New Jersey’s Activist-In-Chief Wants To Flip A Swing Seat

Democrat Sue Altman is hoping voters focus on Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr.’s record without getting hung up on her progressive past.

FLEMINGTON, N.J. — Sue Altman first made national headlines when she was expelled from a New Jersey state Senate hearing by state troopers in November 2019.

The moment was captured in a photo of Altman, then the state director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance ― a state branch of the progressive Working Families Party ― being physically dragged out of the room with her head held high in defiance.

At the time, Altman was the leading critic of a state tax incentive program that handsomely benefited George Norcross III, the well-connected insurance executive regarded, for decades, as the most powerful figure in South Jersey politics. The troopers had been tasked with ejecting jeering demonstrators, but Altman was quiet at the time of her removal, fueling speculation she had been singled out for her role as a ringleader.

The moment captured Altman’s essence as an irritatingly effective thorn in the side of the Garden State’s famously clubby Democratic establishment. Earlier in 2019, she had led a demonstration outside of Sen. Cory Booker’s presidential campaign fundraiser with Norcross and other New Jersey bosses. And in 2021, Altman picketed outside of Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s district office over his effort to delay a vote on President Joe Biden’s sweeping climate and social policy bill.

That kind of stint as a rabble-rouser is not exactly the textbook prelude to a congressional run in a Republican-held seat, but Altman is not one to follow conventions. Trading in her black-and-orange Working Families Party T-shirt for business attire, she is now the presumptive Democratic nominee in New Jersey’s purple 7th Congressional District, where ousting first-term Rep. Tom Kean Jr. is part of Democrats’ strategy for retaking the House.