Northfield Democrat will run to take on Jeff Van Drew

Terri Reese says that when she began meeting with Democratic groups and showing up at rallies around Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis)’s district this year, she asked her fellow activists who would take up the mantle against the congressman in the 2026 midterm elections. No one was able to give her a definitive answer.

“At the very first meeting that I went to, I asked the question, ‘Who is running against Jeff Van Drew?’” Reese said. “‘They need to start today – to start calling out the things that are happening today. We can’t wait until March of 2026.’ And nobody could answer that question.”

“I got tired of waiting,” she continued. “So I said, ‘I’m going to put myself out there.’”

Reese – a former retail store manager, a single mom of two adult kids, and a lifelong Atlantic County resident – decided last month that she would run against Van Drew, who has represented a conservative-leaning swath of South Jersey in Congress since 2019. The 58-year-old Northfield Democrat has never run for office before and only recently became directly involved in politics, but she said that she has what it takes to take Van Drew down.

“My son and I have had very robust discussions on politics, and have for years and years,” Reese said. “He kept saying, ‘You should run, you should run, you should run.’ Finally, I said, ‘You know what, what’s holding me back now?’… And I know that I can beat [Van Drew].”

Reese is the first Democrat to enter the race against Van Drew, but she’s unlikely to be the last. Either or both of the last two Democratic nominees for the seat, 2022 nominee Tim Alexander and 2024 nominee Joe Salerno, might run again, Reese said; there’s also chatter about candidates with national political connections entering the race, though candidate recruitment still seems to be in its early stages.

Regardless, some national Democrats are intrigued enough about the possibility of flipping the seat that they released an internal poll yesterday showcasing Van Drew’s potential vulnerabilities. The group that commissioned the poll, the Democratic-aligned Voter Protection Project, said that it was “highly motivated to find and support a candidate who can put this seat on the map.”

That poll, though, also showed how challenging the road for any 2nd district Democrat will be. When asked who they would vote for in a hypothetical congressional race, 46% of poll respondents said Van Drew, while 36% said they’d support an unnamed Democratic candidate.

Van Drew became a bête noire on the left in 2019, when he defected from the party to become a loyally pro-Trump Republican, and Democrats made a very serious effort to unseat him in 2020. But in the last two cycles, the district has been all but ignored by both parties, in deference both to Van Drew’s strengths as an incumbent and the 2nd district’s increasing GOP lean.

Last year, Van Drew won 58%-41% over Salerno – who never got the outside Democratic help or financial support he was aiming for – as Donald Trump was carrying the district by around 12 points. The seat would likely only become competitive in 2026 if Democrats massively upped their investment in South Jersey, and even then, it would remain a reach opportunity that might only flip in a huge blue wave.

Reese, for her part, said that she thought Van Drew’s easy wins were due in part to name recognition, and that the congressman has neglected further-flung parts of his district in places like Salem and Cumberland Counties. If she were to win both next year’s potentially crowded primary and the ensuing general election against Van Drew, she said that she’d aim to be a different kind of congresswoman.

“I’m not a politician,” she said. “I don’t look like a politician, I don’t sound like a politician, and my entire life has been in helping people get through different challenges that they’ve had.”

If local South Jersey Democratic organizations opt to back her, Reese said, she’d welcome their support. But Reese has appeared at a number of events with anti-machine gubernatorial candidate Steve Fulop since launching her campaign, and she said that she wants to run a grassroots campaign beholden to people rather than parties.

“I believe in having character and integrity and standing up for what you believe in, and not being wishy-washy based on wanting to appeal to the big-money donors, or to appeal to party leadership,” she added. “I firmly believe in people, and marginalized people especially, whether they are the trans community, the immigrant community, minorities, women… And I want to bring that to Congress.”