NJ-12 Democrats Compete to Replace Rep. Watson Coleman

Eleven Democrats stood shoulder to shoulder at Princeton’s Whig Hall on Monday, and every single one of them wanted the same thing.

The open seat in New Jersey’s 12th congressional district belongs to nobody right now. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman of Ewing retired, and thirteen candidates jumped in. Eleven of them showed up Monday night for a forum at Princeton University co-hosted by the American Whig-Cliosophic Society. They all hate Donald Trump. They all call themselves progressives. They all want Watson Coleman’s seat. So the question the forum actually answered was narrower: who are you when everyone’s saying the same thing?

That’s where it got interesting.

Sue Altman built her name running the New Jersey Working Families Party and working as a top staffer for Senator Andy Kim. She’s positioning herself as the candidate who doesn’t flinch, who won’t shake the wrong hands to get somewhere. Adam Hamawy spent years as an Army combat surgeon before this race. He’s running on healthcare experience and what he frames as a genuine, not performative, push for peace in Congress. Then there’s Matt Adams. His pitch doesn’t sound like anything else in this field, or really any congressional field. Adams worked as counsel at a defense technology firm, served in the military, and now he’s telling voters he’s the candidate built specifically for two existential threats: a potential war with Iran and the possibility that AI development ends very, very badly for humanity. You can debate whether that’s brilliant or bizarre. Either way, nobody else is saying it.

AI dominated the early part of the forum and never really left. Multiple candidates backed a moratorium on new data center construction, arguing the technology’s effects aren’t well understood yet. Hamawy went further, citing Bernie Sanders’ call for a moratorium directly. “It’s affecting our children, it’s affecting education, it’s affecting jobs, it’s affecting the climate,” he said. “So what we need to do is stop, slow down, make sure we understand all the effects.”

Altman’s argument ran in a different direction. She said AI was built from the collected knowledge of human civilization and that the profits shouldn’t just land in corporate bank accounts. Society, she argued, deserves a cut.

The structural math in this race is genuinely brutal. The 12th district sits in the gap between the New York City and Philadelphia media markets, which means TV ads cost a lot and free press is hard to earn. The four county parties inside the district each endorsed a different candidate, so there’s no dominant machine candidate walking into this with a clear edge. Thirteen people, no real frontrunner, an expensive map, and a voter base that’ll need to actually sort through the differences.

According to the New Jersey Globe, the fundraising picture tracked through the Federal Election Commission will tell a lot about who can actually sustain a campaign through June. Money doesn’t win primaries in New Jersey, but running out of it sure can end one.

Twelve candidates still need to keep introducing themselves to voters who, right now, are mostly paying attention to anything else.