NJ special election pits GOP moderate against AOC, Sanders-backed progressive

Randolph, New Jersey — Republican Joe Hathaway, who is trying to flip a vacant U.S. House seat in a blue-leaning district in northern New Jersey, isn’t shy about pointing out where he disagrees with President Donald Trump, even as he accuses his Democratic opponent of being too far to the left.

“I’m going to call it ball and strike in this race. I’m not going to put my stamp on anybody,” Hathaway said when asked about Trump in an interview with Fox News Digital this week.

Hathaway will face progressive champions Sen. Sen. of Vermont in Thursday’s special election in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District. She will face Democrat Analilia Mejia, who is supported by Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of neighboring New York. The winner will replace Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democratic representative who left Congress in November after winning the New Jersey gubernatorial election.

Thursday’s special election comes as the GOP clings to its fragile House majority and will relish the opportunity to flip a suburban district that Sherrill won by 15 points in her 2024 re-election and by nearly the same margin in last year’s gubernatorial election.

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A confident Hathaway said: “I think we’ll get a broad coalition coming together to choose common sense over socialism in this race.”

Mejia, a progressive organizer who served as national political director for the 2020 Sanders presidential campaign, suffered defeat in February’s Democratic primary, narrowly edging out his more moderate opponent, former Rep. Tom Malinowski, in a field of 11 candidates. While Mejia was the clear choice of the party’s left wing, the rest of the field appeared to split the more moderate and centre-left vote.

After Democratic socialist New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani sent shockwaves across the country with his Democratic primary victory in June 2025, his victory was another boost for the anti-establishment left.

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Hathaway, the former Randolph Township mayor and current council member who is uncontested for the GOP congressional nomination, emphasized that voters’ choice is “between a level-headed, practical independent leader who gets things done at the local level in New Jersey and knows the issues, and someone who works with pure ideology, far-left ideology, and Squad-backed ideology.”

Mejia recently appeared at a town hall with Malinowski and worked with Sherrill on the campaign trail this past weekend, aiming to unite Democrats who hold a significant registration advantage in the district.

Analilia Mejia has secured the Democratic Party nomination in a special election to see who will take over newly elected New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill’s vacant House seat. (Heather Khalifa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Hathaway said Mejia is now “trying to hide some of his rhetoric from that a little bit, because he knows these policies are completely irrelevant, but he’s not fooling the voters. He’s certainly not fooling us.”

Jewish voters make up a significant portion of the district’s electorate, and Hathaway noted that in the only debate in the special election showdown, Mejia was anti-Semitic, saying Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.

“He held Israel responsible for Hamas’ attacks on October 7,” Hathaway said. “I think Jewish individuals in this area, whether Republican or Democrat, are very afraid of that kind of rhetoric.”

“I talked to more members of the Jewish community and they told me they had never voted for a Republican in their lives and they would vote for me in this race,” Hathaway said. “So that tells you where the Jewish community is on the importance of this race and that they are not aligned with Mejia and his platform.”

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Mejia vowed to “protect the rights of Jewish voters” and said his criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza should not be confused with antisemitism.

“Joe Hathaway’s inability to distinguish between criticism of a government or government official and bigotry is both disturbing and disgusting,” Mejia said in a statement to Fox News Digital.

Mejia wrote last week that he was “honored” after he was endorsed by the liberal pro-Israel political group J Street PAC. But his acceptance of the endorsement caused pushback on the left, with the Democratic Socialists of America in North Jersey calling the move a “heel turn.”

As she aims to win over independents and Democrats, Hathaway points out where she agrees and disagrees with Trump, who lost the district by eight points in his 2024 presidential election victory.

Republican congressional candidate Joe Hathaway speaks to voters at the Randolph Diner in Randolph, New Jersey, on April 13, 2026. (Paul Steinhauser/Fox News)

“I’m always going to do what’s right for this district first. And I’ve been clear: If the president is going to do good things for the district, if he’s going to increase the SALT cap cut, if he’s going to put money back in people’s pockets, especially in New Jersey, affordability is very difficult here. If we’re doing things like border security, if we’re reducing fentanyl deaths like we’re seeing in our community. Those are good things. I support those policies,” he said.

“But on the other hand, if the president is going to do things that are not in the best interest of our district, it’s my job to reverse that, and that’s exactly what I did,” he emphasized.

Hathaway noted Trump’s move last year to end billions of federal dollars for the Gateway Project, which funded a new train tunnel under the Hudson River connecting New Jersey and New York, and the president’s plans to cut nearly 1,000 jobs and fund nearly $1 billion for an Army base in New Jersey.

“I’m going to call balls and strikes in this race. I’m not going to mark anyone,” Hathaway said.

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Hathaway said her message to independents and Democrats is: “Even if you’ve never voted for a Republican, you have a chance to give it a test run over the next six months. Send me to Washington. Let me prove to you that I’m going to do what I said I was going to do, and that’s how we’re going to build the coalition to win.”

And he touted: “I think we have the right math and the right bipartisan coalition to come together to win this thing on April 16.”

Campaign signs for Republican candidate Joe Hathaway and Democrat Analilia Mejia in the New Jersey 11th District congressional election on April 13, 2026 in Randolph, New Jersey. (Paul Steinhauser/Fox News)

But Dan Cassino, a political science professor and pollster at Fairleigh Dickinson University, calls Hathaway’s hopes of catching Democrats a “pipe dream.”

“Democrats as a whole don’t seem interested in finding common ground with Trump,” he said, while predicting that most voters in the special election will be strong partisans. “Democratic turnout is through the roof and Republican turnout is low at this point.”

“Right now, everything is driven by national policy. We say all politics is local. Today, unfortunately, all politics is national,” Cassino said.

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Mejia, meanwhile, connected Hathaway to Trump and Republicans in Congress.

“MAGA Republicans are driving up daily costs with extreme policies my opponent supports. Health care and critical programs are being gutted just to fund tax cuts for the ultra-rich. We can’t afford one more vote for Trump in Congress,” he wrote in a social media post.