Former NJ Gov. Jim McGreevey running for mayor of Jersey City, wants 'second chance'

Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey has formally announced his bid to run for mayor of Jersey City in 2025.

McGreevey, a Democrat, resigned from his post as New Jersey's 52nd governor in 2004, less than three years into his term. He announced he would step down at a press conference where he came out as gay and disclosed his extramarital affair with another man.

An announcement video titled "Second Chances" and released late Wednesday night — barely a day after polls closed in the 2023 election — makes direct reference to the circumstances of his resignation, showing McGreevey famously announcing "I am a gay American" as he told the state he'd step down.

But it also highlights his journey as a seminary student who obtained a master of divinity degree and sought ordination in the Episcopal Church, and his work with prisoner re-entry.

McGreevey, 66, is the former head and founder of the Jersey City Employment & Training Program but was fired from that post over what city officials described "financial improprieties” in the organization, and the program shut down last year. McGreevey is now executive director of the New Jersey Reentry Corporation, which provides job training and other services to released prisoners.

"What's the point if we just throw everyone away who's ever made a mistake?" his daughter, Jacqueline McGreevey, asks in the video. She says her father's work to provide services and counseling to prisoners taught her people deserve second chances.

At the time of McGreevey’s resignation, aides identified the man with whom he’d had an affair as Golan Cipel, whom McGreevey had previously appointed to a $110,000 homeland security post despite being unable to get federal security clearances and being broadly criticized by legislators as unqualified. Cipel said at the time there had been no romantic affair and that McGreevey had sexually harassed him, which McGreevey denied.

Micah Rasmussen, who was McGreevey’s communications director when the governor announced his resignation and now directs the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University in Lawrence Township, said McGreevey understands he needs to answer questions about the scandal and why he wants to return to office.

“He's going to be faced with this question of his resignation over and over again, and he realizes he needs to pick up there," said Rasmussen. "So I thought it was a smart place to start. It's really the only place he can start.”

Rasmussen added that McGreevey ran the state as if he were the "mayor of New Jersey," with command of the details of state programs under his watch, so a mayoralty is a good fit for him.

In the new campaign video, the former governor says he wants Jersey City to be about "opportunity for working families, people who want to give back and make the community better, who give a darn." He describes difficulties residents have affording to live in the community but does not lay out any policy prescriptions.

McGreevey is also a former mayor of Woodbridge, New Jersey — where he served from 1992 to 2002 — and a former member of both the state assembly and senate. He moved to Jersey City in 2015.

Hudson County Commissioner Bill O'Dea, another Democrat, is expected to soon announce he'll run for Jersey City mayor as well, according to Hudson County View. Councilman James Solomon, also a Democrat, is expected to run as well, the Jersey Journal has reported. Current Mayor Steven Fulop is running for governor in 2025 and not seeking reelection in Jersey City.

At least nine of the 12 mayors in Hudson County, a part of the state known for its powerful political machinery, endorsed McGreevey in the weeks leading up to his campaign announcement — though Fulop was not among them. Paterson Mayor André Sayegh and former state Senate President Steve Sweeney were both present for an in-person campaign announcement McGreevey held in Jersey City Thursday morning, Politico reported.

O’Dea told Politico his campaign would be “about the people” and not “anything related to my own ego.” He predicted outside support wouldn’t help McGreevey with Jersey City residents: “People in the town, they’re like, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know such and such lived in Jersey City.'"

Rasmussen of the Rebovich Institute said he believes his former boss will be able to defend himself against criticisms that he’s an outsider with little involvement in Jersey City affairs.

"I think it's really unlikely that he's getting back involved in elected politics to be a cog or a pawn of the machine," Rasmussen said. "What would be the point of doing that?"

This story has been updated with additional information.