The two main chapters of Zach Beecher’s professional career – his service as a U.S. Army paratrooper and his more recent work as a venture capitalist – have been, he said, part of his life’s call to service. He’s now vying to add a third: U.S. congressman.
Beecher launched his campaign today for New Jersey’s 11th congressional district, which will soon be vacated after Rep. Mikie Sherrill departs for the governor’s office. A Morris County native and first-time political candidate, Beecher argued that his service-oriented background and results-focused message will resonate with voters across the district.
“The folks that I’ve grown up with want someone who’s focused on results,” Beecher said. “They want someone who can be relentlessly, pragmatically problem-solving, putting their priorities and their problems first. And I believe that I have the background, the experience, and the community rooting here to really make that difference.”
The campaign puts Beecher on a collision course with a huge number of other Democrats – ten of them, to be exact, with more potentially on the way – who want to succeed Sherrill in the 11th district, a Democratic-leaning district covering parts of suburban North Jersey. The Democratic primary for the district is likely to arrive next January or February, giving candidates a very brief runway to put together their campaigns and coalitions.
Beecher lacks the political background or connections of many of his 11th district opponents, among whom are the sitting lieutenant governor, a former congressman, and five county and local elected officials. But in such a crowded race, there’s could be a lane for anyone to break through.
The 34-year-old Beecher was raised in the western Morris County suburb of Randolph, the son of a social worker and a policeman; his now-retired father served 36 years in the Mount Olive police department, including a stint as chief.
After graduating Princeton, Beecher joined the U.S. Army, serving in the 82nd Airborne Division as a paratrooper. A key part of his service came during Operation Inherent Resolve in 2016 and 2017, when U.S., Iraqi, and Kurdish forces worked together to free the city of Mosul from the Islamic State.
“We were confronted with incredible barbarity and incredibly complex problems, and I had a great boss there who said, ‘You’ve got to keep the simple, simple,’” Beecher said. “What we wanted to do was we needed to solve problems. We needed to solve the problems of our Iraqi counterparts, we needed to solve the problems of our coalition partners. And so that’s what we did.”
Beecher left active duty at the rank of captain, though he remains a member of the Army Reserve (and is now a major). His career since then has taken him through a number of venture capital and investment firms, including most recently at the national security-focused firm Scout Ventures; at one point, he worked with the New Jersey Economic Development Authority on Nokia Bell Labs’s Innovation Center in New Brunswick. He and his wife are now raising their one-year-old son in Morristown.
Like many Democrats, Beecher said that the core focus of his congressional campaign will be affordability: bringing down energy costs, transportation costs, health care costs. And like many Democrats, he laid much of the blame for voters’ current malaise at the feet of President Donald Trump, long an unpopular figure in New Jersey – especially in the suburbs at the heart of the 11th district.
“We need to meet Trump and his cronies at every single turn,” Beecher said. “We need to challenge them in every venue, we need to be in every room, in every media space, in order to challenge the onslaught of attacks on the institutions, the norms, and the laws that we hold dear.”
That’s similar to the message that helped propel Sherrill throughout her career, both into Congress in 2018 and into the governor’s office in this year’s Democratic landslide. Sherrill, like Beecher, had never run for elected office before her first 11th district campaign.
There are mitigating factors to that comparison – Sherrill was running in 2018 for a GOP-held seat that many Democrats saw little hope of winning, and she faced a much less formidable field of primary opponents than the one Beecher is now confronting. Beecher, though, said that just like Sherrill was able to energize the grassroots and win the trust of voters eight years ago, his own status as a veteran and political outsider can do the same.
“I know that I’m a political outsider,” he said. “I think that that is our advantage. We believe that this election is a contest of ideas. We want to be in every single room across the district – Essex, Passaic, Morris County – and we want to talk to every single voter we see on the street and remind them: I want to work for you.”