Sue Altman, the Democratic nominee for New Jersey’s hyper-competitive 7th congressional district, has had another gangbusters fundraising quarter, raising more than $2.1 million between July 1 and September 30.
The whopping total brings Altman into the upper echelons of the strongest House fundraisers in New Jersey history – the record still belongs to Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair), who raised $2.8 million from donors in a single quarter in 2018 – and means that Altman will have lots of cash to spend in her bid to unseat first-term Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield).
“The numbers speak for themselves – thanks to the support of the thousands of people who know NJ-07 deserves better than Tom Kean, Jr., this campaign has the momentum and resources it needs to sprint all the way through Election Day, and we’re not going to slow down anytime soon,” Rob West, Altman’s campaign manager, said in a statement.
Altman has raised a total of more than $5.1 million since launching her campaign last spring, from more than 30,000 unique donors. Her campaign declined to say how much cash on-hand it had at the end of the 3rd quarter, though, which means that it’s not clear how much of her money she’s already burned through and how much is left for the final month of the race; as of this summer, the campaign had $2.1 million in its warchest, but much of that has since been spent on TV ads and other campaign activities.
Kean, who has not yet released his own 3rd quarter report, is no fundraising slouch either; as of this summer, he’d raised $4.2 million this cycle. But Altman outraised him in both the 1st and 2nd quarters of 2024, and unless Kean puts up an equally impressive fundraising performance this quarter to match hers, she may have done so again.
Kean has gotten some backup from outside groups: the GOP-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund and a PAC led by billionaire Elon Musk have both spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the race, and the CLF hit the airwaves this morning with a new ad slamming Altman as a “radical liberal.” Altman has not yet received any equivalent assistance from Democratic independent groups.
But thanks to federal broadcasting rules, the money Altman and Kean raise themselves will go farther than anything spent by national PACs. (Candidates get better ad rates than outside groups, allowing each of their dollars to make more of an impact.) Altman has so far spent more than $1.5 million airing several ads in the expensive New York media market, one criticizing Kean as a “do-nothing politician” and another touting her pro-law enforcement credentials.
Kean first got to office in 2022 by unseating Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) in a bitter and extremely expensive contest. Malinowski had narrowly defeated Kean once before, in 2020, but the 7th district was substantially redrawn in the interim to make it friendlier to Republicans, helping Kean win their rematch by three percentage points. (That result came about despite the fact that Malinowski outspent Kean $9 million to $4.5 million, though GOP outside groups narrowed the gap significantly.)
The district, though, is still one of 18 Republican-held seats nationwide that supported Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race, making Kean an obvious target for Democrats in their efforts to flip back control of the House. Altman, a former state leader of the progressive Working Families Party, successfully boxed out several primary opponents at the beginning of this year, and has been campaigning hard against Kean ever since.