Steven Fulop

Steven Michael Fulop (born February 28, 1977) is an American politician serving as the 49th and current mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey.

He went to Harpur College at Binghamton University where he graduated in 1999.

During university, he spent time abroad studying at Oxford University in England.

Shortly after completion of Marine Corps boot camp, on January 14, 2003, his reserve unit was activated, and Fulop was deployed to Iraq, where he served as part of the 6th Engineer Support Battalion for six months.

He traveled into Baghdad in the early weeks of the war.

The battalion focused on engineering, logistics, water purification, and fuel, part of the support infrastructure that allowed swift movement through Iraq.

His unit was written about in numerous periodicals during the war, which highlighted the company's movements, their contributions to the war, and the challenges that they encountered.

The New Jersey Star Ledger highlighted Fulop on several occasions as a result of his choice to leave his financial services job to serve his country.

After his service in Iraq, Fulop returned to Goldman Sachs.

Fulop ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2004 against current U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, who then represented New Jersey's New Jersey's 13th congressional district Congressional District; Fulop lost the June 8, 2004 primary election by 74.8 percentage points, 87.4%–12.6%.

In May 2005, Fulop was the winner against an incumbent councilman in Jersey City's Ward E, representing the downtown area.

When Fulop was sworn into office at 28 years old, he was the youngest member of the city council by more than 17 years and the third youngest in the nearly 200-year existence of the city.

However, as noted by The New York Times, the most significant difference between Fulop and every elected official in Jersey City, and most in Hudson County, is that he won the election with no establishment support, beating an incumbent with the backing of Senator Robert Menendez, Mayor Jerramiah Healy of Jersey City, and the Hudson County Democratic organization.

Fulop was outspent by more than 2-to-1 during the campaign but several tactical innovations that were highlighted in The Star-Ledger, The New York Times, and The Jersey Journal contributed to Fulop's win against stiff opposition.

In 2006 he completed both his Master of Business Administration at the New York University Stern School of Business and his Master of Public Administration at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

Upon graduating from college, Fulop joined Goldman Sachs, the investment banking firm, first working in Chicago and later in downtown Manhattan and Jersey City.

After seeing first hand the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks, he decided to put his career at Goldman Sachs on hold and join the United States Marine Corps.

In early 2006, he left Goldman Sachs to take a position at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., and also completed his service to the Marine Corps Reserve with a rank of Corporal.

In September 2007, he proposed legislation that would have restricted use of city vehicles and property, banned officials from holding multiple elected or appointed positions in government, instituted business and income transparency requirements for elected officials and barred people from lobbying an entity in which they serve.

This legislation was rejected by a 6–1–1 vote.

Fulop then proposed that Jersey City voters have the opportunity to institute new ethics reform measures by voting on two referendums.

The first referendum would prevent elected officials or government employees from collecting more than one taxpayer-financed salary, a practice known as double dipping.

In May 2009, Fulop was re-elected for a second term with 63% of the vote.

In 2010, he led grassroots and local government efforts to oppose the construction of a gas pipeline through downtown Jersey City.

As a councilman, one of Fulop's main interests was ethics reform.

In 2012, the Hudson Reporter named him #4 in its list of Hudson County's 50 most influential people.

A Democrat, he was formerly the Councilman for Jersey City's Ward E. On May 14, 2013, Fulop defeated incumbent mayor Jerramiah Healy.

Fulop assumed the office of mayor on July 1, 2013.

He was widely considered likely to run for governor in 2017, but ended this speculation by announcing his intention to run for re-election as mayor.

In November 2017, Mayor Fulop was re-elected as mayor of Jersey City with 78% of the vote which represented the largest margin of re-election by a Jersey City mayor since 1949.

He was again re-elected in 2021, becoming the first Jersey City mayor to win a third term since Frank Hague.

On January 3, 2023, Fulop announced that he will not seek reelection in 2025.

Instead, in April 2023, he announced he would run to succeed term-limited Governor Phil Murphy in the 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial election

Fulop was born in Edison, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, Carmen and Arthur Fulop.

His parents were both born in Romania.

His father grew up in Israel and was a sniper in the Golani Brigade during the Six-Day War.

His father also owned a delicatessen in Newark, New Jersey, where Fulop often worked, and his mother Carmen, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, worked in an immigration services office helping others gain citizenship.

Through the sixth grade, Fulop attended Rabbi Pesach Raymon Yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish elementary school in Highland Park, New Jersey, though he himself was not observant.

For his last two years of elementary school and his first two years of high school, Fulop attended Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union (now Golda Och Academy) in West Orange, New Jersey.

Fulop graduated from J. P. Stevens High School.