Inside Elections

New Jersey’s 7th District is almost exactly the kind of seat Democrats need to win to take back the House in 2024. 

The party’s path back to the majority runs squarely through the 18 districts represented by Republicans that Joe Biden would have carried in the 2020 presidential election, districts that are, by and large, suburban seats with large numbers of college-educated voters that shifted toward Democrats between the 2016 and 2020 elections. In other words, districts like New Jersey’s 7th. 

The North and Central Jersey district was represented by Republicans from the 1980s until 2018, when diplomat Tom Malinowski flipped it as part of Democrats’ landslide victory in the Garden State.

But Malinowski lost re-election in 2022 to Tom Kean, Jr., a Republican who ran as a throwback to an earlier era.

Malinowski has ruled out a rematch, leaving Democrats with an open primary field that, despite the district’s competitive nature and prominent spot on the battlefield, has been slow to develop.

The Lay of the Land
The 7th includes both inner suburbs of New York City and more rural counties along the Pennsylvania border. The district is roughly triangular in shape and spans the width of the state, with points at Lambertville and Stillwater along the Delaware River in the west, and in Union County along the Hudson River to the east.

The district includes parts or all of six counties: Union County (24 percent of the district’s population), Somerset (21 percent),…