No one opened the door when Adam Hamawy rang the bell of a Trenton row house while campaigning for Congress in the city’s historic Mill Hill district. Instead, a young man opened a third-floor window and poked his head out.
“Have you voted yet? Or are you going to vote soon?” Hamawy shouted up into the May afternoon sunshine. The man replied with a no.
“The election is on June 2. And I'm running so that we are funding healthcare, not bombs. We all want healthcare, right?” asked Hamawy, a surgeon by trade. The man agreed.
“So will you vote for me?” Hamawy asked. The man said he would look at the pamphlet stuck in his front door.
New Jerseyans head to the polls in less than two weeks in a host of high-stakes primary races for Democrats ahead of November’s midterm elections. But none are more crowded than the state’s sprawling 12th Congressional District, which leans heavily blue and encompasses urban locales like Trenton, wealthy suburbs like Princeton and working-class towns like Manville.
Thirteen candidates are running for the Democratic nomination to replace Bonnie Watson Coleman, who is retiring after holding the seat for the past 11 years. She won her last two congressional elections with more than 63% of the vote.
But three top fundraisers have emerged from the field, said Matt Hale, a political professor at Seton Hall University. In the first quarter of 2026, Hamawy brought in over half a million dollars, well more than any other candidate. East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen was second with just over $400,000, and former head of the New Jersey Working Families Party Sue Altman was a close third with $406,000. It’s unclear how much additional money candidates have raised in the past two months.
The question now, Hale said, is how far left Democratic voters are willing to go when choosing their nominee.
Adam Hamawy canvassing in Trenton.
All three of the front-runners align closely on several progressive issues. Each has said they support abolishing President Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Altman and Hamawy both say they support Medicare for All. Cohen, a practicing OB-GYN, does not specify Medicare, but says he supports universal healthcare for all Americans. And all three have spoken out against the Iran war as a waste of taxpayer money.
Where Hamawy goes further is on the topic of Israel. He freely calls Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide” — something his fellow Democratic candidates in the district have not been willing to do.
“[Hamawy] is as far progressive and as left as you can possibly get on a whole host of issues,” Hale said.
Altman has not gone as far as Hamawy. “ I've called [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu a war criminal. I'm comfortable with that language,” she told Gothamist.
Cohen, who is Jewish, has campaigned as one of the most pro-Israel candidates in the field and touted his membership in the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful political organization that lobbies for strong U.S.-Israeli relations. However, AIPAC has yet to make a significant donation to Cohen’s campaign. Cohen did not respond to multiple phone calls to speak for this story.
Outside support
Sue Altman likes to say her career in politics started when Chris Christie threw a microphone at her.
It was 2016. Altman was working as an education consultant at the time when she attended a town hall in Bordentown. Christie, a Republican in his second term as New Jersey's governor, was on hand to discuss his education funding plan that boosted aid to the suburbs while scaling back funding for urban schools.
Altman stood up during the meeting and verbally sparred with Christie for roughly six minutes. She criticized his plan’s drastic cuts to funding for Camden, one of the state’s poorest cities, where she said kids can’t even drink the school’s water because of lead contamination.
Christie, who was known to get into public arguments with voters, finally relented and tossed Altman the microphone.
“My entire career I've been taking on powerful people,” Altman told Gothamist, reflecting on the Christie episode.
Altman went on to serve as the executive director of the Working Families Party in New Jersey and most recently worked as U.S. Sen. Andy Kim’s state director.
She has earned the endorsement of a number of New Jersey progressive groups, including the New Jersey Working Families Party, New Jersey Citizen Action and the Princeton Democratic Community Organization. And she has questioned the significance of Sen. Bernie Sanders' endorsement of Hamawy.
“ Bernie's not from New Jersey, so I don't really know why he's endorsing here,’ she said.
“ Progressive local groups have endorsed me, and my opponent is getting Bernie Sanders, and I think there's a real conversation here about whose seat this is,” Altman said. “I think voters will choose the local option.”
Altman also criticized money flowing from outside New Jersey into Hamawy’s campaign. American Priorities, a new pro-Palestinian super PAC launched this year to counter the flow of pro-Israel money flowing to candidates, said it’s planning to spend $2 million to support Hamawy. Top donors to American Priorities include Omer Hasan, a former executive at multibillion-dollar tech company AppLovin, and Silicon Valley-based angel investor Tariq Afar Ahmed. In April, the PAC shelled out $600,000 in ad buys on TV and digital platforms for Hamawy.
“What we have here is an attempt by billionaires to buy this election,” Altman said. “[Hamawy] had three or more weeks of airtime to himself with this million-dollar or $2 million donation from billionaires. I think you'll start to see the score evened out once voters get to hear my story.”
Hamawy spokesperson Vincent Vertuccio called Altman’s comments about Hamawy’s support a “weak-sauce attack.” He added that Hamawy wants to see campaign finance reform in Washington.
“While we still contend with that broken campaign finance system, we’re grateful that some folks with resources are pushing back and standing up for the priorities of our communities,” Vertuccio said.
Hale said he expected the race to tighten because Hamawy’s far-left message will turn off some voters.
“If you look at the entire district, there's certainly plenty of areas in the district where that's going to cause people to run for the hills,” he said.
‘In Gaza, that wasn’t war’
Hamawy speaks about Gaza with firsthand experience.
Two years ago, Hamawy was trapped in Gaza while working as surgeon in a hospital deluged with bombing victims of the war. When he returned to New Jersey, he said it was his experience in the Middle East that motivated him to run.
“ In Gaza, that wasn't war. That was constant daily bombardment of civilians, children, men and women that were living in tents — and it was deliberate,” he told Gothamist. “I could only define it as a genocide because I saw the bodies of the, the people that came in and it wasn't an accident. You can't have an accident every single day for three years.”
Hamawy’s progressive platform earned him the Sanders endorsement.
But he’s also had to face a swirl of questions around his past connection to Omar Abdel-Rahman, a radical Muslim cleric who was known as the “Blind Sheikh.” In 1995, Abdel-Rahman was convicted of seditious conspiracy for having planned several terror plots against the United States, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He was sentenced to life in prison and later died while incarcerated.
At the 1995 trial, Hamawy was called as a defense witness and acknowledged traveling to an Islamic conference in Michigan with Abdel-Rahman, being in a hotel room with the cleric and hearing him speak of jihad.
Hamawy told Gothamist he never had a close association with Abdel-Rahman” and that he condemns all “extremism and all violence of any kind.”
”Thirty years ago, he was a well-known person in the community. He spoke all over New Jersey, and he was a blind, old man that people volunteered [to help] when he needed some kind of service because he couldn't take care of himself,” Hamawy said in Trenton.
