Sue Altman has a simple message as fall arrives and Election Day nears: “I’m here.”
Being accessible to voters and the press typically isn’t enough to stand apart in a tight congressional race like the one she’s in with Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield). But Altman hopes her criticisms of Kean — that he gives too few interviews to journalists and is too unwilling to be in the public eye — will further differentiate her from the Republican.
Altman, who hosted a town hall in Warren County’s Phillipsburg on Thursday night, jabbed Kean for a video in which the congressman refused to answer questions from an NJ Spotlight reporter. The Democrat used these points to double down on an argument she made in her first town hall: that Kean lacks “political courage.”
“He’s either deeply uncomfortable with a cognitive dissonance he’s holding in his brain about the job he has, or he doesn’t want the job, or he just cannot defend his positions,” Altman told the Globe after the town hall. “And either one of those is pretty upsetting.”
The Phillipsburg town hall is her campaign’s third town hall. The event is part of a town hall tour of the New Jersey 7th district’s six counties.
Altman spent a good deal of the town hall trying to convince voters of her political courage.
Questions at the town halls are unscreened, a lesson she says she learned from former Gov. Chris Christie, with whom she once sparred at a 2016 town hall.
The first question, in fact, came from Jason Haley, an older man dressed in camo pants and a shirt that read “Veterans for Trump.” He asked Altman, a former professional basketball player, how she “felt about competing against biological males.”
“If we decide as a society that making rules about who is and who isn’t female is more important than giving young children a chance to get teams and compete as a part of something bigger than themselves, especially young people who are more susceptible to suicide and bullying, then I think we’ve lost our way a little bit,” she told him.
After about an hour of Q+A, Altman sat near a small group of Republicans who had been asking her questions and talked for about 10 more minutes.
One Republican asked whether she’d join the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of moderate members of Congress that Kean is a part of. She said she would consider joining, but her hesitancy lies in the fact that the Problem Solvers “haven’t done much problem-solving” because of national politics that disincentivize such work.
Another Republican voter at one point asked her about a November 2020 tweet she sent that featured the phrase “Defund the Police.” Altman, the former executive director of the progressive Working Families Party, said she regretted using that message in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.
“When I wrote the hashtag, which I do regret because I think what I’ve learned in the subsequent four or five years is that it caused a lot of harm, I was moved by that movement emotionally,” she said.
The Kean campaign has used that tweet, as well as other pre-campaign Altman tweets supporting police reform, to call the Democrat “anti-police.”
Altman rejected that characterization Thursday, and said her evolving positions on the issue show a genuine change that should be lauded from politicians.
“I didn’t get it right. I’ve gone, I’ve done my homework, and I’ve evolved in my position, and I’m here to explain it,” Altman said. “I am not shy about it, and I think that is true courage.”