Sue Altman has a easy message as fall arrives and Election Day nears: “I’m here.”
Being accessible to voters and the press sometimes isn’t sufficient to face aside in a decent congressional race just like the one she’s in with Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield). But Altman hopes her criticisms of Kean — that he provides too few interviews to journalists and is simply too unwilling to be within the public eye — will additional differentiate her from the Republican.
Altman, who hosted a town hall in Warren County’s Phillipsburg on Thursday night time, jabbed Kean for a video through which the congressman refused to reply questions from an NJ Spotlight reporter. The Democrat used these factors 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 advised the Globe after the town hall. “And either one of those is pretty upsetting.”
The Phillipsburg town hall is her marketing campaign’s third town hall. The occasion is a part of a town hall tour of the New Jersey seventh district’s six counties.
Altman spent a great deal of the town hall attempting to persuade voters of her political braveness.
Questions on the town halls are unscreened, a lesson she says she realized from former Gov. Chris Christie, with whom she once sparred at a 2016 town hall.
The first query, actually, got here from Jason Haley, an older man wearing camo pants and a shirt that learn “Veterans for Trump.” He requested Altman, a former skilled basketball participant, 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 advised him.
After about an hour of Q+A, Altman sat close to a small group of Republicans who had been asking her questions and talked for about 10 extra minutes.
One Republican requested whether or not she’d be part of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a gaggle of reasonable members of Congress that Kean is part of. She stated she would contemplate becoming a member of, however her hesitancy lies in the truth that the Problem Solvers “haven’t done much problem-solving” due to nationwide politics that disincentivize such work.
Another Republican voter at one level requested her a couple of November 2020 tweet she despatched that featured the phrase “Defund the Police.” Altman, the previous govt director of the progressive Working Families Party, stated she regretted utilizing that message within the aftermath of the homicide 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 stated.
The Kean marketing campaign has used that tweet, in addition to different pre-campaign Altman tweets supporting police reform, to name the Democrat “anti-police.”
Altman rejected that characterization Thursday, and stated her evolving positions on the difficulty present a real change that must 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 stated. “I am not shy about it, and I think that is true courage.”
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