The political calculus in New Jersey’s 4th Congressional District has long been simple arithmetic: add the name Chris Smith, and the sum is victory.
First elected in 1980, the Republican congressman is serving his 23rd term, a monument to political endurance in a changing state. Kentucky Rep. Harold Smith was sworn into office the same day, so Smith is considered the second-longest currently serving member of the US House of Representatives and the longest serving member of Congress from New Jersey in history
Now, that calculus is being challenged by a new and improbable variable: Rachel Peace, a 33-year-old single mother from the Jersey Shore who is running for her life, based on palpable fear, not merely political ambition.
Peace’s candidacy is a direct response to what she calls the “morally reprehensible” cuts in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, which threaten the Medicaid and Medicare programs that are, quite literally, the lifelines of her family.
Her campaign is a personal story weaponized against a political institution, a leap of faith made from a foundation of necessity.
Peace’s life is a tapestry of caregiving and vulnerability.
She and her four-year-old son rely on New Jersey FamilyCare, a Medicaid program.
Her 36-year-old sister, Brittany, relies on a complex web of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security Disability to manage severe mental health conditions, including bipolar and schizoaffective disorder.
“She’s been hospitalized more times than I can count,” Peace said, describing stays that often last for months.
Medicaid and Medicare have covered those hospitalizations and the critical follow-up care that allows Brittany to live at home, including in-home medication administration and community integration programs.
A particularly intensive treatment, electroconvulsive therapy, which Peace credits with saving her sister’s life after a suicide attempt during the pandemic, was covered by these programs.
“Without Medicaid and Medicare,” Peace states plainly, “she would not be able to pay for any of the services that are vital to her continued existence in our family.”
Her own brush with being uninsured after fleeing an abusive relationship left her with medical debt and a conviction that the system is broken for the “forgotten middle class.”
This lived experience is the engine of her campaign.
It is a stark contrast to Smith, who, while known for his anti-abortion advocacy and human rights work abroad, has served through decades of Washington budget battles that often abstract the human impact of policy.
The Peace campaign is a consciously crafted narrative.
Her launch was facilitated by a video produced by Julie Roginsky, a veteran Democratic strategist and Fox News personality. Roginsky, frustrated by what she called ineffective Democratic messaging, sought to “put a face to the crisis.”
“A senator, a member of Congress, or a pundit like me can go on tv and scream that millions of Americans are going to lose access,” Roginsky said. “But until you put a face to the crisis, the statistics will be just amorphous numbers attached to anonymous people.”
That face is Rachel Peace’s.
The strategic bet is that in a district that has reliably returned Smith to office for 46 years, a message grounded in immediate, kitchen-table survival might resonate more than traditional partisan broadsides.
It is a campaign built not on political machinery—though Paterson attorney Boris Zaydel has signed on as treasurer—but on shared anxiety over health care and economic stability.
The odds remain overwhelmingly long. Smith has survived political shifts and challenges for decades, his local roots and consistent service building a formidable defense. Peace must first win a contested Democratic primary before even facing the incumbent.
Yet, Peace’s candidacy represents a shift in the political climate.
It is a signal that policies debated in Washington are creating a new class of reluctant, motivated candidates whose platforms are their own lives.
Rachel Peace is not running for Congress to launch a political career. She is running, she would say, because the programs that allow her sister to live and her son to thrive are on the line, and the congressman who has been in office since before she was born appears poised to support their dismantling.
Rachel Peace is running for her life.
In that dynamic, the 2026 race in New Jersey’s 4th District might become more than a contest; it could be a collision between decades of incumbency and the urgent, fragile reality of one family’s survival.