This is the seventh in a series of in-person, in-depth New Jersey Globe interviews with New Jersey’s members of Congress. The interviews will be published as-is, with editing for length and clarity.
This week, the Globe spoke with Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis), a three-term Republican from Cape May County who serves on the Judiciary Committee and the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The Globe sat down with Van Drew to talk about his 2019 party switch, his vote against foreign aid for Ukraine, his leadership role on Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, and more.
Previous interviews: Rep. Andy Kim, Rep. Chris Smith, Rep. Bill Pascrell, Rep. Rob Menendez, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rep. Mikie Sherrill
New Jersey Globe: The thing that a lot of people, especially outside New Jersey, know you for is your party switch in 2019. Do you have regrets looking back on that switch, or any thoughts about how things have gone in the four-and-a-half years since?
Jeff Van Drew: No regrets. Not a one. I’m conservative – there’s just no doubt about it. I was the most conservative [Democratic] member of the New Jersey State Senate and Assembly. It’s why I was able to work with Republicans, whether it was on the township committee, or as mayor of my town of almost 7,000 people, all the way through being on the board of freeholders, to State Assembly and State Senate. There were many times that I voted with Republicans – got along with them, worked with them, and had certain basic conservative values. I love this country. I really, really do. It’s been really good to me, and it’s been good to so many of us. It is a land of opportunity, and those aren’t just words. I felt, as I went through the years, that the Democratic Party really strayed away from what it was – Jack Kennedy’s party. I think Jack Kennedy would be shocked if he saw where we are now. I’m not regretful about it at all. I feel like I’m home.
It was a very big decision I made, and some of the mainstream media said, ‘Van Drew’s never going to win, because the Republicans won’t trust him’ – they were wrong – ‘and the Democrats will be so angry at him, they’ll work extra hard’ – that part, they were right. I ran against Ted Kennedy’s daughter-in-law, Amy Kennedy. She outspent me vastly, and we still won. But no political party is perfect, and we’re going through a time of tremendous turmoil and change and challenge, and because of that, you’re going to see internal situations that I don’t always love in the Republican Party.
In my State Senate office, the biggest picture I had was of Ronald Reagan. People used to get a kick out of it when they’d come in the office; here was a Democratic state senator in a Democratic majority, but he still had Ronald Reagan’s picture. But I still have Jack Kennedy’s as well [in my congressional office], and I still have FDR’s as well.
You say that you felt the Democratic Party had strayed from you. There also are some policy positions that you yourself have shifted on over the years, especially after you switched parties. What was the thought process behind the way that you thought about these issues?
Tell me which issues.
When you got into Congress, you were a cosponsor of the LGBT Equality Act; you removed that cosponsorship when you switched parties. Your position on abortion has grown more conservative over the years.
Those are two good examples. The LGBTQ – here’s the deal with me. It’s really simple. I don’t care what people do in their bedroom. I don’t. That’s their business. Don’t make me pay for it, and don’t thrust it upon my kids. Don’t make my kids have to believe in it. That’s all I ask. And that’s where I think the Democratic Party has changed. I don’t care what you are or what you believe – that’s up to you, and that’s your own private life. But we’re at the point now where we’re really pushing kids – this has changed a lot, and the more I looked into it, the more I evolved and realized, ‘Hey, I don’t believe that.’ I do not believe that children should be able to change their gender when they’re minors. I never believed in that. That’s just not right. Do I believe that if you’re gay, you should have equal opportunity for employment? Yes. Do I believe that if you’re gay or whatever, you should have an equal opportunity in the United States of America to live a good life? Absolutely. But don’t force it on people. Americans generally do believe that. Americans generally want people left alone. That’s where my value is with that.
On abortion, let me be really clear where I am with that issue: I’ve always, including when I was a Democrat, felt that third-trimester abortions were wrong. And I believe most Americans do. Regardless of whether you’re pro-choice or pro-life – and I’m pro-life now, I am – whatever you are, you have to think that in the seventh, eighth, ninth month, that’s got to be wrong. That just can’t be right. I always believed that, and never strayed from that. Regardless of where you are on the issues, I believe we can all come together, pro-choice and pro-life, on third trimester abortions.
I believe the vast majority support legislation I’m on right now: in-vitro fertilization, which is a blessing from God to be able to do that if you want to have children; I believe the vast majority of Americans think you should be able to do that. I believe the vast majority of Americans think, even if you’re pro-life, that there should be exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother, without question, and I believe in that. I believe that adoption is an alternative, and I’m not saying it needs to be forced on people, but I think people should be able to know about it. And here’s what’s wrong with the Democratic Party: they hate pregnancy centers. Places that, if a young woman is in trouble and doesn’t know what to do, she can go there and at least hear the other side. There’s nothing wrong with that. I have visited them, and they’re not angry old men that want to force you to have babies that you don’t want to have. They are young women who are very kind and very thoughtful that work at these pregnancy centers.
Let’s be clear: even Bill Clinton said that abortion should be safe, legal, but very rare. We’re acting like it’s some kind of amazing right, a God-given thing. It’s not a good thing. I feel sad if you have to get an abortion. But if we’re going to have those rights, at least make sure that they’re equal, and that people can hear from both sides.
When Roe v. Wade was struck down, you said that the Supreme Court made the right call in throwing decisions about abortion to the states. Do you think that there is any role for the federal government to play in this?
I don’t. I think that was the thought of the Supreme Court, because they didn’t want people to be playing ping-pong. What would happen is, you’re going to have one administration, and – let’s go to the extremes, just for the sake of an example – they’re going to make a federal law that says you can have an abortion to nine months and even immediately postpartum. And then the other extreme would be, you can’t get an abortion no matter what, even rape, incest, or life of the mother, and federal policy is going to mandate and dictate over all of this. I would rather see that the states decide what they’re going to do, and go through that process. Let the people speak; let them vote if necessary, however they want to do it.
You were saying earlier how, when you switched parties, there were questions of whether Republicans would trust you. I think it’s pretty clear that they have grown to trust you. Where do you see yourself within the modern Republican House caucus?
Conservative. The more I’ve heard, the more I know, the more I develop, the more I evolve, the more I believe that those conservative values are so important. I really see there is a difference [between the parties], more notable now than it was in years before; the parties used to be closer together. But the difference is over some major issues. Illegal immigration is wrong, and the Democrats try to morph it into something of, ‘Oh, you’re racist.’ God, that word is used too much. The vast majority of Americans, right now, in 2024, are not racist. To say otherwise just isn’t true. I see that all the time. But if you think that illegal immigration is wrong, then you’re racist and you don’t like immigrants. That’s nonsense. Immigrants are the greatest Americans there are. The people that are most offended by illegal immigration are those that are legal immigrants that have pledged to the flag, that believe in American values.
Do you think that legal immigration should be increased, or should be easier?
It should be better, yes. I almost hate the word ‘easier’ – should we let bad people in the country? No. You do need to still background check, and you need to make sure that these people have values that you want to see in immigrants, which is what we have with our legal immigrants. The history of our country is the history of immigrants. My great-grandparents were immigrants. We’ve got immigrants who serve in Congress. This is what we need to do: we need to button up the borders. We need to do all the things that we’ve talked about over and over again. H.R. 2 [the Republican border bill] is not cruel, it’s not mean-spirited, it’s not wrong – no nation ever prevails with open borders. We’re faltering because of it. Once we get the border under control, then we need good leadership to try to see how we deal with these issues and make legal immigration less expensive and more attainable for good people.
Last fall was a bit of a mess in the House, where you went through those cycles of Speaker elections after Kevin McCarthy was ousted. What do you make of that, six months on?
It’s growing pains. Families sometimes fight. I know that the majority of members of Congress didn’t necessarily like doing that. A person that’s a very conservative individual, Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, is somebody with whom I work a lot, and I respect and admire him. If you look at his voting record, we’ll be almost always in the same position on these different issues. He didn’t vote for Kevin McCarthy to be removed either. I didn’t agree with everything Kevin McCarthy did, and I was more conservative than he was on certain issues. But he shouldn’t have been vacated. I didn’t agree with that, and I made that clear, because I do stand up for what I think is right. I thought that was wrong. And I don’t think Speaker Johnson should [be vacated].
What I think we should do, as somebody who believes Republicans do have the answer, is that we should win. The way that we win is to stop arguing with each other. I’ve learned a lot from Democrats. I’ll tell you one thing I’ll say about Democrats: they’re not stupid, they’re not lazy, they’re not unfocused. They are smart, they are focused, and they know what the endgame is. The endgame is always, always with them, to win. They’re all about winning. We’ve got to learn to do that more in the Republican Party. It’s about winning. Sometimes I get aggravated; I speak to my colleagues about it. I spoke to President Trump a couple days ago about Marjorie Taylor Greene and how I disagree with [her efforts to remove Johnson] – and so did he. President Trump has never encouraged that, and in fact has spoken to her about it. I believe that we need to, as a caucus – the political side, not the public policy side – focus on one thing now: winning. We need a stronger, more robust, conservative majority in the House of Representatives. We need a majority in the United States Senate. And we need President Trump to be the president. That’s where I’m at.
Since you mentioned Congressman Jordan: he’s a big figure in the Freedom Caucus. Is that something you’ve ever had any interest in joining?
You know what, I’m happy with where I’m at. I probably agree maybe 75% of the time with the Freedom Caucus, but they’re individuals too. If you look at Jim Jordan, when it comes to issues like vacating the Speaker, he’s been where I’m at. There were a few members of the Freedom Caucus who didn’t vote for the last piece of legislation defining antisemitism; he, like me, voted for that. Some members of the Freedom Caucus – no offense to them, because it’s absolutely their right – are libertarians. They’re libertarians more than they’re even Republicans. So if you look at Jordan’s voting record, it shows that yes, he’s very conservative, but he believes in freedom, believes in not abusing the power of the government. I’ll bet you on 98% of the votes, we’re probably in the same spot. There might be some union stuff where I’m a little different, a couple of other things like the State and Local Tax deduction. Number one, you’ve got to serve your constituents. You’ve got to take care of your people.
One big vote where you and Congressman Jordan did align was the trio of foreign aid bills. You supported the Taiwan bill, you supported the Israel bill; you did not support the Ukraine bill. That’s consistent with a lot of your votes over the last couple of years regarding Ukraine. What about the Israel bill was worthy of support in a way that the Ukraine bill was not?
That’s a good question. Israel has been one of our strongest and oldest allies for many years. They are the civilizing force in the Middle East. They are. It’s very, very important that we support them – especially with their history, especially with what happened with the Holocaust, especially with what’s happened over thousands of years. What we’re seeing unfold in Israel, and now in the United States of America and around the world, is almost Biblical in nature, this antisemitism that we never can see go away. I’ve always been supportive of Israel. And by the way, the amount of money Israel has gotten over the last year is a fraction of what Ukraine has gotten. And I think you can follow the money there. I think you know where the money went, you know it went for the right thing.
Let’s talk about Ukraine a little bit. I love the Ukrainian people, I do. I have Ukrainian people in my district, and I speak with them and they understand my position, because they’re Americans first. What would it take? What do I think about Ukraine? Number one, I think we need to know where the money is really going. I’m not saying that all of it is going to the wrong place, but we don’t know. We need a full and complete audit of the dollars that we’ve given already and where they’ve gone. It should be done by the Pentagon, the Department of Defense, whatever appropriate agency – I have legislation to do that. How can you be against an audit?
Secondly with Ukraine, I don’t think any of the money should go for government salaries, government payroll, government pensions, government health care. They should deal with that. But some of it is going for that. That, to me, is a really important point. Thirdly, I think that Europe should be paying an equivalent amount of money – and some are, Poland is really trying to do its share, but many countries aren’t. They’re so worried about it – they’re right there, they should be more worried about it than anybody else, but they’re not kicking in the way that they should. Once again, it’s the American taxpayer breaking his or her back, working multiple jobs, trying to be able to afford a mortgage or rent, to be able to afford life in the United States.
We’re worrying about Ukraine’s borders – which I do too, Putin’s an evil man, no doubt about it. We’re taking care of Ukraine’s borders, but how about taking care of the borders of the United States of America? I think that needs to be taken care of as well. There are just issues with Ukraine that I think need to be dealt with, and we have legislation – whether it’s asking for the audit, whether it’s saying that Ukraine needed to get money from Europe at a much larger level than they do – before we go ahead.
Shifting to local issues, one of the committees that you sit on is the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Your district has fewer public transit options than almost any other district in New Jersey. Is that something you’d like to see change?
Certainly. I want the people in my district to get everything that we possibly can. It’s one of the harder ones – I have the largest geographic district in the state, with six counties and almost 100 towns. It’s hard, because it’s hard to make it cost-feasible at all. But we’re always fighting for it, always working with the state, always trying to get new routes in. I always think of the one time – this had been going on for years, back when I was a county freeholder – women that were pregnant had to go to the Department of Health to get checkups, and New Jersey Transit would drop them off on the wrong side of the Garden State Parkway. These women were trying to get across the Parkway literally with baby strollers and being pregnant. It was awful. And so we finally, working with the board of freeholders and with New Jersey Transit, got a stop there. So the answer is yes, I would like to see it be better, yes I am constantly working on it, and where we can, on the most egregious examples, we try to help with that.
I’m glad that you mentioned Transportation and Infrastructure. One of the bills that we worked on a lot is on the Federal Aviation Administration renewal. It’s a really big deal. And I think it’s going to come up this week. We got the Senate to agree, we’ve got the House on the same page, and let me just boil it down: there’s a lot of good things that we wrote into the bill out of this office. The most important and obvious one is that it will be in code that the FAA Technical Center will be and always will be in New Jersey. [The William J. Hughes Technical Center is located in Egg Harbor Township.]
Another key issue in your district is offshore wind. You had a major victory on that when Ørsted pulled out of its projects, but that’s certainly not the end of it; there’s other projects that are being planned as we speak. What are the next steps on that?
There’s a lot. Let me just review again how I think it’s bad. I don’t care if you put the wind on land – it’s really a bad idea to do it in the ocean. I am not against all renewables; for example, I have been supportive of solar power, and in New Jersey we’ve done a great job with solar power. When you’re in and around New Jersey, you see a lot of solar panels on roofs. You can’t go into any neighborhood where you won’t see some homes with solar panels.
What is the essential difference? Well, there’s a lot of differences, but I’ll give you the one that’s going to affect every single resident of New Jersey and the United States of America: solar energy is not controlled by a foreign entity. Solar panels reduce your utility bill. For God’s sake, if we’re going to subsidize it with tax dollars, at least know that it’s going to reduce what you pay in your utility bills, and it does. Even the wind companies absolutely admit – they can’t even fake it that much – it’s going to be a significant increase in the cost of energy to move forward with wind energy. We’re not Europe. We have energy. We can be independent. We should be the leader of energy in the world; we shouldn’t follow suit with the countries that, unfortunately for them, don’t have any of their own energy capabilities.
This isn’t about the environment. It isn’t about the carbon footprint. It’s about making money, and big multi-billionaires are going to make money all around the world with this. It hurts fishermen, it hurts tourism, it hurts national security, it hurts the whales, it hurts the utility payer. I’ve been around for a while in politics and public policy and government – I’ve never seen anything that has nothing good about it. There’s nothing good about these things, at all, in my mind. And you shouldn’t just support them because you’re a Democrat. You have to think for yourself. In the beginning, I thought, ‘Hey, windmills. Seems bucolic, beautiful little windmills out in the ocean, just spinning.’ It’s not. These are industrial. They’re a thousand feet high. They have to be lubed up with all kinds of petroleum products all the time. It’s going to cost a fortune. It’s not good for the environment. So: we’re going to have another hearing, and we’re going to discuss this some more. Privately, there are individuals who are still suing, there are lawsuits going as well.
We got a bill through Appropriations that said before these companies could go forward, the Government Accountability Office study had to be completed. We asked for a GAO study, we got it. Big deal that we got it. Let’s wait ’til it’s done. It may not be good for us. I still am going to have the same position I do, but let’s hear. I’d hazard to say there’s a lot more Democrats over at the GAO, but hopefully they’re trying to do an objective job. We’re going to push that again. We made it through the House side – I negotiated it, I was up until the wee hours of the morning involved with that – and the Senate wouldn’t do it, because the Senate is controlled by Democrats and they love this stuff.
We’re going to have rallies, we’re going to do everything we know how to do. I don’t know if we’ll win or lose this. We’re against very, very powerful, well-heeled forces that want to make this happen. But it’s going to hurt America, and dammit, we’re going to fight and give it everything we’ve got. Shame on us if we don’t try.
Your other big role this year is chairing Donald Trump’s campaign in New Jersey. Any Republican campaign in New Jersey is going to be at least something of an uphill climb; what are your goals and hopes for this campaign and for the New Jersey GOP?
One day, I’ve got to do something that’s easy. Of course it’s a challenge. But I want to be clear: President Trump has New Jersey in his heart. This is a real thing with him. And he wants to win New Jersey. He spends half his time in New Jersey! He knows people in New Jersey; he’s got friends in New Jersey, family in New Jersey, investments in New Jersey. He really cares about this state, and he wants to win it. And I’m not going to say, ‘You’re not going to win it.’ So we’re doing everything we can. Right now, he’s doing better than anybody would have ever expected. You saw some recent polling, an Emerson poll came out and said he was seven points [behind Joe Biden] – that’s damn good. Usually when you do those polls, we’re like 22 points out.
We’re going to win South Jersey for sure, but we’re going to work and we are working in northern New Jersey. There’s a lot of energy and a lot of momentum, and amazing things can happen. Everyone thought that I’d lose to Amy Kennedy and I didn’t, and people may think he can’t win New Jersey, but he can. We’re going to do everything we can.
What’s good about it, too, is that there’s a big tangential benefit: we’re right next to Pennsylvania, which is a swing state. The South Jersey Shore is like Little Philadelphia in the summer. You’d better not go into a local restaurant and say that you’re a Yankees fan, or a Knicks or a Nets fan; you’d better be a Philadelphia fan. A lot of people from Philadelphia are going to be at the [Wildwood] rally. It’s just a positive thing. I’m going to do everything I can – he stuck by me when all the pundits and the media said, ‘Jeff Van Drew’s gonna lose. Kennedys never lose.’ I am the only person to beat a Kennedy in a general election in history. [Editor’s note: Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a Maryland Democrat and the niece of John F. Kennedy, lost general elections for Congress and governor.] I’ve got this thing, and I’m going to work at it. It’s what I do.
Do you see any potential place for yourself in a second Trump administration?
Right now, I’m focused on one thing, and that’s winning.