New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District Democratic primary fight turns ugly

The contest for New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District has produced a flashpoint that reveals nearly everything about the state of American politics in the spring of 2026, and little of it is reassuring.

Robin Nowicki of Englishtown, the owner of Robin’s Nest Home & Patio in Bradley Beach, has described a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, a combat surgeon who operated on American soldiers under fire in Iraq and whom Sen. Tammy Duckworth has publicly credited with saving her life, as a terrorist.

Not metaphorically. “A full-on terrorist,” said Nowicki, who added: “And a piece of shit.”

The candidate she was discussing is Dr. Adam Hamawy, a reconstructive surgeon from Princeton who grew up in Old Bridge, the son of Egyptian immigrants. He enlisted in the New Jersey National Guard and served eight years in the Medical Corps. He deployed to Baghdad’s 31st Combat Support Hospital during the worst years of the Iraq War, where he operated on hundreds of service members and civilians.

Among them was then-Maj. Tammy Duckworth, whose Black Hawk helicopter was shot down in 2004. Hamawy performed a vascular procedure that he had only recently learned in medical school. Duckworth has said he not only saved her life but also prevented her from becoming a triple amputee.

Duckworth, who is now a Democratic U.S. senator, has endorsed Hamawy in the race to replace Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman.

That is the man Nowicki called a terrorist. And a piece of shit. And a Hamas supporter. And an Islamist. And an advocate for rape, murder, child marriage, child abuse, genocide and colonialism. She accused him of being funded by terrorist dark money.

She accused him of standing with “rape and abuse of women.” She described his supporters as “sickos” and “losers” and told them to “go troll elsewhere.”

Nowicki is not an anonymous bot. She is a real person speaking in support of East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen, one of Hamawy’s opponents in the June 2 Democratic primary to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman.

The comments came in response to a statement from Bertin Lefkovic, who accused Hamawy of benefiting from nearly $2 million in undisclosed dark money and suggested progressive candidates, fearful of being labeled Islamophobic, were unwilling to discuss it.

Lefkovic, who also supports Cohen, has his own history of inflammatory accusations. He previously called for a primary challenge against a congresswoman who said Democrats should reject AIPAC support, voted for a Republican instead of Sen. Andy Kim and made remarks multiple observers described as rude and racist about the wife of another candidate.

Another contender, Sue Altman, accused Hamawy of “cheerleading and wishing for the deaths of Israeli children” after he explained why he does not want American taxpayers to fund Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system.

The core issue is this: Hamawy has emerged as the unlikely front-runner in a crowded field, and the attacks against him have abandoned any pretense of policy disagreement.

A poll conducted May 5-7 by Workbench Strategy for Hamawy’s campaign found him at 19%, leading Altman at 12%, Cohen at 11%, and Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson at 10%.

That represented a dramatic shift from an unreleased internal poll conducted roughly five weeks earlier, in which Reynolds-Jackson led with 16%, and Hamawy trailed at 5%. His favorability rating during that same period rose from 11% to 40%.

The likeliest explanation is not that New Jersey Democrats suddenly discovered Hamawy’s surgical résumé. It is that American Priorities, a newly formed super PAC created as a counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spent $1 million on pro-Hamawy advertisements and pledged as much as $2 million more.

That kind of spending changes races. It changes them quickly. And in a district that has not elected a Republican since 1998, and whose Cook Partisan Voting Index leans heavily Democratic, the winner of the June 2 primary is all but certain to become the next member of Congress.

So the stakes are not small. Neither has been the response from some of Hamawy’s opponents. It has been vicious, personal and, in the case of Nowicki’s remarks, detached from any recognizable version of the truth.

Let us be precise about what the truth is. Hamawy volunteered in Gaza in May 2024 as part of a 20-member international medical team. He performed 120 surgeries, more than half of them on children. Two of his colleagues on that mission were killed in strikes on their homes. When Israel seized and closed the Rafah border crossing, the team became trapped.

Duckworth personally intervened with the Israeli ambassador and delivered a letter Hamawy had written to President Joe Biden to help secure their departure. Hamawy refused to leave until every member of the team — including doctors from Jordan, Egypt and Australia — could leave as well.

“When you go in as a team, you leave as a team,” he said. “That’s the right thing to do, and that’s what was bred into us.”

After returning, he told The New York Times that children who had lost limbs and could no longer run or play told him they wished they had died. He told NPR that the mortality rate at Gaza European Hospital was 80% — eight times the rate American medics experienced during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — largely because of shortages of medication, personnel and basic supplies.

For that work, and for that testimony, Hamawy received endorsements from Duckworth, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Reps. Ro Khanna and Ilhan Omar, former Rep. Jamaal Bowman and progressive organizations including Justice Democrats and Our Revolution. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, whose seat he seeks, invited him as her guest to President Donald Trump’s 2025 State of the Union address.

None of these place Hamawy beyond criticism. Questions about campaign finance and dark money are legitimate regardless of who benefits. Voters concerned about a candidate’s foreign policy positions have every right to ask difficult questions and demand direct answers. AIPAC and its counterweight super PACs represent a genuine escalation of outside spending in Democratic primaries, and pretending otherwise helps no one.

But there is a line between criticism and slander, and calling a decorated combat surgeon a terrorist — a man who took an oath, wore the uniform, and operated on wounded Americans while rockets fell — is nowhere near the criticism side of that line.

The woman who made those accusations claimed Hamawy supported rape, child marriage and genocide without presenting a shred of evidence because no such evidence exists. She claimed the Council on American-Islamic Relations is a terrorist organization funded by terrorists, a charge unsupported by any federal designation or court finding. She argued that advocacy for Jewish people is what “haters want to silence,” while ignoring the fact that Hamawy’s campaign has not advocated against Jewish people at all.

The 12th District includes Princeton, Trenton, Plainfield and a long suburban stretch across Middlesex, Somerset, Mercer and Union counties. It is home to research universities, pharmaceutical companies and one of the most educated electorates in New Jersey. Its voters are capable of distinguishing between a serious debate over super PAC spending and the kind of ugly, fact-free name-calling deployed by Nowicki.

Whether enough of them will do so, and whether the candidates who benefit from such rhetoric will condemn it clearly and without hedging, remains an open question.

What is not open to question is that the attack was false — false in its facts, false in its implications, and false in its attempt to reduce a man who has spent his life stitching other people back together into a caricature of evil.

That kind of lie serves no political cause except the cause of making politics unlivable. And it is spreading.