Tim Alexander, civil rights lawyer and ex-detective, will make third run against Jeff Van Drew

After losing elections for New Jersey’s 2nd congressional district in both 2022 and 2024, Democratic candidate Tim Alexander thought he was done running for Congress. But the election of President Donald Trump last November, and the policies Republicans in Congress have enacted since he took office, made him reconsider.

“If you had asked me before he was elected, ‘Are you considering running?’ I would have confirmed with venom, ‘No thank you,’” Alexander told the New Jersey Globe. “But seeing what’s unfolded in the last seven months of the Trump administration, how can I not get back in this race? How can I not bring this passion and energy to the people and try to motivate them?”

Alexander, a civil rights attorney who spent three decades as a law enforcement officer, is launching his third consecutive campaign today for the 2nd district, which stretches across six counties in South Jersey. He’ll aim once again to take down Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis), who has defied Democrats’ efforts to oust him since his famous party switch in 2019.

His task won’t be an easy one; the 2nd district voted for Trump by nearly 13 percentage points last year, and the widely known Van Drew won by even more. Other Democratic candidates, too, may stand in the way of Alexander winning the nomination to face Van Drew at all; Bayly Winder, a former official at the U.S. Agency for International Development, entered the race a month ago and quickly raised more than $170,000.

But Alexander argued that communities in the 2nd district have gotten to know him well over the last four years of campaigning, and that he’s ready to motivate anyone who has grown disillusioned with Trump and Republicans.

“If Trump was my guy, and I put the signs out and I wore the MAGA hat and I went to the rallies and I gave my money to the campaign, and as a result I lost my benefits, or I lost my job – people are pissed!” Alexander said. “That anger, that angst, that disappointment in the GOP, I think is going to speak volumes in the voting booth.”

Alexander was born in Newark and graduated from high school in Vineland; while in school, he benefited from free and reduced lunch programs, and his mother participated in a housing program that allowed her to live in Vineland for decades – the types of initiatives that he said are under threat from Republicans in Washington. After high school, Alexander endeavored to join the New Jersey State Police, but he instead found himself on the wrong end of a violent police encounter in Newark at age 19 – one that introduced him to the intricacies of the criminal justice system that he later joined.

“[The officers] ended up shooting at me, they beat the crap out of me, and they charged me with a crime I didn’t commit: three counts of aggravated assault on the three officers who were doing these things to me,” Alexander said, adding that it was a case of mistaken identity. “I had to navigate through the criminal justice system to clear my name, which I did at the grand jury stage, and then go through litigation to recover some damages, which we did.”

Alexander’s efforts to become a state trooper eventually fell through, and he instead chose to return to South Jersey and join the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office. He followed that with a job in the Atlantic County Sheriff’s Office before joining the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office, where he spent 24 years and retired as a captain of detectives.

During his time at the county prosecutor’s office, Alexander earned his law degree from Rutgers, a degree that he quickly put to use after retiring. He spent several years as an Assistant District Attorney and an Assistant City Solicitor in Philadelphia before joining a law firm in 2018 and honing in on civil rights litigation.

While Alexander was transitioning into private practice, the 2nd district was undergoing major changes of its own. Van Drew, then a state senator, flipped the district blue in 2018 after longtime Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-Ventnor) retired – only to flip it back red a year later when he switched parties in opposition to the impeachment of Trump. Enraged Democrats spent millions boosting Amy Kennedy in the 2020 race, but Van Drew held on 52%-46%.

Soon afterwards, Alexander decided to enter the political arena for the first time. He launched his first campaign against Van Drew in early 2021 and quickly began winning over local Democrats, who saw a lot of potential in Alexander’s law enforcement background and in the chance to elect a Black congressman from South Jersey for the first time ever.

But things began going wrong from there. Democrats on the Congressional Redistricting Commission, more concerned about shoring up neighboring Democratic incumbents, decided to largely leave Van Drew’s district alone and even made it a notch more conservative; Democratic donors, in turn, saw little hope in Alexander’s campaign and closed their wallets. Faced with a daunting resource disparity and an increasingly popular incumbent in Van Drew, Alexander lost 59% to 40%.

A few months after losing, Alexander announced that he would run again – but this time, South Jersey Democrats weren’t nearly as willing to defer to him, and a multi-candidate primary developed. The contest came down primarily to Alexander and Joe Salerno, a tech entrepreneur who seeded his campaign with several hundred thousand dollars of his own money.

Alexander won most of the district’s county conventions, but his wins were then rendered largely moot by a federal judge’s decision overturning county organizational lines, meaning that he and Salerno appeared on primary ballots as equals. With a substantial resource advantage, Salerno eked out a 38%-37% primary win; he went on to lose to Van Drew 58% to 41% in November.

Now 59, Alexander said that he learned a lot from his first two campaigns, and he’s prepared to avoid some of the problems that doomed them. In particular, Alexander said that he’s committed to becoming a better fundraiser, after both of his prior efforts were hampered by a lack of money.

“We have laid out a plan to do just that,” he said. “We’re going to go in a totally different direction than we did last time.”

He cautioned Democrats, though, against being willing to support anyone with a “pocket full of cash” who shows up in the district and launches a campaign.

“You can’t win unless you have connections in the community,” he said. “You can’t move into the district four months ago and say, ‘Okay, I’m here, I’m going to help you, I’ve got a pocket full of cash.’ It’s not going to work! It flat-out will not work. You cannot wake up one morning and say, ‘Okay, I’m running for Congress,’ and expect people from Ocean, Salem, Gloucester, Cape May, Cumberland, and Atlantic to vote for you when they haven’t even heard of you.”

That’s a fairly obvious dig at Winder, Alexander’s main opponent thus far, who grew up primarily in Princeton, spent his summers on the Jersey Shore, and recently moved to Atlantic County after spending much of his career in Washington D.C. Also running in the Democratic primary is Terri Reese, a Northfield resident on her first campaign for public office; Salerno, too, might be interested in a second campaign.

If he makes it through the primary, Alexander said that he intends to attack the Republican agenda from every angle he can. People should be protesting in the streets, Alexander said: against Trump’s immigrant deportation and detainment policies, which Alexander likened to “concentration camps,” and against the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which is projected to impact health coverage, food benefits, and more for hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans. (Van Drew supported the bill after publicly fretting about its impacts on Medicaid.)

Alexander isn’t the only Democrat who thinks the Big Beautiful Bill could be the key to political success in difficult districts like the 2nd. In May, a Democratic PAC polled 2nd district voters to test Van Drew’s political vulnerabilities; the PAC ultimately argued that Van Drew could indeed be beatable, and a message focused on Medicaid cuts would help bring him down. (Around 20% of 2nd district residents are on Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, per a Georgetown analysis.)

The existence of that poll in the first place was a sign that, after several cycles in a row of ignoring the 2nd district, national Democrats might be warming up slightly to the idea of seriously challenging Van Drew again. But Alexander had no love lost for the national Democratic Party, which he said needs a redesign and new leadership.

“We need somebody to say, whatever the Democratic playbook is, I’m tossing it out the window,” he said. “I don’t care if there’s a swing and a miss against these policies that Trump is putting out – we’ve got to try. And if we motivate people, we will erode this stranglehold that MAGA has on our federal government.”