The New Jersey Globe interviewed Andrew Zwicker for this week’s conversation with a state legislator. The fifth installment follows interviews with Luanne Peterpaul, Dave Bailey Jr., Doug Steinhardt, and Al Abdelaziz.
State Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D-South Brunswick) is the head of public engagement and workforce development at Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, where he has worked for almost three decades.
Zwicker first ran for public office in 2014, after the retirement of former Rep. Rush Holt Jr., a mentor and fellow physicist. He finished fourth in the 12th congressional district’s Democratic primary that year, but he impressed party leaders, who recruited him to run for a 16th legislative district state Assembly seat in 2015.
Zwicker narrowly flipped a GOP-held seat, and eventually flipped the district’s state Senate seat in 2021 after GOP incumbent Kip Bateman opted against a tough re-election campaign. After considering a run, Zwicker decided last year to keep his state Senate seat instead of campaigning to succeed the retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) in Congress.
Zwicker is the chair of the Legislative Oversight Committee, vice chair of the Higher Education Committee, and a member of the Labor and Budget committees.
A list of Zwicker’s floor and committee votes this session can be found by clicking here.
Click here to view a list of bills that Zwicker has sponsored.
The following phone interview has been edited for clarity and length.
New Jersey Globe: How does a physicist get into politics?
Andrew Zwicker: He gets hired by a physicist who gets into politics first.
I was hired at Princeton by former Congressman Rush Holt when he was the deputy director of the Plasma Physics Lab, and when he retired from Congress after 16 years, the person who had replaced him [at the Lab], my boss, came to me and said he wanted another scientist represented in Congress. And so that was the beginning.
I thought that was a crazy idea, but eventually I came around and said, “Why not another physicist?” And so back in 2014, I ran for the 12th congressional district against a bunch of people, including Bonnie Watson Coleman, who, of course, went on to win the election. I came in last, but I did less worse than many people could have ever imagined.
And you parlayed that into a later Assembly and state Senate career, right?
Yeah. The next year, some folks who had been working on Congresswoman Watson Coleman’s campaign approached me. One of them was a Ph.D. physicist at Princeton that I knew who, instead of modeling physical systems, decided to use her physics skills to model voter behavior, and so she had helped guide Bonnie Watson Coleman to victory. She said, “Hey, we’ve been looking at the 16th legislative district, and there is definitely a path for a Democrat to win the district.” At that point, no Democrat had ever won in the history of the 16th district.
And she was right. About 34,000 people came out that year to vote, and I won by only 78 votes. Every vote really does matter, right? And I would say I won because enough folks were intrigued by my science background to say, I’ll check you out, I might consider voting for you. And it was just enough.
Does your science background come up often in your political work on the day-to-day?
Sure, of course. We live in such a technologically driven world. Our workforce is changing and adapting to innovation. I have argued in talks I’ve given around the country that a science background is a great background to have for elected office, because you are, by your nature, skeptical, but also data-driven and constantly trying to improve and make things better. I think that fits nicely into what we all try to do as elected officials.
And between energy policy, climate change, tech, and AI, it’s pretty valuable right now.
Exactly. The headlines are dominated by the next advance in AI. We are all concerned about ensuring that utility costs are affordable and the impact of the data centers that power AI. And we’re worried about the future of higher education, making sure people are properly trained. So these are not always scientific things, but we’re all really focused on this, because this is what’s driving our society and our state forward.
A Fairleigh Dickinson poll found that about two-thirds of New Jersey voters would support a temporary halt on data center construction until energy supply can catch up. Is that a sentiment that you agree with right now?
So data centers are a problem because large ones consume enormous, enormous amounts of energy — the equivalent, let’s say, a million homes might consume in a brief period of time. But they’re enormous, and they need lots of electricity, they need cooling. We’ve seen local communities rising in protest to not just [electric demands], but the noise that is associated with lots of concerns.
The difficulty we have in New Jersey is that we are part of the PJM regional grid, which means that if a data center is built in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or any of the other states that are part of this regional grid, the impact is felt by New Jerseyans as well. As I understand it, New Jerseyans’ feelings on data centers are echoed by other states, and so we need to approach this as a multi-state effort. There’s no reason why these multi-billion dollar corporations that are driving AI and the data centers that power them should be paid for on the backs of New Jersey rate payers.
You mention a multi-state effort — have you gotten the chance to work with legislators from other states on this?
I have not. I think this needs to come from the administration. I know that governors — not just Governor Sherrill, but other governors and other states — have been talking about this. I have found it is at times difficult because our schedules are so different in terms of when different legislatures meet and how often they meet, so it has been difficult to coordinate.
Outside of science, a lot of your legislation focuses on the structure of the electoral system, from filling U.S. House vacancies to automatic voter registration. What’s behind your drive and focus on the electoral system as a means for reform?
I talked about the fact that I won my first election in the general with such a narrow margin. But what was also apparent was how few people had come out to vote in that primary. We see this happening over and over again, where, for a variety of reasons, people aren’t voting. And so the first bill I ever wrote — and it took a while to get it into law — was the New Voter Empowerment Act to allow 17-year-olds to vote in primaries if they’re 18 by the general election.
This was directly in response to what I was observing, not just in Jersey, but around the country. And since then, [we’re] making sure that if you vote by mail and make a simple mistake, your ballot can be fixed and your vote can be counted; that there are enough ballot drop boxes; that vacancies in the House are filled as quickly as possible; and much more.
In this turbulent time that we live in, with all the chaos coming out of Washington, it remains true that the single most powerful thing that each of us can do is vote and vote for people who we feel best reflect and represent our values.
What do you think of Governor Mikie Sherrill’s performance and her desire to try to shave the budget down?
Putting together a budget is a difficult process. This is my fifth year on the Budget Committee. It’s always a tremendous learning experience.
Because of Governor Murphy making sure that we were ramping up to put enough money into our public pension system and to ensure the K-12 funding formula is fully funded — even though it still needs to be updated and modernized — the budget has naturally risen because of those decisions, which I strongly support. And then you add COVID in the middle of all this.
On one hand, we’ve gone from having a very small surplus to a very large surplus, which is remarkable. On the other hand, we’ve seen the overall budget grow. So we’re going through the process in both houses with the budget committees, hearing from all the various departments, and then it is up to the legislature to send back to the governor our budget and negotiate between the two.
Inside what the governor has proposed has been significant cuts to health care, significant cuts to social services for our most vulnerable people. And so how we craft a budget, which is an indication of our values and our morals as a state, is going to play out in the weeks ahead.
Do you think there’s grounds for agreement and an opportunity to craft an effective budget?
Oh, absolutely. There’s always grounds for agreement. There’ll be lots of discussions in the days ahead.
We talked a little bit about the 12th earlier, and last year you decided against running to succeed Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman. Why did you make that decision, and how are you feeling about it now?
That took a lot of personal reflection, because over the last 10-plus years, my assumption had been that I would run for the seat when she announced her retirement. But when it finally happened, I realized that I personally have a chance to put forth, advocate for, and get impactful legislation passed in New Jersey, in a way that Congress has shown they’re incapable of doing.
Congress needs such tremendous reform, and the people who have lined up to run for her seat are aware of that and are passionately advocating for reforming Congress. At the end of Governor Murphy’s term, the governor signed 18 bills that I had either written or sponsored, bills that would make New Jerseyans’ lives better. The most prolific member of Congress might pass half a dozen bills at most in a session. I decided in the end that I could be more impactful in New Jersey. And so a lot of people have stepped up to the plate.