New York Magazine: Can an Invisible Congressman Win Reelection?

By Chris Smith, a longtime contributing writer

Tom Kean Jr. needed to vanish to become interesting. He’d been in public office for 25 years — first as a New Jersey state assemblyman, then a state senator, then a congressman — without making much of an impression. The only federal bill he’d written that became law, signed by President Joe Biden, increased funding for firefighters. It was worthy but not especially noteworthy.

House members of both parties desperately try to attract attention and stand out from their 434 colleagues. Yet Kean, after unseating a Democratic incumbent in 2022, went in the opposite direction: He generally shunned the press and seemed to prefer video town halls to in-person gatherings. If the wider civilian public recognized his name, it was because Kean was the eldest child and namesake of a widely respected former New Jersey governor.

Then, late on the afternoon of March 5, Kean voted “yes” on a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, helping end a partial shutdown of the agency in the wake of a string of ICE shootings. After which the congressman went … well, almost no one knew where. For nearly four months.

Kean, 58, attracted more press coverage during his absence than he’d probably accumulated in the previous quarter century. Reporters checked out a Kean family-owned ten-acre estate on Fishers Island in Long Island Sound and another on the Jersey shore that’s registered under the name Rendezvous LLC. They quizzed the neighbors of Kean’s primary residence in Westfield, New Jersey, and noted that the house’s mailbox was full. No signs of the congressman.

Social-media posts and press releases kept flowing, keeping up an eerie appearance that Kean was still on the job, even as most of the staffers preparing these dispatches had no idea where their boss had gone. “They were worried about him and frustrated with the lack of information,” a New Jersey political insider says. About six weeks into the mystery, a post appeared bearing Kean’s signature, saying only that he was addressing “a personal medical issue.”

When Kean did resurface in late June, he took to the House floor in a largely empty chamber. There, he read a five-minute statement disclosing that he had been hospitalized for the treatment of depression. “There is no timeline for healing,” he said. “There is no timeline for recovery. Only the work of getting better one day at a time.”

This explanation for Kean’s absence from Congress generated considerable and justifiable sympathy — mixed with criticism that, unlike other lawmakers who have received treatment for serious depression, Kean kept his whereabouts unknown.

After his D.C. speech, Kean mostly went dark again. Over the past few months, he has launched a kind of political science experiment: Can you win a tough reelection fight in a key House district against a formidable opponent by largely staying out of view?

Carlos Santos is the chairman of the Republican committee in Union County, a crucial population center at the eastern end of Kean’s congressional district. He has nothing but praise to offer. “The congressman delivers for the people of CD 7. For instance, he brought back some tax cuts with SALT,” Santos says, referencing the federal deduction for state and local taxes. Last year, Kean voted to raise the limit by $30,000 after voting to lower it during President Donald Trump’s first term — a decrease that hit hardest in blue states, including California, New York, and New Jersey.

Does it bother Santos that Kean was off the radar for months? “Hey, we’ve elected Democrats that have been dead,” he says. (Well, Pennsylvania has, anyway.) “The congressman has been in our office for door-knocking launches. And I’m going to be with him tonight.”

Really? What’s the event tonight?

“Um,” Santos says. “Local events around the county.”
He can’t divulge where Kean will be because the campaign doesn’t publicly release its schedule and many of Kean’s appearances are invitation-only. My interview requests to the campaign and to Kean’s Capitol Hill office went unreturned. It’s a different way to run a campaign, I say. “Yes,” Santos replies, tightly.

Mike DuHaime has been the political director of the Republican National Committee, and he ran Chris Christie’s first winning bid for New Jersey governor. He has known the Kean family for decades. “On the trail, Tom is hearing from people who are sharing personal stories with him and they’re appreciative of him being forthright about his depression,” DuHaime says. “Will that add up to some votes? I don’t know.”

Regardless, Kean is running up against an electoral force stronger than anything related to his personal story: the president’s deep unpopularity. Kean, in his single debate with Democrat Rebecca Bennett, refused to distance himself from Trump on the Iran war or tariffs. “When the president’s numbers are where they are nationally, and even worse in New Jersey, that’s going to make it really difficult for any Republican in this district,” DuHaime says — even in a district where Republicans have a registration edge of about 19,000 voters and even though Kean retains a financial advantage over his opponent. Polls have been sparse, but in mid-October, two of the biggest Republican super-PACs seemed to take a dire view of Kean’s prospects, pulling all ad money from New Jersey and redeploying it in more winnable races. (A Democratic strategist, evaluating both Bennett’s prospects and the wider midterm outlook but determined not to sound overoptimistic, says, “Things are looking less shit.”)

The Trump drag and the strangeness of Kean’s absence aren’t the only factors shaping this race, however. The Democratic primary yielded in Bennett a nominee who is both engaging and a good ideological fit for the general-election audience. She is a classic centrist in the mold of fellow military veterans like New Jersey governor Mikie Sherrill, in contrast to some of her party’s more left-leaning candidates. “The Navy pilot thing kind of screams moderate,” DuHaime says. “Nobody thinks communists are going to the Naval Academy.”

When I meet her, Bennett is wearing white sneakers, sensible blue jeans, and a jacket that is — what exactly is that color? She consults with an aide, and they decide on fuchsia. “I spent 15 years wearing a flight suit every day,” she says with a laugh. “When I got out, I didn’t know how to dress. I was looking at regular clothes and saying, ‘Where are all the pockets?’”

She has just finished speaking to a group of about 100 mostly Democratic voters in Califon, New Jersey, a bucolic town set amid rolling hills, horse ranches, and insurance-company office parks. It’s in the western part of a district that borders Staten Island, then fans out toward Pennsylvania. The Seventh Congressional District contains wildly different demographics. On balance, the district is wealthy, highly educated, and predominantly white, but it includes some gritty industrial locales such as Rahway and parts of Linden.

Bennett, 40, grew up in a small town slightly southwest of Fort Worth, Texas, before winning an ROTC scholarship to attend Cornell University. After flying the Navy’s version of a Black Hawk helicopter, including in missions over the Middle East, Bennett moved to New Jersey to take a job in middle management at Johnson & Johnson. When it comes to public disgust, big pharma rivals Trump, so Kean’s ads have been hammering Bennett for the roughly seven years she spent employed in the industry. She claims the experience prepared her to push for patient-friendly legislation should she get to Washington, including for a public-health insurance option.

The fact that Bennett was a registered Republican until 2016 may well help her against Kean, given the district’s swingy history, as may the fact that Trump was the reason she switched parties. In 2016, she says, “I looked at it and realized my values aligned with the Democratic Party.” Ask about whether the party nationally has embraced too many cultural-identity issues and Bennett tacks rapidly back to her pragmatic message. “What I hear every day on the campaign trail when I’m talking with voters is things are not working for them — whether it’s ‘Prices are too high’ or their kids can’t find jobs … We gotta go, we gotta try, we gotta iterate. It’s not about spending the next 20 years talking.”

Bennett’s sense of urgency kicked in two days after Trump beat Kamala Harris: “My whole life, I have just run at whatever the biggest, hardest problem is. I told my husband, ‘I have to run for office now.’” She has proved a fast learner as a first-time candidate, shedding much of her initial stiffness. Bennett weaves in endearing anecdotes about her two young daughters — “The other day, my older one didn’t want to do something and she goes, ‘It is my body, my choice.’ And I was like, ‘That’s great, but you gotta brush your teeth’”— while not hesitating to knock out some teeth. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is “an absolute disgrace.” Her opponent, Kean, is ”a coward.” How? “Why is he continuing to do what Mike Johnson and Trump tell him to do? He’s a rubber stamp. He’s not willing to face voters; he’s not willing to talk to them.”

How to discuss Kean’s treatment for depression while not appearing callous has been tricky. Bennett regularly expresses her hope that the congressman’s recovery is going well before pivoting to how she believes Kean’s absence hurt the district. “He seems like a nice guy,” she says. “But we need someone who is going to show up and represent. I think that he has failed this district. I think he voted to take health care away from tens of thousands of people.”

She’s referring to her opponent’s 2025 vote in favor of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cut more than $1 trillion in Medicaid and Obamacare spending. Bennett stops short of spelling out the contrast she’s drawing. In a moment of crisis, Tom Kean Jr. deserved to get health care. But he didn’t need to worry about his insurance coverage.