New Jersey — 12th District

Democratic voters in New Jersey's deep-blue 12th Congressional District on June 2 picked their new nominee for the fall — and Fox News got a new poster child.

“New Jersey Dems send terrorist sympathizer to Nov. election," heralded the chyron from a news broadcast.

The report focused on Adam Hamawy, the plastic surgeon and former U.S. Army battlefield doctor who cruised past a crowded field to win the Democratic nomination in the primary election.

Hamawy’s campaign was flush with cash — and support from an equally flush super PAC — that paid for mailers and television ads that marketed him as an empathetic, Bernie Sanders-backed doctor in a lab coat, vowing to expand health care access, curtail aid to Israel and abolish President Donald Trump’s deportation effort.

But that progressive packaging omitted an inconvenient chapter in Hamawy's impressive resume: His relationship, dating back more than 30 years ago, with the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, the fiery cleric convicted in 1995 for conspiring to blow up New York landmarks and for plotting the assassination of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Prosecutors also depicted Abdel-Rahman as the inspirational leader behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six and injured more than 1,000 people.

The case against Abdel-Rahman and his co-conspirators brought into sharp focus the new threat of Islamic extremism on U.S. soil in the decade before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Republicans paint Hamawy as a terrorist sympathizer

Although the Fox News lower thirds distorted Hamawy's past associations — he said during the campaign that he condemns the sheikh, condemns violence and hasn’t had any contact with him since his arrest in 1993 — Republicans are already branding him as the new face of the Democratic Party.

“Not even ties to terrorists are too extreme for the modern-day Democrat Party,” wrote House Speaker Mike Johnson on X. Other Republicans are declaring Hamawy a national security risk who should be barred from classified briefings on foreign intelligence. The right-wing ecosystem is already having a field day.

Hamawy has pushed back repeatedly on the criticism, maintinaing that his battlefield experience in Iraq and his long service in the National Guard — he was in the service during Abdel-Rahman’s trial — is clear evidence of his deep-seated patriotism. As a surgeon, he saved the life of then-Army helicopter pilot Tammy Duckworth, who would become a U.S. senator from Illinois. She returned the favor by endorsing his campaign.

But in New Jersey, his swift ascendancy to power — Hamawy is almost certain to win the seat in November in a district that former Vice President Kamala Harris won by 23 points in 2024 — is stirring debate: How did an outsider, who never held elected office and who had no political network until he announced his candidacy, catapult so quickly to victory?

Could Hamawy have overcome NJ's county line?

For some operatives, Hamawy’s success over a host of more experienced elected office-holders is a direct result of the landmark change in the way primaries are run.

Two years ago, a federal court struck down New Jersey's county-line ballot format, which placed candidates endorsed by county parties in the same column. Progressive reformers, led by New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim, cheered the move as a victory for democracy, giving newcomers and challengers a chance to compete against county party-endorsed candidates.

Defenders of the old system warned that eliminating the line would weaken New Jersey county parties and allow newcomers, backed by private or outside money, to bypass the will of local party leaders and win the nomination without being screened for possible skeletons in their closet before awarding them the coveted line on the ballot.

Hamawy, who raised $1.4 million on his own — and boosted by American Priorities PAC, a pro-Palestine group that poured nearly $2 million into the race — bypassed the old guard system. He didn’t need it.

So did Rep. Analilia Mejia.

Mejia, the veteran social justice activist and a former campaign aide to Sanders, also stunned the establishment with a victory in the special election to fill the seat in the 11th Congressional District left vacant by Gov. Mikie Sherrill.

A staunch progressive, Mejia seemed out of step with the more moderate tradition of the district — but still won without the formal party backing. Her own grass-roots campaign certainly helped, too, but she benefited from a negative campaign barrage that took aim at the frontrunner, former Rep. Tom Malinowski.

Neither Hamawy nor Mejia could have succeeded if the party line system was in place.

That reality frustrated Peg Schaffer, the chair of the Somerset County Democratic Committee. In the past decade, Schaffer has helped convert the affluent, central Jersey county into a Democratic powerhouse through a disciplined reconstruction of the party organization.

“We really don't have any ability to tell the voters in a clear manner who we support or why we support them," Schaffer said at the June 2 victory celebration for Rebecca Bennett, who won the Democratic nomination in the 7th Congressional District, which includes parts of Somerset County.

Some observers say blaming the loss of the line avoids other factors that propelled Hamawy.

For one, the county party organizations failed to coalesce around a consensus candidate, choosing instead to stick by their hometown favorites. Somerset County Democrats rallied for County Commissioner Shanel Robinson; Mercer County stood behind Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds of Trenton; Middlesex County — which represented the largest bloc of voters in the 12th — endorsed East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen; and Union County supported Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp. That parochialism diluted the vote and gave the well-funded Hamawy an opening.

“They chose to go into the primary divided," said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Center for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “That was a choice and it allowed the outsider to go up against a divided field.”

That divided approach also hampered efforts to rally behind an African American candidate as a successor to Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, the first female African American congresswoman from New Jersey, who is retiring at the end of her term representing the 12th. The field included four African American candidates from three different counties. The irony is combined vote total for the four candidates was almost 5,000 more votes than Hamawy’s.

Others noted county parties still flexed their muscles and relevance despite the loss of the line. Bennett’s victory was powered, in part, by the support of robust field work in Union, Somerset and Morris counties where she won the county party endorsements. The door-to-door campaigning on her behalf helped offset doubts and concerns about Bennett that arose from negative ads by a Republican group and one of her rivals, Tina Shah.

Does New Jersey's primary system still need more change?

Still, the victories by Hamawy and Mejia are stirring some nascent talk about making changes to the system that might avert well-funded outsiders sweeping into power. Watching the churn in this year's congressinal races, some New Jersey political observers are wondering what would stop outsiders from upending next year's contests for seats in the state Legislature.

Schaffer floated the idea of a runoff system — like those used in some municipal elections — that would require candidates to win with more than 50% of the vote or face a second round of voting weeks later, a system used in nonpartisan municipal elections. That would ensure that a candidate win with a broader base of the primary electorate. Hamawy won with the nomination for the 12th with just 28% of the vote.

Others argue that the loss of the line now opens the door for the next step in reform: ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to choose their preferences in descending order rather than make one choice. Under the ranked choice system, a voter's second or third choices are distributed to the remaining candidates. The voting continues until one candidate captures 50% or more of the vote.

Critics argue that such changes would confuse voters and discourage participation. But supporters say these adjustments could be hedges against spoiler candidates and would require winners to consolidate broader bases of voter support.

"I don’t think it’s great when 75% of voters aren’t picking the winner,'' said Sen. Vin Gopal, D-Monmouth, a long-time advocate of ranked choice voting along with Sen. Andrew Zwicker, D-Mercer. "I think a runoff or rank choice voting system could help make it more Democratic."

The looming legislative elections next year have suddenly added a dose of urgency. If a well-funded outsider can snatch a victory in a crowded congressional primary, what's to prevent that from happening in a safe legislative race?

"You're going to see, in next assembly and state races, a lot more people running, and a lot more people like Hamawy," said Matt Hale, an associate professor of political science at Seton Hall University and a longtime advocate of ranked choice voting, which is used in Maine, Alaska, New York City and 35 other cities.

“And I’d say that’s bad for Trenton," Hale said. "I mean, as much as we think that our politics in New Jersey is divisive, we’re nothing like Congress and we’re nothing like a lot of other legislatures. The Democrats and Republicans can work together — but I don’t think that’s going to last for much longer.”

Charlie Stile is a veteran New Jersey political columnist. For unlimited access to his unique insights into New Jersey’s political power structure and his powerful watchdog work, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.