New Jersey Democratic primary voters deserve more respect from the candidates

The math of a Democratic primary is a peculiar thing. In New Jersey, on June 2, voters will walk into firehouses and school gymnasiums. They will pull levers or fill in bubbles. And not a single one of them, not anywhere, will be casting a ballot for a Trump Republican.

This is obvious. It is also beside the point.

The point is this: Most of the people whose names appear on those Democratic ballots, seeking the party’s nomination for Congress, have not told voters what they actually plan to do if they win.

They have websites with vague platitudes. They have mailers with family photos. They have lists of endorsements from people you have never heard of.

What they do not have, in many cases, is a clear, specific, accountable answer to the question: What would you fight for?

There are exceptions.

One of them is Dr. Adam Hamawy, who is running to succeed Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman in the 12th District. Hamawy is a father, a husband, a surgeon, an Army veteran who served in Iraq and Gaza. He is also a small business owner. He has sewn up children in war zones and come home to pay taxes in New Jersey. He supports Medicare for All. He opposes endless war. He wants to end the U.S. veto of U.N. cease-fire resolutions. These are positions. You can agree with them or not, but they are actual positions, which in a Democratic primary puts him in a distinct minority.

His opponents in that race include Sue Altman. Altman has spent much of the campaign attacking Hamawy rather than explaining what she would do in Congress. Her campaign is insipid, almost entirely devoid of meaningful discussion about the issues that separate her from her primary rivals. There is a thinness to it, a sense of a candidate running on who she is rather than what she will do.

What separates a former Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett from Tina Shah, a physician running in the same district, or from any of the other Democrats seeking to unseat Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr.? The answer, so far, is very little.

The same emptiness defines the campaigns of Bennett and Shah in the 7th District. Both have resumes, but neither has offered voters a clear reason to choose one over the other.

Their campaigns are insipid, almost entirely devoid of meaningful discussion about the issues that separate them from their rivals. They talk about beating Kean Jr. So does everyone else in the race. That is not a platform. It is a starting line.

And then there is Brian Varela.

Varela, the son of Colombian immigrants, is also running in the 7th. Unlike many of his opponents, he has built a coalition that actually means something: the Latino Victory Fund, Make the Road Action NJ, Peace Action PAC, the Center for Freethought Equality PAC.

That is not a random collection of groups. It is a statement. He is anti-deportation, pro-worker, anti-PAC money. Varela wants to abolish ICE and expand Medicare to cover all Americans. He has the support of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and local Democratic leaders and activists have flocked to him. Not because he has a better biography, but because he has been clear. Clarity, in a primary, is momentum.

In the 2nd District, the dynamics are different. The incumbent is Jeff Van Drew, who was elected as a Democrat and then became a Republican. This is a special kind of betrayal, the kind voters in South Jersey do not forget.

Four Democrats are running to face him.

One of them is Bayly Winder, who worked at the State Department, the FBI, and USAID. Winder has said he supports “protecting Medicaid” and “pushing back on policies like reckless tariffs.” He has also said he learned at USAID that he could work with Republicans if they had good ideas.

This is the “peace through strength” approach, the same framework Republicans have used for decades to increase defense funding and expand the military-industrial complex. Winder is not a Republican. But he is echoing their language and their assumptions.

Cape May Mayor Zack Mullock is also running in that primary. He lost the Salem County Democratic convention by three votes.

Mullock is a better candidate than that margin suggests. He is a mayor, which means he has actually had to balance a budget and respond to pothole complaints. In a district where Van Drew is vulnerable, Mullock has the kind of local credibility that matters.

In the 8th District, Rep. Rob Menendez is running for re-election. He is not talking about his father, the former senator now serving 11 years in federal prison for corruption. He is not talking about it because he cannot. Instead, he has done what incumbents do: He has secured the endorsement of the Hudson County Democratic Organization, the same machine that delivered him the seat in the first place. He has the backing of Sen. Andy Kim and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman. He has the institutional protection that comes with power.

Both Bob Menendez, the disgraced former senator, and his son Rob have been supported by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. Both have been reliable hawks on military spending and foreign intervention. Their greed has been exceeded only by their ineffectiveness. On abortion rights, the younger Menendez has been a bystander while Republicans dismantled protections. On the environment, his record is thin. On behalf of the American working class, he has offered little beyond the standard Democratic talking points that his own party’s left flank has long since abandoned as insufficient.

His primary opponent, Mussab Ali, is 28 years old. He is the former president of the Jersey City Board of Education. He beat cancer. He went to Harvard Law School. He is also pounding the pavement, going to diners and train stations, talking about Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, taxing the rich, and ending the influence of AIPAC and corporate PAC money. Ali is not running against Bob Menendez. He is running against Rob Menendez’s voting record, which is moderate, corporate, and out of step with a district that is majority Hispanic and working class.

It is easy to dismiss Ali as a long shot. He probably is. But he is also doing something that most of his fellow primary candidates are not: He is asking for votes on the basis of what he would do, not who he is connected to.

And that, finally, is the problem. Democrats in Washington talk about bipartisan problem-solving. This is a polite fiction. It means working with Republicans who have, in some cases, embraced neo-Nazi rhetoric and voted to overturn elections. It is not bipartisanship. It is surrender. And when Democratic candidates only complain about the Republican incumbent without offering a competing vision, they sound daft. They sound like they want the job but have no idea what they would do with it.

The voters in the June 2 Democratic primary are not confused. They know they are not voting for a Trump Republican. What they do not know is what they are voting for.

And in a field where most candidates refuse to say, the ones who do — Hamawy, Varela, Ali, and Mullock — stand out not because they are perfect, but because they have the courage and confidence in their convictions to tell voters the truth.