he did maintenance work for older people and had a lot of referrals. He smiled when he told me that his clients (he called them customers at first then corrected himself) would send him Christmas cards.

When I asked about the mayoral race, he didn't seem to know it was going on, and when I asked him if he knew anyone voting for McGreevey he said he did not. He told me he was broke and no politician could change that, and he thought they were all snakes.

I took a train back downtown, and didn't have much time left, so I stopped at O'Hara's Bar & Grill because it was where Solomon would hold rallies and other election events.

I sat down for a beer before catching my train, and talked to one more person sitting next to me. He said that he didn't care about the election, but in terms of who people he knew were voting for, it was a three way split between McGreevey, Solomon, and O'Dea.

That's exactly what the latest polls showed too.

With that insight, I got back on the the PATH and headed back to New York City.

Takeaways

Here's the major ones:

• I didn't find a single McGreevey voter. For reasons I'll write about later, this is probably because I was in a rush and didn't target areas that had more representative voters. I was in the downtown area or transit areas which likely have more young professionals. And when I did go to areas people told me had McGreevey voters, people were either not voters for McGreevey or didn't want to talk about it.
• Ali had young enthusiasm. I saw a gaggle of canvassers near Journal Square, the younger barista I talked to seemed enthusiastic, and the volunteer canvasser had a good impression of him.
• O'dea feels more "institutional" and "working class" than Solomon, who was more represented in the urban core around transit hubs. I saw O'dea's name on park signs and more working-class-looking house's chain link fences.

How does my position change?

I have not changed my settled positions based on this. I have some resting orders for Solomon Y but don't want to put any more money in this right now.

Mainly, this visit reinforced that this will be a run-off, and O'Dea or Solomon would be the other half of it. Maybe Ali will compete here too if he gets more votes than I'm expecting.

Most people I talked to thought "McGreevey would win" and would usually clarify they meant he would get to the runoff. Their reasoning was almost always that he had the name brand recognition and people trusted him.

Beyond McGreevey, people that were less involved in politics didn't seem to know or care about other candidates. Some people knew about Solomon or O'Dea, but people that weren't young didn't seem to know Mussab Ali.

There was a lot of visible enthusiasm for Ali from younger people. He was definitely "viral." I still don't think it's enough to have him beat Solomon or O'Dea, but he is laying the groundwork for being a political force.

Thoughts on "boots on ground prediction market research"

It was exciting to wander around a city, chatting with people about the race, trying to get alpha. As someone on a discord server said when I sent the Ali pic, "We are becoming what I dreamed of, a politics hedge fund"

But the way I went about this was very inefficient. I hopped off the PATH train around noon, and just vibed it out.

When looking at where I walked, it covers an area that is not representative of different types of voters. So next time, I would want to take a more coordinated approach:

• Do more advance research on which wards historically have voted differently, and make a small game plan.
• Get there earlier and leave later – dedicate an entire day
• Have better questions that can help answer questions I have about the race that affects the value of each strike.
• When I first get there, find locals and ask them which areas would be "most likely" to vote for different candidates, and plan to go to each.
• Have a "contact goal" for each area, trying to get a varied opinion
• Hold a clipboard or notebook to look a little more 'official', and give out some kind of small treat or gift in exchange for their opinion and thoughts about the race.
• Have more confidence to talk to more people, even if they looked like they didn't want to talk

This would help me be more focused and get better information than this time. But my time was certainly not wasted, because there will be another Jersey City race and my experience this cycle will help inform decisions next time.

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