Hudson County, New Jersey, is one of the country’s last remaining redoubts of old-fashioned machine politics where, just across the river from the city, political bosses control patronage and can funnel loyalists to the polls for their preferred candidates. Its most powerful figure is Robert Menendez, the New Jersey senator now facing corruption charges in federal court.

When Menendez’s successor in Congress, Albio Sires, decided not seek another term in 2022, almost instantaneously, every major political figure in the county — including Sires — decided to back Menendez’s 36-year-old son, Rob, who had never before run for office.

Two years after he was elected on the strength of his name, Rob Menendez might lose for the same reason. He is facing a well-funded challenge in the Democratic primary this June from Ravi Bhalla, the two-term mayor of Hoboken who is going after the congressman as a corrupt nepo baby. Menendez, he says, shared “the same consultant … the same donors, same corporate PACs, the same lobbyists” with his father. The congressman is “nothing more than old wine in new bottles … it’s getting more of the same, but just from another generation,” he says.

Rob Menendez spent his entire youth watching his father’s rise to power. He was not even 1 year old when Bob became mayor of Union City in 1986 after testifying against the prior mayor’s corrupt political machine while wearing a bulletproof vest in federal court. He was 2 and a half when his father first paired his mayoralty with a seat in the state legislature in 1988. By........

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