Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing)’s decision to retire from the 12th congressional district has practically every Democratic politician in Central Jersey looking at a campaign to succeed her, but some potential candidates also hail from outside the world of elected politics.
Jay Vaingankar, a former White House and Energy Department official under President Joe Biden, is interested in running for the district, the New Jersey Globe has learned.
The 27-year-old Vaingankar, who would be New Jersey’s first South Asian member of Congress and its first to hail from Gen Z, is a Mercer County native, raised just outside the 12th district’s boundaries in East Windsor. After graduating from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Vaingankar worked for Biden’s 2020 campaign, then joined the Biden White House as an official at the Office of Management and Administration.
In 2022, Vaingankar moved to the Department of Energy as a special advisor, where he focused on clean energy initiatives and tax credits in the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act’s passage. Once Biden left office at the beginning of this year, Vaingankar became the director of policy and markets at a solar energy developer.
In what’s sure to be a packed Democratic primary, Vaingankar lacks the electoral experience of many of his would-be opponents. Two prominent local elected officials, Somerset County Commissioner Shanel Robinson (D-Franklin) and East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen, launched campaigns the day Watson Coleman announced her retirement, and plenty of other local state legislators, county officials, and mayors are considering running as well.
But Vaingankar, who has remained active in New Jersey Democratic politics, may have national political connections that many other Democrats do not. He’d also be one of the only – perhaps the only – Asian American candidates in a district that is more than one-fifth Asian. (The highly diverse district is more than one-fifth Hispanic as well; Vaingankar speaks fluent Spanish.)
The closest New Jersey has come to electing a South Asian member of Congress was in the 2014 race for the 12th district, when then-Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula (D-Franklin) competed for the right to succeed retiring Rep. Rush Holt (D-Hopewell). Chivukula picked up strong backing in his native Somerset County and from the district’s Asian American voters, but he ultimately came in third place behind Watson Coleman and State Sen. Linda Greenstein (D-Plainsboro).
