By JOHN T. WARD
Democrats will maintain their lock on the Red Bank government in 2020.
Incumbent council member Kathy Horgan, seeking her fifth three-year council term, and council president Erik Yngstrom, seeking his second, easily topped Republican challengers Allison Gregory and Jonathan Maciel Penney in Tuesday’s election.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a blowout,” former Mayor Ed McKenna announced to the Democratic faithful who’d gathered at temporary party headquarters.
Unofficial results posted by the Monmouth County Clerk’s office showed these vote tallies:
Kathy Horgan (D) 1,266
Erik Yngstrom (D) 1,278
Allison Gregory (R) 901
Jonathan Maciel Penney (R) 817
Democrats won all nine voting districts, often by wide margins, with one exception: Gregory, running for the second consecutive year, outpolled Horgan by a single vote in district two, coming in second behind Yngstrom by one vote. Results don’t include mail-in and provisional ballots.
Though they pitched themselves as advocates for the borough’s West Side, a traditional Democratic redoubt, Gregory and Penney came up far short there.
For all but one year since the early 1990s, Democrats have dominated local government. Mayor Pasquale Menna is also a Democrat.
