Four Democrats are angling to replace Rep. Thomas Kean Jr. in New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District, where the Trump administration’s planned immigration detention center, Kean’s ongoing absence, and affordability concerns have dominated the campaign.
Rebecca Bennett, Michael Roth, Tina Shah, and Brian Varela will face off in the Democratic primary on June 2 in their bids to unseat Kean, a two-term Republican who has blamed unspecified medical troubles for not being seen in Congress or his home district in 11 weeks. Kean, a former state senator who’s running unopposed for reelection in his party’s primary, has missed 99 House votes since his last recorded vote on March 5.
Of almost 635,000 registered voters, Republicans outnumber Democrats by about 3% in the district, which covers Hunterdon and Warren counties and parts of Morris, Somerset, Sussex and Union counties. Kean won the seat in 2022 after redistricting gave Republicans an edge in the district, and voters there narrowly supported President Donald Trump in 2024’s general election.
But political observers consider the district one of the most vulnerable for Republicans nationally as more people sour on Trump’s controversial policies, with the Cook Political Report deeming the race a tossup. Democrats hope to flip enough seats in November’s midterms to regain control of the House.
For next month’s Democratic primary, Bennett has long been regarded as the frontrunner and leads in fundraising in what is shaping up to be the most expensive race statewide.
About the candidates
Bennett is a military veteran of 15 years, having served as a U.S. Navy helicopter pilot and an officer in the Air National Guard. She also has worked as a healthcare executive at Midi Health, which specializes in women’s health; Oshi Health, which specializes in gastrointestinal care; Noom, a weight-loss platform; and Johnson & Johnson. She’s from Texas and moved to New Jersey about seven years ago.
Roth has a background in business, including as a Biden administration alum. He led the U.S. Small Business Administration for six months in 2021, overseeing the Paycheck Protection Program there and working with Congress on pandemic relief. Before that, he worked at IBM, JP Morgan, and Johnson & Johnson and led Next Street and the Economic Opportunity Coalition, organizations focused on economic revitalization especially in underserved communities. He’s a New Jersey native and the grandson of Holocaust survivors.
Shah is a doctor who’s board-certified in internal medicine, pulmonary medicine, and critical care medicine and now works as a pulmonary and critical care physician at RWJBarnabas Health. She has advised the White House in past roles at the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. She also helped draft national strategy on clinician burnout and advises hospitals and investors on how to use artificial intelligence to improve healthcare. She’s the daughter of immigrants from India.
Varela, the son of Colombian immigrants and a New Jersey native, is a businessman who owns Growing Seeds Learning Academy, a chain of 10 childcare centers; a marketing agency; and a med spa. He was state lead of the New Jersey Forward Party, a centrist political party founded by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. He also founded and chaired the Morris County Democratic Hispanic Caucus.
How are they different?
The four Democrats have similar policy priorities and positions and even overlapping resumes.
Three are Ivy League graduates (Bennett, Roth, and Shah), two have worked as healthcare executives (Bennett and Shah), two have small business backgrounds (Roth and Varela), two have worked for the White House (Roth and Shah), two have had Johnson & Johnson jobs (Bennett and Roth), and none have held elected office.
But they insist they’re different and offered a range of things they say set them apart from their primary competitors.
Varela called himself “the boldest and most courageous” on policy, saying he alone supports Medicare for all and has been the most vocal against the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort, even running know-your-rights trainings. His vow to govern with the working class top of mind has earned him the support of progressives and establishment Dems alike, with endorsements from Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and former Senate President Steve Sweeney.
As the only Hispanic candidate in the race, he added, he’s in the best position to woo a demographic that has increasingly picked conservatives at the ballot box. About 14% of the district’s 790,000 residents are Hispanic, according to census data.
“Trump beat us in 2024 for a variety of reasons. He attracted young voters, he attracted men, he attracted Hispanics. I’m literally a young Hispanic male, very uniquely positioned to speak to the parts of the base that we lost in 2024,” Varela said.
Roth said his experience sets him apart from his challengers, because he’s the only candidate who has worked on a federal level to improve government and the economy.
“We are in a moment of crisis right now. We are in a political crisis and economic crisis, and a moral crisis. Every candidate is going to tell you that they will fight Trump and lower costs, but I’d ask voters to look for the proof. This is not the time for training wheels. I’m ready on day one, because I spent my career reforming our government and our economy to actually work for people,” Roth said.
Bennett said she’s the strongest candidate to mobilize the Democratic base, with lots of grassroots support including more than 850 campaign volunteers. She’s also been the fundraising leader, with more than $2.6 million raised from over 13,000 donors and no self-funding, she said.
“The way that we flip the seat is by getting our base engaged and activated and mobilized, and also by being able to appeal to independent voters and center-right Republicans, who I refer to as ‘Tom Kean Sr. Republicans’ because they voted for his dad but they’re just deeply uncomfortable with what is happening in this country right now,” Bennett said. “So that is the coalition that we’re building.”
She’s also the only candidate in the race who has served in the military, and veterans often outperform their rivals in elections, she said. A Gallup poll last year found that a majority of Americans said they’re likelier to support a candidate if they have military experience.
“How I’ve led my entire life, which is country over party, is really resonating with people right now,” she said. “People are craving authentic leaders who are going to show up and be able to stand up for all of us and go get some stuff done in Washington.”
Shah did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Their policy priorities
Bennett, Roth, and Varela listed affordability as a top priority, with differing strategies to lower the rising cost of living.
Bennett said she would base childcare costs on income, capping its cost at 7% of a family’s income.
“We pay for that by undoing the Trump tax cuts from last year on the top 1%,” she said.
She also would ease spiking healthcare costs by reversing Trump’s cuts to Medicaid.
On energy, she said policymakers should make a separate rate class for power-hungry data centers to ensure they pay their fair share and everyday consumers don’t have to subsidize them. Pursuing federal funding to mitigate flood damage and remove forever chemicals from the environment also are priorities, Bennett said.
If elected, she said she’d like to be appointed to the House’s transportation and armed services committees, where she’d focus on modernizing our airspace and expanding oversight on military spending to ensure the military remains effective and keeps the country secure without wasting money.
Varela said he aims to focus on reducing healthcare, energy, and housing costs. That means reversing Trump’s cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and other programs, passing universal childcare, expanding renewable energy to lower utility costs and create jobs, and restoring the “soft power” of Congress and other institutions to stop Trump from making unilateral decisions — including charging tariffs and waging war in Iran — that spike costs for Americans, Varela said.
Defending democracy also would be a priority, he said. That would include dismantling the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, passing term limits for Congress members, banning Congressional stock trading, barring Congress members for life from becoming lobbyists, restricting money in politics to foil greedy politicians who abuse their office for personal gain, and reexamining the presidential pardon, “which has been used and abused by the Trump administration,” Varela said.
Roth said his first order of business would be pursuing accountability over “everyone from Donald Trump to Pete Hegseth to every single person in the Trump administration who has broken a law, which is a long list.”
“It’s about restoring our democracy, restoring our justice, restoring due process, and restoring Congress as an equal branch of the government,” Roth said.
He also cited affordability concerns, seconding Varela’s alarm about housing, energy, and healthcare costs and adding taxes and unemployment to that list. New Jersey is among the 10 states with the highest unemployment rates nationally, at 4.9% as of March, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Clean water and contamination remediation are top priorities too for Roth, who said nearly half the towns in the 7th District have high rates of forever chemicals. New Jersey’s persistent failure to complete major transportation projects like the Gateway Tunnel and improve its public transit system is an “embarrassment,” he added.
“I have a goal to make trains work in New Jersey before people’s kids who are born now graduate high school. We need to be more ambitious than that,” Roth said.
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