Thomas Emens ’25, MPA ’29, has won the special election for mayor of Jamesburg, N.J. Emens defeated Republican candidate Shannon Spillane, receiving 57 percent of the vote and nearly 1,000 votes. Jamesburg is a small town of about 6,000 residents in Middlesex County.
Emens will be sworn in just after Thanksgiving and will serve until Dec. 31, 2027.
“It is a real honor and very humbling to have been elected mayor of my hometown. This campaign was won by the residents and for the residents,” Emens told The Daily Princetonian in a phone interview.
Emens — who ran on the slogan “Progress for Jamesburg” — was elected alongside borough councilmember Samantha Rampacek and Jamesburg residents Tracey Madigan and James Kozee.
“If I didn’t have a team that I felt would be able to not only win, but also deliver the results that we need in Jamesburg, I wouldn't have run for mayor,” Emens said.
“It's been a very worthwhile journey because there's a lot of meaning behind the work that we do and the campaign that we ran. It was fantastic,” he added.
Emens framed his campaign around fiscal responsibility, professional standards in borough operations, affordability, and everyday quality-of-life fixes. He said that small-town politics can drift toward patronage and uneven service delivery, and that his team ran explicitly on raising the bar.
“We want to make sure that our tax dollars are being spent wisely and that there are true investments in the neighborhoods, in town, and also to straightening out our finances because we have some significant financial problems,” he said.
Jamesburg’s budget pressures, he noted, are acute. “This is the first year that our expenses exceeded our revenues,” Emens said, pointing to lost ratables and the borough’s limited geography for large-scale development.
He said his administration will pursue “meaningful economic development” while tackling cost drivers like health insurance contributions in a way that “is an investment in the employees, but is also living within our means.”
Emens is a current Scholars in the Nation’s Service Initiative (SINSI) scholar. The program consists of a two-year MPA program with a full scholarship. After their first year, students participate in a two-year fellowship with a government agency and return to the University for their final year of school.
He says there is a “real possibility that [the two-year fellowship will] just be my mayoral duties.” However, he has not yet had a formal conversation with SINSI director Gregory Jaczko.
“Given the uniqueness of this particular case and the need to expand what it means to be in the nation’s service and in the service of humanity, I think this is a very compelling case to be my rotation,” he said.
Emens graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Politics after earning an associate degree with high honors from Middlesex County College in 2022. He was a recipient of the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship.
At Princeton, he served as the President of the Princeton Transfer Association and worked at the Emma Bloomberg Center for Access and Opportunity, where he supported first-generation and low-income community college students and military veterans.
Emens emphasized how influential the transfer cohort has been, saying, “they are people who will be friends of mine for the rest of my life.” He added that many of them played a big role in his campaign, such as campaigning door-to-door in support of his candidacy.
His thesis, advised by Professor Nolan McCarty, explored how tax levies are affected by mayoral election cycles in New Jersey. He ultimately won the department’s Philo Sherman Bennett Prize.
“We found that when there is a mayor up for re-election, or there is a mayoral election period, tax levies tend to be less when a mayor is on the ballot than they are in non-election years,” Emens explained.
Emens first won a seat on the Borough Council while at Princeton and took office in 2023. He served a three-year term, and the council selected him as council president in 2024 and again in 2025.
After Republican mayor Thomas Gibbons resigned at the end of 2024, Emens became the acting mayor of Jamesburg. He ultimately ceded the role to Spillane, as the law required a Republican mayor until the next special election.
“When we consulted with the election law attorneys, they said it’ll follow the same procedure for someone who was a nominee of their political party,” Emens said. “The local Republican organization put three names forward for the council to consider for appointment, and ultimately we picked Mayor Spillane.”
When asked how he plans to balance studies and mayoral duties, he said that the “role of mayor really is a 24/7, 365 job,” but it “really does come down to time management.”
He added that he will lean on the Jamesburg council members but acknowledged they also have other commitments. Jamesburg’s government is a “weak mayor, strong council” format, with more power reserved for the council members.
“I really wouldn’t want it any other way,” he said. “I would not be as successful as I am as a student or as a public official if I wasn't actively involved in learning new things and prioritizing growth as a student, but also being actively involved in service.”
Emens sees his future as a “combination of elected and appointed office.”
“The Democratic Party has forgotten about the working class and blue-collar communities like mine. I think we need to refocus that and do that work and really care about people,” Emens said. “I put a very high premium on public service because there's a real need for it in our country.”
Hayk Yengibaryan is a head News editor, senior Sports writer, and education director for the ‘Prince.’ He is from Glendale, Calif. and typically covers breaking news and profiles. He can be reached at hy5161[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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