February 21 update: Due to a major winter storm projected to hit New Jersey tomorrow, the Hunterdon Democratic convention has been delayed until next Sunday, March 1.
This weekend, the Democrats hoping to flip New Jersey’s 7th congressional district will at last be able to make their case directly to voters – a very small subset of voters, that is.
On Sunday afternoon, the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee will hold its annual convention, and the race for the 7th district, where Democrats are eager to unseat Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), will be the main event. Hunterdon County makes up around one-fifth of the 7th district’s Democratic primary electorate, and more importantly it’s the first of the district’s county parties to issue an endorsement in what is for now still a wide-open primary.
How much does that endorsement really matter? Certainly less than it did in the era when the county line reshaped primary ballots themselves based on party endorsements; these days, most county party endorsements are more symbolic than anything else, and every candidate in the race says they’re prepared to run a serious campaign regardless of how much party support they get.
But that doesn’t mean they’re not still trying their best to win the convention, or at least put in a good showing, because they know how important the narrative of convention season will be. Whoever wins in Hunterdon will be, at least for the next few weeks, the star of the 7th district show.
If the convention has a frontrunner, it’s Rebecca Bennett, a former Navy helicopter pilot who entered the race before anyone else and has been one of the field’s top contenders from the beginning.
Bennett has publicized endorsements from Assemblywoman Mitchelle Drulis (D-Raritan Township), the wife of Hunterdon Democratic chair Michael Drulis and the county’s most prominent elected Democrat, as well as from current and former mayors in Lambertville, Flemington, Clinton, and High Bridge. There’s no real Democratic “establishment” in Republican-leaning, machine-skeptical Hunterdon, but to the extent that one exists, it’s behind Bennett.
Nipping at her heels, at least in terms of endorsements, is Brian Varela, a businessman and Democratic activist who hit the ground running in the district’s western reaches earlier than anyone. Varela has dozens of local Hunterdon elected officials and county committeemembers publicly on his side; among them are the runners-up in the 2024 and 2025 races for county Democratic chair, a sign of where coalitions in the race are forming.
Three other candidates – Michael Roth, Tina Shah, and Megan O’Rourke, all New Jersey natives who held a variety of roles in the Biden administration – also have devoted supporters, though they’ve publicized fewer endorsements and haven’t seemed to put quite as much of an emphasis on winning Sunday’s convention. One final candidate, criminal justice professor Beth Adubato, will not participate in the convention in order to attend her father’s funeral.
Hunterdon Democrats aren’t an easily predictable bunch, making more precise prognostication all but impossible; the 150 to 200-odd people who will show up to vote on Sunday are largely independent-minded folks who will resist any perceived pressure to vote a certain way. (Given the dismal weather forecast for Sunday, who shows up at all is also hard to predict.)
That was on full display at the 2024 convention, when a last-minute attempt by party leadership to get Tammy Murphy and Andy Kim to share the party endorsement was loudly voted down. Kim, whose reform-focused campaign was perfectly tailored for the types of Democrats who populate the Hunterdon county organization, ended up winning 62% to 33%.
Many committeemembers will be arriving on Sunday without their minds definitively made up, voters who could be won or lost in the brief time allotted to the candidates for introductory speeches. At last year’s convention, for example, Ras Baraka rode the wave of his soaring oratory to a surprise second-place finish against Mikie Sherrill. (There are some echoes of that convention in this year’s – Bennett is an ex-Navy aviator like Sherrill, and Baraka has endorsed Varela – but there’s no guarantee the same voting patterns will emerge.)
If none of the five candidates gets a majority in the first round of voting, the top two will advance to a runoff. That means that whoever wins will have to do so with a majority, and there could be an incentive for the various defeated candidates to encourage their voters to coalesce behind one of their opponents in the second round.
While the Democratic primary has remained cordial on the surface, the fight for a victory in Hunterdon has gotten a bit rough around the edges. Some local committeemembers have been rubbed the wrong way by the Bennett campaign’s intense quest for support, while others have spread around the details of Varela’s political and legal baggage.
That could make for a contentious convention, though there may be more overt drama in the race for U.S. Senate, where Senator Cory Booker is the heavy favorite for a third full term.
Both of his challengers, Lisa McCormick and Chris Fields, either live in or are originally from Hunterdon County. McCormick is a perennial gadfly with penchant for political chicanery, and her partner, James Devine, has taken to showing up at Hunterdon Democratic events; Fields, a former Hunterdon Democratic official, has raised repeated objections to the various county party endorsement processes around the state.
The winner in the 7th contest will emerge with the ability to use Hunterdon Democrats’ ballot slogan (“Hunterdon County Regular Democratic Organization”) and a commitment from the county party to support them any way they can. As shown by the special Democratic primary for the neighboring 11th district earlier this month, in which none of the three local county parties endorsed the eventual winner, that might not mean much in the way of actual votes in June.
What it does mean, though, is momentum. Democrats, looking for signs of how to sift through what is otherwise an amorphous primary, will look to the Hunterdon convention as an early indication of where things are headed. If Bennett wins, that cements her further as the race’s frontrunner; if one of her foes beats her, that upends the conventional wisdom about the primary; and if someone finishes in a distant last place, that could be a warning sign that their campaign isn’t catching on at all.
Momentum is especially important in a race where ideological distinctions among the candidates are both hard to find and not top-of-mind for most voters. More than anything else, Democratic voters are looking for someone who can flip the long-competitive seat blue, and having a proven ability to organize a county committee electorate is a good place to start.
The first place any such momentum might show up, naturally, is in the district’s five other county conventions and endorsement votes, most of which are scheduled for mid-March. Bennett and Shah likely have more of a leg up in Somerset and Union Counties, which include the district’s denser suburbs, while Varela’s home base is in Morris and the more sparsely populated west; O’Rourke and Roth are more of geographic wild cards. Adubato also plans on participating in those later endorsement processes.
Depending on how Hunterdon goes, though, all of that could change. Hunterdon provided early victories for Sherrill in 2025, Kim in 2024, and Malinowski in 2018 that set them on the longer-term path to victory; then again, the county party’s 74-70 vote for Elizabeth Warren over Mike Bloomberg in the 2020 presidential election wasn’t exactly a great indicator of where that race ended up.
New Jersey politicos are still figuring out exactly what county endorsements are worth in a line-free world; in a race where four different candidates have already raised more than $1 million with months to go until the June 2 primary, maybe not much. But every election needs a place to start, and in the 7th district, it will be on Sunday in Flemington.
