Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) may represent a district that was once won by Joe Biden, but he’s ready to support Donald Trump for president this year.
The freshman congressman, who represents a pivotal swing district that might help determine who controls the House come 2025, said through a spokesperson that he will vote for Trump, who has no opposition on New Jersey’s GOP primary ballot and who is virtually assured to become the Republican presidential nominee at the the July Republican National Convention.
“Congressman Kean will be voting for President Trump,” Kean spokesman Harrison Neely told the New Jersey Globe. The campaign declined to elaborate beyond that.
During his two campaigns for Congress in 2020 and 2022, and since taking office in 2023, Kean has tried to walk a fine ideological line that would neither frustrate his district’s many conservative voters nor turn off the moderate suburbanites he needs to win.
The congressman has pushed for Trump’s immigration policies, supported some restrictions on abortion, and voted for deeply conservative congressmen like Jim Jordan to be Speaker of the House – but he has also indicated his support for gay marriage, recognized Joe Biden as the duly elected president, and declined to link himself closely with Trump the way that many other Republicans have.
When asked during a 2020 debate against then-Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) about who he was voting for in that year’s presidential election, Kean said he was “supporting the president,” but declined to give his Trump endorsement any more weight than that. His endorsement strategy this year seems to be similar.
Sue Altman, Kean’s prospective Democratic opponent in a race many forecasters label as a “toss-up,” said that Kean’s support for Trump shows how out of step he is with the voters of the 7th district.
“While some of our Republican neighbors in Pennsylvania and New York have had the courage to reject [Trump’s] agenda, Tom Kean, Jr. has chosen to be a coward over and over again – embracing extremism and showing he is anything but the moderate he pretends to be,” Altman said. “He has done nothing but enable the worst impulses of Trump and sold out New Jerseyans to benefit himself at every turn.”
Altman, for her part, affirmed that she’s supporting the re-election effort of Biden, who carried the 7th district 51%-47% in 2020 – becoming the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the district’s current iteration in many decades.
“As we fight to protect our democracy and fundamental rights, the stakes of this election have never been more clear,” she said. “I haven’t always agreed with the President, but there is no question in this moment. The stakes are too high. I will proudly vote for President Biden this November.”
Kean is one of 17 House Republicans who hold Biden-won districts, a key group on which the GOP’s narrow majority rests. According to Politico, he was one of the last members of that cohort who had not gotten behind Trump; with Kean now officially in Trump’s corner, only a handful of Biden-district Republicans are left who have not affirmed their support for the former (and potential future) president.
Kean’s endorsement also means that every New Jersey House member has now taken a side in the presidential race. Every endorsement is as would be expected: all eight Democrats are supporting Biden (as was Rep. Donald Payne Jr. before his death), while Kean’s fellow Republicans, Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) and Chris Smith (R-Manchester), are on Team Trump.