James Solomon ’06 has just returned to his Jersey City council office after attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a nonprofit that provides clothing, hot meals, emergency services and advocacy for people in need.
When he gets off a Zoom interview, he’ll hop on the phone to raise money for his 2025 mayoral campaign.
While Solomon doesn’t necessarily enjoy asking for political contributions, “it’s part of the process,” he says. “You can build a genuine relationship and connection with people through it, as well as catch up with people you’ve known for a long time.”
Since being diagnosed with lymphoma in 2015, Solomon has focused on the positive in life.
From being an early-30s newlywed at the time of his diagnosis to making a full recovery, the cancer scare gave Solomon a fresh outlook on life.
“Life is short,” he says, now eight years in remission, “and I really want to use my time to do right by folks.”
The path he’s chosen is public service.
Elected to city council
In 2017, Solomon won a Jersey City council seat in the community he has grown to love over the past 12 years. “It was a city that really helped to take care of me during a very difficult time in my life,” he says.
Solomon won reelection in 2021 with 68.5% of the vote—a 15% increase over his previous winning total.
“I always knew that I loved policy and politics and the intersection of the two,” Solomon reflects. “Because if you’re not thinking about good public policy, then you’re actually not making people’s lives better.”
At Pomona, Solomon studied public policy analysis. “There’s a passion for public service that was instilled through the major,” he says. In class and, in Solomon’s case, outside of class, students and professors talked about the importance of policy implementation—something that he says is often forgotten.
“We think about passing laws,” he explains, “but very rarely about once the law is passed, how do you ensure that it is implemented in a way to make a real-world impact?”
"An especially good policy student"
Politics Professor David Menefee-Libey remembers long conversations with Solomon as they hung around Carnegie Hall. “He was an especially good policy student,” says Menefee-Libey, “asking hard questions about how the world worked and how it could work better. He was willing to take on challenging and complicated projects across all kinds of domestic policy issues.”
For his senior thesis, Solomon examined how safe and reliable contraception could be made more widely available. Menefee-Libey recalls the consistency of Solomon’s research. “He took the time to do the work, thought for himself, looked for realistic solutions and then wrote it up in plain language,” Menefee-Libey says.
Solomon was elected student commencement speaker at Pomona and after graduating spent four years in St. Louis and Chicago developing a passion for city government.
“I love the physical form of cities—the architecture, the infrastructure,” he remarks. “You could feel the impacts of a well-functioning or poorly-functioning city government on a daily basis. If a pothole wasn’t filled and your car broke an axle, that could really screw up your month.”
In a city, he discovered, “day-to-day impacts of the policies are in your face, for better or worse.”
That early-career experience in the Midwest propelled him to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he spent two years studying city government in the classroom and learning on the job in the office of longtime Boston mayor Thomas Menino. Seeing Menino’s work in Boston made a deep and lasting impression.
Solomon met his future wife at Harvard, and when she accepted a job in New Jersey, Solomon followed her back to his home state, settling in Jersey City. They have been married for nearly 10 years and have three daughters.
Launching a campaign for mayor
Jersey City has become something of a revolving door in New Jersey politics, with the current mayor running for governor and, in the 2025 election, the former governor running for mayor.
In his mayoral campaign launch Solomon quipped, “I was recently at an event, and I was asked to introduce myself to the group with my name, where I lived, and my biggest professional accomplishment. I thought for a second and said: Well, I am a politician from New Jersey and I’ve never been indicted.”
Humor aside, Solomon has a simple reason for running. “I want to do the job of being mayor,” he says. “It’s the dream job for me.”
Solomon sees Jersey City’s future at stake as it becomes increasingly unaffordable. His campaign focuses on independence from developers and insider politics, creating affordable housing, keeping city streets safe, and creating more summer and after school job programs.
He likes to say he’s running for the future—for 2040, not 2004. “My hope and vision for the city in 2040 is that it remains one of the most diverse cities in the country and a place where people really come to start their lives in America,” he says.
Its location provides a visible reminder of that promise. Just across the Hudson River from Jersey City is Ellis Island—for centuries America’s Golden Door.
“Our nickname is ‘Chill Town,’” says Solomon, contrasting Jersey City with frenetic neighbor New York, located just a mile away by water, or a five- or six-mile drive by car. Its future—he hopes with him at its helm—will see arts and culture and small businesses thriving, and the government delivering for the people.
As a council member and now mayoral candidate, Solomon hears from residents daily. A pervasive theme is that their government doesn’t care about them. They deserve “a government as good as its people,” he says.
A mayor’s race is an uphill climb—a marathon, not a sprint. The period between the day he announced his candidacy and election day 2025 is well over a year. “It’s crazy,” Solomon says. “You’re trying to introduce yourself to voters each and every day.”
In some countries, candidates stand for office. In New Jersey and the rest of the country, candidates run.
James Solomon is running hard.