‘It was time’: Watson Coleman on her decision to retire and what comes next

At first, when people began calling on 80-year-old Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) to retire, she said it simply emboldened her to keep running.

“People started saying, ‘You’re old, get out,’” Watson Coleman told the New Jersey Globe in an interview last week. “And I was like, ‘Screw you, I’m staying in. I’m going to run again.’”

Watson Coleman had considered stepping aside in 2024, but instead sought one more term even as the Democratic Party descended into debates over President Joe Biden’s age and the need for new leadership in the party. This year, however, she at last decided that the time was right to end her time in Congress.

“Really, it was time,” she said. “It’s time to spend time with my family, my husband. It’s time to have time. It’s time to take some of the burden of not being able to get the things that you wanted to get done off of you – and to turn it over to somebody, hopefully, who shares some of the same values that you shared and things that you worked for.”

The congresswoman’s decision to retire brings to an end a storied career: as New Jersey’s first Black congresswoman, one who broke a decade-long streak of the state only electing men to Congress; as one of Donald Trump’s most vituperative critics, one who has called the president “awful,” “evil,” “corrupt on so many levels,” and a “lying, stupid, amoral son-of-a-bitch”; and as a guiding light for New Jersey progressives, one who has found her voice growing ever stronger as New Jersey’s insider-dominated political system starts to crumble.

Watson Coleman was born in 1945, the daughter of John Watson, a trailblazing politician in his own right who was the first Black member of the Mercer County Board of Freeholders. Watson Coleman was frequently involved in government and politics during the first 50 years of her life, but she didn’t seek elected office herself until 1997, when she ran for and won her father’s old Trenton-based seat in the State Assembly.

Although Watson Coleman’s Assembly tenure included stints as Assembly Majority Leader and chairwoman of the state Democratic Party, she was still seen at first as the underdog when she launched her 2014 campaign to succeed Rep. Rush Holt (D-Hopewell) in the 12th congressional district. But not for the first time, she proved skeptics wrong, winning a four-way Democratic primary against two fellow state legislators with 43% of the vote.

It was once she arrived in Congress that the relatively mild-mannered Watson Coleman began to come into her own – and to be pegged with a label, “progressive,” that thrust her into the Democratic Party’s long-running debates over how far to the left it should push.

“I wasn’t labeled a progressive when I was working in the state legislature,” Watson Coleman said. “It’s a thing that came here in Congress.”

“I work for people having health care, for having housing, for having jobs, for being treated well by their employer, for supporting unions, for non-discrimination in employment, things of that nature,” she continued. “People started labeling that as progressive. I think that’s just trying to get government to do what it needs to do on behalf of the people that need it.”

At least at first, that “progressive” label didn’t change the fact that Watson Coleman was still a product of the New Jersey political establishment. She, like most of her fellow New Jersey Democrats, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, for example, and she rarely picked fights with the state political establishment even as she amassed the state’s most progressive voting record in Washington.

As the state’s politics have shifted in the last several years, though, Watson Coleman has shifted with them. She pointedly declined to endorse anyone in the 2024 U.S. Senate showdown; supported Ras Baraka for governor this year as he ran on the most progressive gubernatorial platform in recent memory; and sided with now-U.S. Senator Andy Kim in his successful efforts to end New Jersey’s county line ballot design system.

“I don’t think that bossism is ever good. The elimination of the lines and that kind of thing is fine, it gives everybody an equal chance,” she said. “I think we’re moving in the right direction.”

Case in point: as Kim and other state progressives fight against a lame-duck-session effort to gut the state comptroller’s office, Watson Coleman has taken an unusual public stance against the bill, calling the Democratic leadership-backed effort “just plain bad for New Jersey.” (There have been exceptions, though, like when she endorsed the Democratic assemblyman who had authored a controversial bill overhauling the state’s public records laws; as easy as it would be to divide the state into “progressive” versus “machine,” it’s rarely that simple.)

One of the races impacted by the changes remaking the state’s politics is the Democratic primary for Watson Coleman’s own congressional seat. Seven candidates have announced campaigns, with more potentially on the way; many of those candidates come from backgrounds in state or local politics like Watson Coleman did, while others are newer to the New Jersey political scene. One of them, 27-year-old ex-Energy Department official Jay Vaingankar, was born three days after Watson Coleman first took office as a state assemblywoman.

Watson Coleman said that she hopes her successor follows the same progressive path she has in Congress, but that she doesn’t anticipate she’ll make an endorsement: “It’s generally not what I do.” The one red line that the congresswoman drew when it comes to the 12th district’s next representative, though, was on Israel and Palestine.

“I would never support a candidate in my district that doesn’t support the two-state solution and the call for peace. Never,” she said. “Even if I agreed on everything else, I’m not going to.”

The war in Gaza has played an important role in Watson Coleman’s final few years in Washington. The congresswoman was the first New Jersey member of Congress to call for a ceasefire back in 2023, and she remains one of the few representatives to have compared the conflict to a “genocide,” a position that earned her both admirers and critics around the country.

She also became an unexpected national figure earlier this year after her oversight visit at the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center resulted in a scuffle with ICE officers and assault charges against Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark). Watson Coleman, who began conducting similar visits at detention facilities when Biden was still president, said she intends to continue fighting against the Trump administration’s immigration policies during her final year in office.

But asked what she’ll look back on most proudly of the work she’s done in Congress, Watson Coleman instead pointed to two less flashy accomplishments: co-founding the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls and advocating for greater mental health awareness and resources. “Those issues hadn’t been sufficiently addressed and still haven’t, but we certainly elevated that,” she said.

With 13 months left in her term, Watson Coleman said she’s now focused on bringing her own work to a close and making sure the causes she’s fought for find new champions in Washington. It’s unlikely that she’ll be able to accomplish much of anything in a GOP-led Congress – even the Republicans who control Congress have struggled to do so – but with Democrats in contention to take back the majority in 2026, she said she’s working to educate the colleagues who will still be around in 2027 on her legislation on for-profit prisons, second chances for ex-convicts, and the Earned Income Tax Credit.

One of those potential torch-bearers is McIver, a fellow staunch progressive who followed in her footsteps as the second woman of color elected to represent New Jersey. Watson Coleman has been something of a mentor to McIver since her arrival in Congress, and McIver called her “truly one of a revolutionary kind” when she announced her retirement.

Unlike some of the older congressional Democrats heading for the exits next year, Watson Coleman is definitively leaving on her own terms.

The congresswoman was facing a younger primary challenger prior to her retirement announcement, fitness studio owner Kyle Little, but he had garnered little attention for his campaign and Watson Coleman would have almost certainly won another term with ease. And after undergoing treatment for cancer in 2018 and more recently struggling with some lower back problems, Watson Coleman said that her health remains good; her decision to retire, she said, “has nothing to do with my health, thank God.”

Instead, Watson Coleman said that she was just ready to begin the next chapter and continue living a “purposeful life” outside the halls of Congress.

“Congress isn’t a job, Congress is a commitment,” she said. “Public service is a commitment. And you carry that commitment with you all the time.”

“I don’t have any plans. I know that at some point, God’s going to reveal the what and the how,” she continued. “But I’ll tell you what I won’t have: I will not have a 9 to 5 job anywhere. I can promise you that.”