Nearly a dozen Democratic candidates for Congress in New Jersey’s 12th congressional district met on a Princeton stage Monday evening, looking for a chance to set themselves apart.
The forum touched on issues most salient to the Democratic base — immigration, artificial intelligence, and Donald Trump, for example — and answers from the mostly progressive participants rarely differed in substance. But the event mainly allowed the jostling candidates the chance to continue establishing their lanes.
Sue Altman, formerly director of the New Jersey Working Families Party and Senator Andy Kim’s state operations, said she will be a progressive fighter against entrenched power. Adam Hamawy, a former Army combat surgeon, said his experience will help him ease the burden of healthcare on Americans and push for peace in Congress. Even Matt Adams, an underdog in the race, has claimed a lane as the “existential crisis” candidate — he said his military service and time as a counsel at a defense technology firm will help him handle the war in Iran and the proliferation of AI, which he worries could spiral into extinction-level events, and he believes he’s especially well-suited to handle such threats.
The forum exemplifies the difficulties candidates face in trying to build their profile in a thirteen-candidate field. Anti-Trump bona fides are a given for Democrats in the district, and most candidates dub themselves as progressives suitable to succeed the retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing). No candidate has dominant establishment support — the four county parties in the district have given their endorsements to four different candidates. And getting their word out will be expensive in a district split between the New York City and Philadelphia media markets.
Eleven of the thirteen candidates crowded a small stage Monday evening in Princeton University’s Whig Hall, home to the American Whig–Cliosophic Society, which co-hosted the forum. They spoke before a few dozen locals, including several students.
Several candidates said they supported a moratorium on the construction of data centers as researchers continue to learn more about the potential benefits and harms of AI.
“[AI] can help in medicine, the development of drugs, efficiency,” Hamawy said. “But it’s affecting our children, it’s affecting education, it’s affecting jobs, it’s affecting the climate. So what we need to do is stop, slow down, make sure we understand all the effects, positive and negative, and that’s why I support Bernie Sanders’ moratorium, so that we can really move forward to make sure that we’re really helping people and not just a profit incentive for the corporations that set them up.”
Altman thinks legislators should “think bigger” about legislating AI, which she argues pulls from society’s knowledge and should thus be used to help people.
“I want to think about how AI is actually the sum total of all of human knowledge, and so we should treat the dividends and the hopeful prosperity and the profits that it generates as something that is collectively owned by all of us,” Altman said. “So I would like to think about how we can equitably distribute the money and the profits that are generated, because I don’t trust these tech CEOs, and I don’t want to replicate the mistakes of the past.”
The forum was a home game for Sam Wang, a Princeton neuroscience professor and leader of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. Wang focused on the need to build a “more resilient” political system, whether through independent redistricting commissions or pushing Congress to reassert its authority over the executive and judicial branches.
“A lot of good policy ideas come back to a core idea, … and that core idea is restoring Congress as the Article I power that oversees the other branches of the government,” Wang said. “A lot of the difficulties that we’re seeing, a lot of the attacks on our system, all stem from a runaway executive or a runaway judiciary. That’s the core thing I’m going to work on.”
Sujit Singh and several of his fellow candidates said they would support an opportunity to promote automatic voter registration, and the Democrats universally disavowed the SAVE Act currently before Congress.
The 28-year-old Jay Vaingankar, an ex-Energy Department official, offered his own proposals to improve involvement in politics, including a policy known as democracy vouchers, which would divvy cash between residents to send to candidates of their choice. (Seattle operates a version of the program for its local elections.) But more than anything else, Vaingankar touted his youth, arguing young people should stop waiting their turn and supporting the status quo.
“Our generation has never experienced normalcy in our politics,” he said. “The aftermath of 9/11; through all these forever wars; I was raised in a recession; I graduated in a pandemic; and now so many of us are struggling to live in the communities that we grew up in, all while we deal with the advent of AI and data privacy that make it harder than ever to find a job.”
Of special interest to the Princeton community remains the federal government’s approach to pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses. Squire Servance, an attorney and member of the Rutgers University Board of Trustees, said officials should ensure the right of free speech on campuses, a sentiment the other candidates echoed.
“If you can’t have freedom of speech at universities, where individuals can go and share their ideas and learn and have those difficult conversations, I don’t know where else you can have it,” Servance said. “This is where you need to have it. We need to stop coming into our universities and trying to impart politics on what professors are doing, what students are doing.”
But regardless of who is elected, they might still be in the minority in the House, and they will have to deal with Donald Trump in the White House, making sweeping progressive reform before 2029 unlikely. Somerset County Commissioner Shanel Robinson (D-Franklin), a veteran of the U.S. Air Force Reserves, said her time leading the bipartisan New Jersey Association of Counties has taught her to work with Republicans for the good of the counties.
“Nobody asked when we were in the foxhole or the trenches whether you’re Black, white, Republican, Democrat, male, or female,” Robinson said. “It was about bringing our brothers and sisters home and making sure the mission [was completed].”
The candidates also supported aggressive policies to lower the cost of housing, including Kyle Little and Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp.
“In New Jersey, we are 220,000 units short, and what we must do is bring more low-income housing tax credits to the state so that developers can build more affordable housing,” Mapp said. “We also must have a credit from the federal government that is provided to those who want to own a home for the very first time, but who are not able to afford that first home.”
Elijah Dixon, a Trenton entrepreneur and democratic socialist, said he would use the earmark process to try to guarantee federal funds for housing and push for social housing programs.
“You have federal governments that are not only subsidizing, but they are directly building housing units, and it’s at a much, much more affordable rate because they’re cutting off the profit incentive that many of the developers and corporate landlords and others within the industry have essentially entrenched within the process,” Dixon said.
The wide field gave the moderators a chance to ask candidates who they would support if they weren’t to vote for themselves; most opted not to pick anyone in particular, but they nonetheless celebrated the breadth of candidates.
“Everyone has the right to represent this community,” Vaingainkar said about the abolition of the county line. “We’re done with the era of being told, ‘You don’t have enough money, you’re not the chosen one, you don’t look like the district.’ This is finally an opportunity where everyone has the chance.”