Meet the three progressive winners of the Cherry Hill county committee election. They’ll defend their victory in court Friday.

It was a surprise upset last month when three progressive Democrats won the primary election to send representatives from Cherry Hill to the Camden County party committee. The committee’s job is to endorse candidates for office.

The progressives beat a slate of 74 candidates from the Camden County Democratic Committee Inc (CCDC), the organization that has long controlled county elections with the backing of George E. Norcross III.

That unexpected outcome is scheduled to be challenged in court Friday morning when the Camden County Superior Court will take up a lawsuit filed by the CCDC along with its chairman, James Beach, who represents the county in the New Jersey Senate. The suit argues, among other things, that the progressives’ win violated election rules.

In advance of Friday’s hearing, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin filed an amicus brief on behalf of the progressives earlier this week, a move that Beach criticized as a political distraction.

But while Platkin and Beach are known political figures in the state, the Cherry Hill winners are less familiar names.

For 31 days, the progressive trio — David Stahl, Rena Margulis, and Susan Druckenbrod — have enjoyed the status of being winners, but not the authority that accompanies it, having been temporarily precluded by a judge from conducting business until the hearing.

They say they have weathered the unexpected pause well, each acknowledging they never figured they would win anyway.

From disparate backgrounds, the three wound up living in proximity on the west side of Cherry Hill, where their kindred political spirits moved them to join the South Jersey Progressive Democrats, formed in 2017.

The three say they fought the Democratic machine that has run Camden County for years, trying and failing to get committee seats until their unlikely June 10 win. They were interested in greater transparency in Democratic politics, and a more open election process, they said.

“I think their ... [victory] is a testament to the power of perseverance,” said Kate Delany, leader of the county progressives. “They ... care about their town, ... our county, and the future of the Democratic Party.”

Delany added that politics are so tough in Camden County that Democrats don’t need Republicans to torment: “They struggle enough with their own.”

She said that the winning slate brings varying skills to their new roles.

One of the trio is a trained actor whose child battles an ultrarare disease. Another is a Stanford University MBA who left the world of finance to become a massage therapist. A third is an ESL (English as a second language) teacher who heeded former President Barack Obama’s call to run for office if you don’t like how the country is being managed.

Here are their stories.

With a degree in theater from Temple University, David Stahl, 42, who grew up in Westville, Gloucester County, thought much of his life would be conducted onstage.

After he married and bought a house in South Philadelphia with his wife, Jessica, though, Stahl needed to supplement his acting career by working in restaurants and even as a so-called standardized patient — a person trained to accurately portray a hospital patient for teaching and evaluating purposes.

Backing further away from the actor’s life, Stahl earned a master’s degree at Temple’s Fox School of Business in analytics for advanced skills in data processing, analysis, and interpretation.

Now living in Cherry Hill’s Kingston neighborhood, he and his wife have two children: a daughter, 10, and a son, 8. Stahl asked that his children’s names not be used.

A lot of family life focuses on Stahl’s son, who suffers from Myhre syndrome, a genetic disorder that is so rare, just 200 people in the world are known to have it, Stahl said. Common characteristics of the disease include short stature, autism, fibrosis, problems with the heart and lungs, and developmental delays.

“We want him to have the best life he can,” Stahl said. “He’s smart and funny, with a huge personality.”

Stahl’s daughter agrees. “My brother is a very special and talented kid,” she wrote in a school essay. “I am very proud of him the way he is.”

Despite the challenges at home, Stahl decided to enter politics because he wanted “more sunshine” in the electoral process.

“For so long, county politics have been conducted out of sight, in proverbial smoke-filled rooms,” he said. “To my mind, that’s not the way you govern.”

Rena Margulis, 67, of Cherry Hill’s Cooper Park Village, grew up in Burnt Hills, a suburb of Schenectady, N.Y., before taking on numerous intellectual pursuits throughout her life.

Between her junior and senior years at Smith College, where she majored in chemistry, Margulis got a job at Eastman Kodak, famous for producing cameras and film. There, she worked in a lab whose goal was to enhance pictures by improving the chemicals in photographic paper.

Upon graduation, Margulis worked on energy policy analysis for a consulting firm in Washington. She went on to Stanford for a business degree, which led to a financial analysis job in Menlo Park.

Years of stressful toil brought on repetitive stress injury, which Margulis thought would prevent her from performing any task that required a computer.

At that point, she pivoted dramatically, becoming a licensed massage and bodywork therapist. “I always enjoyed massage,” Margulis said, “specifically helping someone in pain get out of it.”

Her longtime interest in social justice never far from her heart, Margulis has done volunteer work for Amnesty International, a global human rights movement, over the years.

“That involvement is what underlies my political activism,” she said. “I met real heroes, people who’d been imprisoned for speaking up.

“People are too afraid of speaking up because of what the Norcross machine or Donald Trump might do to them. But I’m not because I got to know people who went through so much for their beliefs, and survived.”

With a political science degree from the University of Connecticut, Susan Druckenbrod wasn’t sure where she would make her mark in the world.

Born in Meriden, Conn., Druckenbrod, 60, of Erlton North in Cherry Hill, decided to turn her love of learning into a job teaching. She earned a master’s degree in teaching from Merrywood University in Scranton, and became an ESL educator.

She has worked in an adult education program at the Center City YMCA, and has taught ESL to students from kindergarten through 12th grade in various South Jersey school districts. Druckenbrod, whose 17-year-old son is a rising senior at Cherry Hill High School West, has also spent time as a stay-at-home mother.

Disillusioned with Trump during his first term, Druckenbrod threw herself into politics after Obama’s call to action. She said she found the CCDC “too insular” and decided to join the progressives.

“They remind me more of F.D.R. [President Franklin D. Roosevelt], helping all kinds of people, than of today’s Democratic Party, which is so reliant on corporations,” Druckenbrod said.

She ran unsuccessfully for the county committee in 2017 and 2019.

But now she’s a winner, along with two partners who say they can’t wait to get to work.

“The trio of Dave, Rena, and Susan began in Cherry Hill,” Delany said. “So it’s fitting that we are all making waves in the place where our grassroots group began.”