A few ballots from 2026’s primary elections still remain to be counted, but the two biggest contests of the night have been firmly decided: Rebecca Bennett and Adam Hamawy are the Democratic nominees in the 7th and 12th congressional districts.
For Bennett, that meant beating out three well-funded rivals for the chance to challenge swing-seat Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) in a race that hinged more on electability than on policy differences. For Hamway, it meant winning a remarkably crowded race to take the safely blue seat currently held by Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) – and doing so by being the most left-wing option available.
Both military veterans, Bennett and Hamawy had very different paths to politics, but at this time next year, they might be colleagues. Here’s a deeper dive into their respective victories.
NJ-7: Bennett romps to victory
It’s not surprising that Bennett won the Democratic nomination in the 7th district. It is a little surprising, though, just how thorough her victory was.
Bennett won around 46% of the vote districtwide, a more than 25-point margin over her closest competitor, ICU doctor Tina Shah. She carried all six counties in the district, including the four where she had party support (Union, Somerset, Hunterdon, and Morris) and the two where she didn’t (Warren and Sussex, both of which endorsed businessman Brian Varela).
A former Navy helicopter pilot who matches the profile of many prior successful swing-district Democratic candidates, Bennett went into the race with some major advantages, including the best fundraising in the field and support from a pair of allied super PACs. She also bore the brunt of nearly $1 million worth of attack ads in the final weeks of the race, evidently to little effect. (The fact that most of those ads came from a GOP-linked super PAC may have even helped her a bit.)
Bennett generally did best in the district’s wealthy, historically Republican suburbs, a potentially auspicious sign for her in November. She got a solid majority of the vote in tony towns like Mountainside, Mendham, and Bernards that have been key to Kean’s victories in the last four years, reliably supporting him even as the district has shifted towards Democrats.
Her worst areas, by contrast, tended to be small towns and cities, especially those with sizable minority populations. A total of six towns supported a candidate other than Bennett: Phillipsburg, Raritan Borough, and Andover Borough for Shah, Somerville and Washington Borough for Varela, and Lambertville for Michael Roth, who had an army of local Indivisible volunteers there.
Throughout primary season, Republicans were gleeful that Bennett had to spend so much time, money, and effort winning the Democratic primary rather than focusing on Kean from the beginning. But while it’s true that Bennett now has some catching up to do against Kean, the primary also allowed her to show off the coalition she’s built – and it’s a pretty impressive one.
NJ-12: Hamawy beats out a regionally splintered field
While the Democratic establishment got its way in the 7th district, the same was very much not true in the 12th district, where Hamawy, a plastic surgeon and Army veteran, swept away a group of politicians with far longer electoral track records than himself.
Hamawy’s path to the Democratic nomination was fairly straightforward. He locked down the progressive lane, earning endorsements from nationally prominent figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC, and got his name out early with an ad blitz from an allied super PAC. Hamawy’s smiling face and progressive policy proposals were on voters’ TVs before any of his opponents even realized he was a serious threat.
The result was an incredibly broad districtwide coalition and a convincing victory. Rather than any particular regional base, Hamawy simply did well everywhere, only falling below 20% in two towns – a remarkable feat for a first-time candidate in such an extraordinarily crowded field.
Most of Hamawy’s main foes relied on a different strategy: maximizing their own regional bases and winning off the strength of the voters who knew them best. East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen (the Middlesex candidate), Somerset County Commissioner Shanel Robinson (the Somerset candidate), Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson (the Mercer candidate), Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp (the Union candidate), and Princeton professor Sam Wang (the Princeton-area candidate) all got plenty of votes in their hometowns, but none were able to make much of a dent elsewhere, allowing Hamawy to crush them in the aggregate.
In fact, the 12th district vote was so heavily regionalized that Matt Adams, who got just 2% of the vote districtwide, narrowly carried the borough of Middlesex, where he was a councilman more than two decades ago.
Two other candidates, former Working Families Party state director Sue Altman and attorney Squire Servance, had more districtwide appeal, but failed to earn a huge amount of votes in any single area. Getting around 10% of the vote everywhere, like Altman did, was not a recipe for success.
Could Hamawy have been beaten if he faced unified opposition? That’s something that his critics, especially moderate Democrats alarmed by his left-wing positions on key issues like Israel, are surely asking themselves. A spokesperson for United Democracy Project, the super PAC affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, told Jewish Insider this morning that his group never got involved against Hamawy because it “didn’t see a path to victory” in such a splintered field.
But there’s no guarantee that any anti-Hamawy consensus candidate would have in fact been able to unify the massively diverse, balkanized district behind their campaign. Even if local party organizations had all coalesced behind Reynolds-Jackson, for example, she would have had a tough time matching Cohen’s numbers in East Brunswick or Mapp’s in Plainfield.
This story was updated at 4:50 p.m. on June 5 to include detailed results from Sussex County.
