Republican incumbent Rep. Tom Kean Jr. claims that he would protect Medicare and Medicaid in paid advertising although he voted to strip health insurance coverage from an estimated 15 million or more Americans.
Lies like that are only the tip of the iceberg, according to political strategists who say a poll conducted by Republicans is testing false accusations to determine which lies might convince voters to reject the former Navy helicopter pilot who won the Democratic nomination.
A poll conducted by Republican pollsters reveals incumbent Rep. Tom Kean Jr. is planning to make false accusations against his Democratic opponent, Rebecca Bennett, according to a source familiar with the survey.
The poll, which was commissioned by the Kean campaign or one of several allied dark money PACs, tested a series of negative statements about Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot.
The statements included false claims that Bennett’s positions would raise childcare costs, that she opposed funding for the military and law enforcement, and that she supported a “radical federal wage mandate” that would eliminate jobs.
The survey asked voters whether those lies would make them more or less likely to support Bennett.
Bennett is a military veteran whose husband is employed in the Trump administration’s energy department.
While she has criticized the brutal immigration enforcement agencies that have killed several American citizens since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, but she has not indicated that she will cut legitimate law enforcement funding.
In contrasts, Trump and congressional Republicans did “defund the police” slashing hundreds of millions of dollars in Justice Department spending, including cuts to the FBI and elimination of programs for body cameras, violence prevention and police responses to people with mental illness.
The charge turns back on the GOP a familiar Republican attack on Democrats, some of whom proposed redirecting resources from law enforcement to other crime fighting and public-safety priorities because police have been burdened with responsibilities that they are not prepared for as social safety net programs were scaled back.
“Tom Kean Jr. never served his country in uniform, but he’s plotting to accuse the Democratic nominee—who was raised as a Texas Republican and served in combat roles flying helicopters for the US Navy before joining the Democratic Party to support Hillary Clinton over incompetent, unprincipled, and vulgar Donald Trump ten years ago—of being some sort of radical left-wing communist,” said progressive Democratic activist Lisa McCormick.
“Rebecca Bennett’s background contrasts sharply with that of Trump’s Trust Fund Tom,” said McCormick, of Hunterdon County.”She’s much more moderate than Democrats like me, so it’s ludicrous to lie by claiming a minimum wage increase would eliminate jobs or calling her a radical.”
Bennett was raised in a Republican family in Texas. She served as a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Navy before settling in New Jersey with her husband, a Navy veteran who is originally from Pennsylvania and works in the Trump administration’s energy department.
Bennett registered as a Democrat in July 2016, according to her campaign website, after the Republican Party embraced Donald Trump for president.
The race could be among the closest in the nation, although many observers believe Kean, a two-term Republican, has virtually no chance to win a third term in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District.
Trump’s second term has been marked by sweeping tariffs and trade uncertainty that have unsettled businesses and consumers, a U.S.-Israeli war with Iran that has dragged on for more than six months without a clear resolution while driving oil and gasoline prices sharply higher, and confrontations with longtime allies that have eroded confidence in the United States as a reliable economic and security partner, prompting Canada and several NATO members to reduce their dependence on Washington and American suppliers.
Kean never stood up to Trump, meekly avoiding discussion when the president illegally cut off funding for the Gateway project, is a massive infrastructure initiative needed to modernize and expand the heavily congested Northeast Corridor rail line between Newark, New Jersey, and New York Penn Station.
The Trump administration purchased a 470,000-square-foot warehouse in Roxbury for about $129 million for a proposed ICE detention center of roughly 1,500 beds. Roxbury’s all-Republican mayor and council opposed the project and publicly criticized Kean, saying he had failed to provide “the advocacy our residents deserved.”
On Feb. 11, Kean voted against a resolution challenging the national emergency Trump had invoked in connection with his tariff policy.
Kean voted three times against resolutions directing Trump to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran — March 5, July 23, and Sept. 15, 2026. A Sept. 15 resolution nevertheless passed 220-204.
On Sept. 15, 2026, Kean voted to table articles of impeachment against Trump.
Kean never served in the military. Instead, he followed the example of his father, grandfather, and other ancestors who cashed in on political office going back to colonial times.
Kean is the beneficiary of a trust fund valued at more than $5 million, although he has never had a job other than his political roles as an assemblyman and state senator, posts to which he was initially appointed.
The district is among the most competitive in the nation and could determine which party controls the House next year.
Kean was absent from Congress from March 5 until June 30, missing more than 140 votes while receiving four months of psychiatric treatment in a hospital following a nervous breakdown. He returned to the campaign trail over the July 4 weekend, attending a Republican fundraiser and marching in a Mendham Township parade.
Bennett won the Democratic primary on June 2 with 45.3% of the vote in a four-way race that featured businessman Brian Varela, medical doctor Tina Shah, and former Small Business Administration advisor Michael Roth.
She has unified the Democratic Party and garnered endorsements from groups that previously supported the Republican incumbent.
Last week, the New Jersey State Firefighters Mutual Benevolent Association—a union representing more than 6,000 firefighters, EMTs, and dispatchers, with a history of crossing party lines in the 7th Congressional District —endorsed Bennett, switching from their support of Kean in 2024.
A third candidate, Seamus Patrick O’Toole, is running under the independent “Stop Israel’s Genocide” banner. The GOP poll asked voters about their proclivity to throw away votes on the anti-war candidate, in an apparent effort to trim support from the Democrat.
Voters might expect to see Republican-funded ads promoting the anti-war candidate, who has not responded to media outreach or done any campaigning.
The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare also endorsed Bennett, who must overcome Kean’s ability to lie in paid advertising.
An ad featuring the congressman’s father claimed that he would protect Medicare and Medicaid although he voted to strip health insurance coverage from an estimated 15 million or more Americans when Republicans passed the sweeping reconciliation package—known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act—which slasheds over $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace subsidies.
Elon Musk’s political spending in support of Kean Jr. is viewed as a reward for the congressman allowing the South African immigrant’s DOGE initiative to run amok at the Social Security Administration.
DOGE enforced a 12% workforce cut at the SSA, stripping roughly 7,000 workers from the agency and shuttering regional offices.
Whistleblower disclosures from career SSA officials revealed a DOGE-driven initiative to mark 2.7 million living people as “dead” in the agency’s database.
The trillionaire’s minions pushed major staffing reductions and sought access to sensitive Social Security data — access that prompted litigation and judicial restrictions — while Musk separately called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” a characterization rejected by retirees, experts and fact-checkers.
The general election is Nov. 3.
The poll did not disclose the methodology but NJTODAY.NEWS did obtain the wording of every question.
Throughout the questioning, the poll was identified only as ‘New Jersey Opinions Survey,’ but NJTODAY.NEWS learned it was conducted by
The poll asked voters whether they believe the country is headed in the right direction or on the wrong track. It asked which candidate they would support in a general election for Congress — Republican Tom Kean Jr. or Democrat Rebecca Bennett — and how they would vote if a third-party candidate, Seamus Patrick O’Toole of the “Stop Israel’s Genocide” party, were included on the ballot. It also asked how likely voters were to support each candidate.
The survey asked which statement about President Trump and his policies came closest to their view, including the option “I disapprove of President Trump and his policies.”
It asked voters to rate their favorability toward Republicans in Congress, Democrats in Congress, Tom Kean Jr., Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, Rebecca Bennett, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mikie Sherrill, and ‘Democratic Socialists.’
The poll asked voters to identify the most important and second-most important issues in deciding their vote for Congress, offering options such as taxes, healthcare, immigration, overdevelopment, inflation, Medicaid, data centers, education, government spending, abortion, national security, Medicare and Social Security, government corruption, the economy and jobs, crime, and government waste.
It asked whether voters approved or disapproved of Kean’s job performance and whether they considered Kean and Bennett liberal, moderate, or conservative. It asked whether voters had seen, read, or heard anything about each candidate in recent months and whether that information made them more or less likely to support them.
The poll then presented a series of negative statements about Bennett and asked whether each would make voters more or less likely to support her.
Those statements claimed that Bennett’s positions would take money from parents, that she opposed protecting the Child Tax Credit, that she opposed funding for the military and law enforcement, that she supported a federal wage mandate costing 60,000 jobs, that she opposed SALT deduction restoration, that she would raise taxes 16%, and that she was a healthcare executive whose partners put profits over patients.
After reading those statements, the poll again asked which candidate voters would support. It asked about their 2024 presidential vote, their party registration, and how they usually vote in general elections.
Finally, the survey asked about media consumption habits, including how often voters watched TV networks, streamed video, watched short videos, listened to the radio or listened to podcasts, and how they watched live television. It collected demographic information, including religion, education, law enforcement or military connections in the household, Hispanic or Latino background, race, age, and gender.
Kean’s advertising has already made the spurious claim that “Bennett built her healthcare career by partnering with companies accused of overbilling taxpayers and denying care to patients.”
The origin of that false assertion is that Bennett was vice president at a company that engaged in a collaboration to improve care for women experiencing symptoms of perimenopause and menopause with a hospital system that “has come under fire in recent years for aggressive policies that prioritize profit over patient care.”
While the election is likely to be a referendum on Trump’s disastrous second term policies, which have destabilized the economy, plunged the US into another unwinnable Middle-East war, alienated allies, and rekindled inflationary cost increases.
If he cannot convince voters that his moderate Democratic rival is the second coming of Joseph Stalin, Kean may portray himself as a maverick willing to buck his party, but some of the most consequential votes of Trump’s second term show him siding with the president: He backed Trump’s signature tax-and-spending legislation, opposed congressional efforts to terminate Trump’s Iran hostilities and challenge his use of tyrannical authority.
None of that is true, but polls like this can find out which lies people believe.
Discover more from NJTODAY.NEWS
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.