A brief electoral history of Josh Gottheimer

When it comes to running in a Democratic primary, contests decided by droves of highly engaged liberal voters, it’s usually seen as wise to claim the progressive lane. You don’t have to run as a socialist, per se, but at least don’t give your opponents any angle to attack you as insufficiently progressive or, worse, as a closet Republican.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly) has studiously ignored that advice throughout his nearly 30-year career in politics. And he’s about to find out whether his own centrist political style is enough to win him New Jersey’s governorship.

After getting his start as a speechwriter in Bill Clinton’s White House, Gottheimer was elected to the U.S. House from a historically Republican North Jersey district in 2016, and has since charted a course as one of Congress’s most distinctive – and distinctively moderate – voices. A longtime co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus, Gottheimer has repeatedly gone to war with both parties on issues as varied as tax deductions, Israel, abortion, and congestion pricing.

Gottheimer’s attitude has earned him a hefty number of critics who claim he’s a traitor to the Democratic cause. But it’s also earned him a loyal following in his district, where Democratic primary voters have seen fit to renominate him cycle after cycle and where he routinely outperforms the top of the ticket in general elections.

Now Gottheimer faces the challenge of trying to scale up that profile into a statewide race where most voters have little idea of who he is. Just like he’s done back home in Bergen County, the congressman has made high taxes the centerpiece of his campaign in the hopes that affordability-focused voters will flock to him – but for the first time in his career, he has to defend his moderate record to a Democratic primary electorate who have several established, progressive alternatives to choose from.

Gottheimer insists – and has insisted since his very first campaign – that average voters care little for those intraparty squabbles and really just want politicians who are there to fight for them. He’ll soon find out whether New Jersey’s Democratic primary voters agree.

This is the ninth in a series of in-depth histories of New Jersey gubernatorial candidates. Previous profiles: Steve Fulop, Steve Sweeney, Jon Bramnick, Ras Baraka, Jack Ciattarelli, Ed Durr, Bill Spadea, Sean Spiller

Speech writer

Lots of successful politicians caught the political bug early on in their careers. But “early” doesn’t fully capture just how young Gottheimer was when he started making his way up the political ladder.

Raised in North Caldwell, a tony suburb northwest of Newark (and one of the inspirations for the setting of The Sopranos), Gottheimer’s first political gig was as a Senate page for Senator Frank Lautenberg at the age of 16. During high school and college, Gottheimer spent his summers working for the House Speaker Tom Foley, the secretary of the Senate, and C-SPAN; while he was still at the University of Pennsylvania, he took a job on Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign.

And once Clinton had won re-election (and Gottheimer had spent a year at Oxford), an even bigger offer came: presidential speechwriter. During the last few years of the Clinton administration, Gottheimer became one of the small handful of people writing the words that the president spoke to the nation.

“The good news is, I was only 23, so I don’t think I realized just how overwhelmed I should have been by being in the West Wing,” Gottheimer said in a 2020 Roll Call interview.

Gottheimer has said repeatedly that Clinton was his political hero, and it’s not hard to see the throughlines of Clinton’s calculated centrism in Gottheimer’s own moderate politics. In one 2014 interview with local paper the Jewish Standard – two years before he launched his first House campaign – Gottheimer labeled himself a “conservative Democrat,” a phrase few Democrats today would dare utter.

When George W. Bush won the White House in 2000, Gottheimer was out of a job, and he spent the next few years pursuing a variety of different missions: getting a law degree, working on Wesley Clark’s, John Kerry’s, and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns, and – most interestingly – editing Ripples of Hope, a book compiling the greatest American civil rights speeches. (He’s one of a number of published authors in the 2025 field: Jon Bramnick wrote Why People Don’t Like You in 2019, Ed Durr put out the biography The Drive: Lessons Learned in 2024, and a 22-year-old Ras Baraka edited an anthology of young Black writers in 1992.)

In 2006, Gottheimer got married to the similarly high-powered lawyer Marla Tusk, whom he met at Penn, and they had their two kids while Gottheimer was working at Ford, the Federal Communications Commission, and Microsoft. Sometime around 2012, they settled back in Wyckoff in Bergen County, a few towns north of Gottheimer’s childhood home.

Even though he was a reasonably notable figure in Clintonworld, when he moved back to his home state, no one in the tight-knit, sealed-off world of New Jersey politics had any idea who the hell Gottheimer was. But Gottheimer’s friendly 2014 interviewer in the Jewish Standard seemed aware that that might soon change.

“It is likely that we will hear much more from him,” she wrote.

Seat flipper

While New Jersey’s congressional delegation has always had at least a handful of GOP members, there was one Republican congressman whose presence in Washington always ranked the most: Rep. Scott Garrett (R-Wantage).

Garrett, a former assemblyman from rural Sussex County, had first won a seat in Congress in 2002 after essentially badgering Rep. Marge Roukema (R-Ridgewood) into retirement; Garrett had nearly defeated the far more moderate Roukema in both the 1998 and 2000 primaries, and Roukema decided to call it quits rather than go through another round. Because the 5th district stretched from Warren County to the Hudson River, Garrett’s victory meant that much of genteel, old-school Republican Bergen County – which had been divided in the 2002 primary between two local candidates, allowing Garrett to win – was suddenly represented by an arch-conservative.

Once in the House, Garrett continued to ruffle feathers. He was a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, with one former aide saying that “even before the Tea Party was a thing, we had Scott Garrett”; he was regularly the only New Jersey House member to vote against basic bipartisan bills on government funding, transportation projects, and 9/11 first responders; and, most famously, he refused to pay his dues to the National Republican Campaign Committee, reportedly because they had supported openly gay candidates. (Garrett had a different account, saying that he opposed supporting GOP candidates who were in favor of gay marriage.) 

In 2016, national Democrats released a research report to guide messaging against Garrett. It was 1,109 pages long.

The problem for Democrats, though, was that they kept on failing to find a good opening to really take Garrett on. The 5th district wasn’t deep-red, but it still leaned towards Republicans, and the Democratic candidates who ran against Garrett – Teaneck Councilman Adam Gussen in 2012, attorney Roy Cho in 2014 – weren’t able to garner the money and attention they needed to make Garrett sweat.

Enter Josh Gottheimer. Gottheimer, still a total unknown at the time among New Jersey pols, had begun strategizing about running for the district in 2014, when Cho was still waging his ultimately doomed battle against Garrett. In early 2015, Gottheimer started raising gobs of money for a campaign, tapping into Clintonworld and the private sector networks he had been building for years.

By the time Gottheimer “officially” launched his campaign in February 2016, he had already locked down support from local Democrats (Senator Cory Booker, who grew up in the 5th district, attended the launch); warded off potential primary opponents like Cho or Paramus Mayor Richard LaBarbiera; and raised $1.4 million, more than Cho had raised for his entire campaign two years earlier.

It was clear that Gottheimer wasn’t just tapping the Clintons for money. There were certain social issues like abortion and gay marriage on which he would not compromise – a clear contrast with Garrett – but otherwise, Gottheimer embraced the centrism that had propelled Clinton in the 1990s, especially on economic issues. Politico noted that Gottheimer’s kickoff referenced Ronald Reagan twice and barely referenced his own party affiliation; the New York Times reported that he presented himself as “very fiscally conservative” at fundraisers.

And as Gottheimer’s star was rising, Garrett’s was in freefall. Wall Street donors, turned off by Garrett’s social stances and seeing little reason to dislike Gottheimer, started abandoning Garrett despite his prominent position on the Financial Services Committee. The National Republican Campaign Committee, still smarting over the gay candidates dispute, declined to get involved in the race even as Democrats started spending millions. (By the end of the campaign, Democratic groups had outspent Republicans $6.4 million to $461,000, per OpenSecrets.)

That financial disparity allowed Democrats to finally drive home the messaging they had been honing for years: that Garrett was a right-wing crank way out of step with his centrist district. During an acrimonious radio debate, Gottheimer labeled Garrett as “New Jersey’s resident fanatic” and slammed the congressman for his decade-and-a-half of controversial votes.

“Your record on saying no to women, on voting against the Voting Rights Act, on saying no to everyone, is consistent, and it’s completely in line with what your values are, with the Tea Party values you hold,” Gottheimer said. “Those are not New Jersey values.”

Garrett tried to turn the tables on Gottheimer, calling him a liar and a “tax and spend liberal” – but Gottheimer’s relentless message discipline (and his convenient lack of a voting record) gave the congressman few obvious openings on which to launch attacks.

On Election Day, not much went right for Democrats. Hillary Clinton shockingly lost the White House to Donald Trump, kicking off a brand-new political era, and Democrats fell far short of their goal – admittedly an ambitious one – of flipping the House.

But one of the few bright spots came in New Jersey’s 5th district, where Gottheimer ousted Garrett by 14,897 votes, 51% to 47%. It was the first time a Democrat had represented the historically deep-red district since Watergate baby Rep. Andrew Maguire (D-Ridgewood) lost re-election in 1980, and it came in spite of the fact that Trump was carrying the district; Gottheimer won over thousands of voters who also supported Trump on the same ballot, flipping swing towns like Paramus, River Vale, and Newton into his column.

At his victory party, Gottheimer told NJ Spotlight News that the result was a vindication of his theory of politics: voters like moderation, hate extremism, and want a congressman who will focus on getting concrete things done. He abided by that mission, he said, and Garrett did not.

“The overall message that I was talking about, which is lower taxes and Jersey values of actually working together across the aisle to get things done,” Gottheimer said. “I think that’s what people want, especially people around here, who are so sick and tired of the partisanship. They want someone who is actually going to fight for them, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Problem solver

Lots of House members, in their first few terms in Washington, keep a relatively low profile and quietly figure out how to get things done. Gottheimer – younger than anyone else in the New Jersey House delegation by a full fifteen years, and one of just five Democrats to flip non-redistricted House seats in 2016 – decided that wasn’t his style.

As a freshman, Gottheimer became the co-chairman of the fledgling House Problem Solvers Caucus, a coalition of moderate Democrats and Republicans who positioned themselves as Congress’s power brokers on thorny issues requiring bipartisan cooperation. (Gottheimer remained the caucus’s Democratic leader until last year.) And as Republicans debated plans for overhauling Obamacare and taxes, Gottheimer was one of the few Democrats to signal any interest in working with them.

“I’m not beholden to any particular party, I do what’s best for the 5th district,” Gottheimer told WNYC after his swearing-in in January 2017. “Some days the Democrats are going to love me, some days the Republicans are going to love me, and to me that’s the right place because what you want to do is find a middle where you can get things done and work together.”

Republican leaders at the time had little interest in working with Gottheimer or any other Democrats, and the bills they pushed through the House – one partially repealing Obamacare, and another making sweeping tax changes that included a new cap on the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction – were loathed by the freshman congressman. The SALT cap in particular galled Gottheimer; he said the tax bill, eventually signed into law, was “not pro-business and it’s certainly not pro-New Jersey.”

But Gottheimer’s legislative losses in Washington were his political gains at home. Gottheimer said that he had inherited something of a mess from Garrett – he told Politico that Garrett’s office had never sent their constituent files, and that some constituents had been ignored by Garrett entirely during his tenure – meaning that Gottheimer had to start from scratch. (Gottheimer has since developed a reputation as an indefatigable legislator, one whose days are packed even by Congress’s busy standards.)

A member of the Financial Services Committee from his first term onwards, Gottheimer also became adept at raising vast sums of campaign money from both corporate sources and small donors, eventually leading to his moniker of “the Human Fundraising Machine.”

Early on in the 2018 cycle, Republicans expressed some hope of making Gottheimer a one-term congressman; with a less polarizing nominee than Garrett on their ticket, perhaps they could make the 5th district’s GOP roots reassert themselves. But as Trump’s standing plummeted in New Jersey’s suburbs, those hopes faded, and the party – more concerned with vulnerable incumbents in nearby districts – ended up abandoning its own nominee, John McCann.

McCann, a little-known former Cresskill councilman who had already taken a beating in a nasty primary against former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan, was left to fend for himself against Gottheimer’s millions. And Gottheimer took full advantage, deriding McCann as a yes-man for Trump while continuing to sell himself as a problem solver willing to stake out more conservative positions than the rest of his party. (One NJ Spotlight News headline even went so far as to say Gottheimer and McCann “both lean right.”)

The result was perhaps the most impressive Democratic performance the 5th district has ever seen. Gottheimer won 56% to 42%, carrying nearly every town in Bergen County and making massive inroads in the conservative rural turf in the district’s western reaches. From Allendale to Wantage, voters were overwhelmingly sold on their new congressman.

Results beyond the 5th district, too, brought good news for Democrats, who flipped four House seats in New Jersey and 41 nationwide. Those victories gave Gottheimer a position of power in the House for the first time – and they happened in part because candidates followed the socially liberal, fiscally centrist path Gottheimer had laid out two years earlier.

House Democrats’ 2018 resurgence did presage a new problem for Gottheimer, however. Up until that point, progressive activists who disliked Gottheimer’s moderate rhetoric and voting record were willing to put up with it, seeing the congressman as their best chance of holding a difficult seat.

“Yes, sometimes we’re going to take issue with Gottheimer’s votes,” Rosi Efthim, the editor of the progressive site Blue Jersey, wrote in 2017. “Yes, a ‘moderate’ Dem of Clintonesque background may frustrate his more progressive constituents. But remember: Scott Garrett used to occupy this seat.”

But as the Democratic Party shifted leftwards, and as Democrats were presented with the question of what to do with their newly gained House majority, that fragile consensus buckled. Progressive Democrats in the 5th district started to wonder: was Gottheimer actually their champion? Or could they beat him with someone they liked better? (Their nitpicks weren’t exclusively ideological; reports steadily trickled out about Gottheimer’s hard-nosed style rubbing his House colleagues the wrong way, and a story from the left-wing outlet The Intercept claimed he was a “really terrible boss” towards his staffers.)

In July 2019, progressives found their champion: Arati Kreibich, a neuroscientist and Glen Rock councilwoman who had volunteered for Gottheimer in 2018 but soon turned against him. Kreibich called Gottheimer “Trump’s favorite Democrat,” noting that he had voted with Trump 77% of the time in 2018, tied for the most of any Democrat in the country, and had specifically broken with his party on key immigration votes; the district would be better served, she argued, by a more reliably liberal Democrat.

“It has become clear that he is just not doing the job that we asked him to do,” Kreibich told HuffPost after she launched her campaign. “He’s actively working against us.”

Gottheimer strongly pushed back on Kreibich’s insinuation that he was a secret Republican, saying that he was a “lifelong Democrat” and citing the support of leading Democrats like Nancy Pelosi despite his past battles with her. But he also refused to get dragged into a progressive-off with Kreibich, drawing a sharp line between himself and “the fringes of the party.” (Gottheimer has also, more memorably, privately termed that wing of the party the “herbal tea party.”)

“I’m proud to be running with Joe Biden and Cory Booker,” he said late in the campaign. “And I’ll be honest, if Bernie Sanders, socialized medicine and extremism are more of your view, then my opponent is probably your candidate.”

Gottheimer could, of course, count on his vast campaign warchest and the formidable Bergen County Democratic organization to back him up, institutional strength for which Kreibich had no answer, especially in an unusual July primary conducted entirely by mail due to Covid. But he was also banking on a truth he had believed in for years: voters, even Democratic primary voters, are ultimately interested in supporting politicians they believe will lower costs and get things done, regardless of ideology.

And his bet paid off. Even as progressive insurgents beat Democratic incumbents elsewhere around the country, Gottheimer walloped Kreibich 66% to 33%, winning every town in the district except Kreibich’s home of Glen Rock; Kreibich did better than a smattering of other left-wing challengers in New Jersey House races that year, but her contention that 5th district voters were begging for relief from Gottheimer simply didn’t pan out.

In a 2022 profile in the New York Times, Gottheimer noted the contrast between his own voters and the people he said were most likely to harp on him: social media activists, for example, or Intercept reporters, or left-wing Democrats in Congress. “The social media Democrats are not the Democrats back home,” Gottheimer said. “Those aren’t my constituents.”

Republicans, meanwhile, denied McCann an opportunity to take on Gottheimer again and instead nominated Frank Pallotta, an investment banker who promised the ability to self-fund his campaign. Gottheimer took the race seriously – he had said during his primary against Kreibich that Trump remained popular in the district and that “it’s going to be a tough race again” – but national Republicans didn’t, and Pallotta was left by the wayside just like Garrett and McCann before him.

Pallotta didn’t help his cause, either, when he repeatedly affirmed his support for Trump and called the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia organization, “good people.” For the third time in a row, Gottheimer was put in a position where he could position himself as a sensible moderate and his opponent as an extremist. (Pallotta, like his predecessors, tried to argue that Gottheimer’s moderate persona was a facade for a radical liberal hiding underneath, but that argument was too far removed from reality to really stick.)

The final margin wasn’t as much of a blowout as Democrats might have been hoping for; Gottheimer won 53% to 46%, outperforming Joe Biden by around two points, the only re-election contest thus far that the congressman hasn’t won by double digits. A win was a win, though, and Gottheimer entered 2021 as a member of a Democratic trifecta for the first time.

But emboldened by three consecutive general election wins and a convincing primary victory to boot, the congressman was starting to have other ideas about what he could accomplish.

Standard bearer

In late 2021, Democrats on the New Jersey Congressional Redistricting Commission made life a lot easier for Gottheimer. On the map they drew, which was eventually selected as the state’s new congressional map, the 5th district shed much of its conservative territory in the far west and gained deep-blue towns like Fort Lee and Englewood, pushing it from a Biden +6 district to a Biden +12 one. After three cycles on the front lines of the Democratic majority, Gottheimer seemed to no longer be a truly swing-district congressman.

Thanks to the new map, Gottheimer’s 2022 and 2024 re-election contests were relatively sleepy ones, at least by the standards of his prior races. He dispatched Pallotta in 2022 by 10 points and Republican Mary Jo Guinchard in 2024 by 11 points, using the same tried-and-true strategy he’d honed to an art: I’m Josh Gottheimer, your anti-tax, pro-law enforcement congressman, and my opponent is an extremist. (The latter win represented an impressive 10-point overperformance compared to Kamala Harris, who won the 5th district by a shockingly small 50%-48% margin.)

In 2022, Gottheimer also used some of his own campaign funds to boost Pallotta over Nick De Gregorio, a U.S. Marine veteran who was seen by both Gottheimer and national Republicans as a stronger recruit; he sent mailers to Republicans claiming that Pallotta, who didn’t have much campaign money of his own, was “too much like Trump.” Pallotta ended up narrowly beating De Gregorio in the GOP primary, which suited Gottheimer just fine.

Notably, Gottheimer didn’t face any primary challengers either year, even when the rest of New Jersey politics went haywire during the 2024 cycle. Kreibich remains the only fellow Democrat Gottheimer has ever had to face, a testament to his ability to scare away potential opponents on his home turf.

But that hasn’t meant that the congressman has softened his centrist rhetoric or record – far from it. To this day, Gottheimer remains among the most moderate Democrats in Congress, a title he relishes and touts frequently; he’ll even occasionally take the fight to Democratic House leaders, like in 2021 when he pulled together a coalition of nine moderate Democrats who threatened to blow up House leaders’ budget plans if they didn’t put up a Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill for a vote.

In the last few years, Gottheimer become a leading voice on a few issues in particular: repealing the SALT deduction cap and lowering taxes in New Jersey; opposing New York City’s congestion pricing scheme, which he calls a “congestion tax”; and supporting Israel unequivocally, standing out even from the already pro-Israel mood in Congress. All three fights have earned him some detractors, but he sees more upsides than downsides in taking them on.

And as many top New Jersey Democrats came around to the idea of abolishing the county line, the ballot design system that has helped party-endorsed candidates for decades, Gottheimer was one of the few who loudly came to its defense. “It’s a democratic approach that I’ve long supported,” Gottheimer said in September 2023, though he gave a less committal answer when asked the same question last summer, after the line was on its way out the door.

Where has it all been headed? Speculation abounded for years about what Gottheimer would do with his political career – and with his campaign bank account, which reached an astounding $20 million last year after years of diligent fundraising and frugal spending. When Bob Menendez was indicted in the fall of 2023, some Democrats floated Gottheimer as a contender to replace him, but Gottheimer had his eye on what he believed to be a bigger prize.

On November 15, after months of it being an open secret (and only a couple weeks after winning re-election to a fifth term in Congress), Gottheimer made it official: he would run for governor.

“I hear it all the time from moms and dads, kids coming out of college, and seniors: They love Jersey like we all do, but they just can’t afford to stay, or raise their families, or even take the family to a diner. That has to change,” Gottheimer said at his campaign launch in South Hackensack. “It’s time for a reboot. I’m launching my campaign for governor to cut your taxes and to make Jersey more affordable.”

Gottheimer’s affordability-obsessed opening salvo was a sign of the “Lower Taxes, Jersey Values” campaign that was to come, and it matched with the many campaigns Gottheimer had previously run for the House; “I’m the only Democrat in the country who puts ‘lower taxes’ on his signs,” he said in the 2022 New York Times profile.

But for the first time in his electoral career, his moderate messaging faces serious pushback from within his own party. No longer is it just Arati Kreibich with a few Indivisible volunteers and a prayer fighting against Gottheimer; he’s now taking on established, formidable opponents like Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair) and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka who have millions of dollars at their disposal, and they have every incentive to paint Gottheimer as a conservative turncoat.

And even if many voters aren’t yet tuned in to those intraparty battles, Democratic Party leaders clearly are. Gottheimer has struggled to gain establishment support outside of his home of Bergen County, and has even seen a few pledged endorsers turn against him and back Sherrill instead, in part because many bosses view Gottheimer’s centrism as a risky bet in a Democratic primary with no county lines.

But Gottheimer, characteristically, isn’t backing down. The congressman and two allied super PACs (which may or may not be funded by his own congressional campaign) have put millions of dollars into ads promoting Gottheimer’s plans to cut taxes and lower costs. And in Washington, Gottheimer has continued behaving and voting the same way he always has, including casting a notable vote for the Laken Riley Act, making him the only New Jersey Democrat to do so.

This year’s governor’s race, then, is the ultimate test of Gottheimer’s theory of politics, one that he’s been honing since his days in Bill Clinton’s White House and his first campaign against Scott Garrett in 2016: Americans may be riven by political disagreements, but what they ultimately want is someone who, liberal or conservative, promises to work hard for them, address their problems, and make their lives safer and more affordable. If they’re looking for those qualities in a governor, Gottheimer says he’s their guy.

“I believe that elections are all about whether you do a good job or not,” Gottheimer said in an interview with the New Jersey Globe last year. “Are you waking up and doing your job? That’s what I’m doing everyday – I’m waking up and doing my job. And that’s how people will judge you, both for re-election and what they think about you for the future. Did you do your job? Did you get stuff done for them? Are you fighting for them and getting their back?”