Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester), who has largely managed to quiet the once-vocal conservative effort to oust him from office, will nonetheless face a Republican primary challenge this year, albeit from a candidate with a sparse electoral track record.
Rob Canfield, best known for his little-noticed 2025 campaign for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, announced yesterday evening that he hopes to unseat Smith in the June primary.
“The systems in Washington are working great – for banks, for universities, and for career politicians,” Canfield said in his campaign announcement. “But families here in NJ-4 are getting crushed. I’m running to take on the institutions that profit while our kids, our businesses, and our communities pay the price.”
Canfield is the first Republican to announce a campaign against Smith, who had to win a competitive primary for renomination after the 2022 redistricting cycle but hasn’t been the target of any concerted movement to defeat him this year. Last fall, Smith received an endorsement from President Donald Trump, who had criticized the congressman in the past but who now calls him “a fantastic Representative for the wonderful people of New Jersey’s 4th Congressional District.”
Canfield began his electoral career running as an independent for Brick Township Council in 2017, earning less than 1% of the vote. He followed that up with two bids for school board in 2018 and 2019, both of which he lost by modest margins, and an independent campaign for Ocean County Commissioner in 2021, where he once again got under 1%.
In 2025, Canfield was among a handful of lesser-known Republicans who filed to run for the GOP gubernatorial nomination against frontrunners like Jack Ciattarelli and Bill Spadea. He told the New Jersey Globe at the time that he was “an average person, not some career politician or somebody who’s being funded by all the political power bosses of the state who aren’t being indicted right now.”
Canfield dropped his campaign for governor, however, after local Republicans in Brick gave him their endorsement to run for township council. That campaign, too, proved short-lived, and Canfield withdrew before the primary “to focus on a personal business venture,” per Shorebeat; had he stayed in the race, he may well have won the seat, given that Republicans swept last year’s Brick council election.
Now, Canfield is scaling back up once again to a campaign for Congress in the 4th district, a safe-red district along the Jersey Shore in Ocean and Monmouth Counties. A real estate professional, volunteer pastor, and firearms instructor, Canfield faulted Smith for his past willingness to support some gun control measures.
“As a firearms instructor and constitutional-carry advocate, I don’t just vote the right way – I live this issue,” Canfield said. “NJ-4 needs a congressman with an unambiguous pro-[2nd Amendment] record.”
Smith was first elected to the House in 1980, making him tied for the longest-serving current House member, and has won re-election 22 times since then. Throughout his tenure, Smith has largely been a loyally conservative Republican with more moderate stances on a handful of issues, among them gun control, labor unions, and infrastructure spending.
In 2021, Donald Trump decided that Smith was among the Republicans who had lost his favor, and he issued a call on social media for Smith to be defeated in the next year’s GOP primary. The smattering of Republicans who answered his call, however, never received the president’s official endorsement, and Smith was able to beat podcaster Mike Crispi 58%-37%.
Rumors of another serious primary in 2024 never materialized, and Smith won by a lopsided 85%-15% margin against an unknown challenger. With Smith now largely voting in line with Trump and the Republican majority in Washington, there have been even fewer whispers of a primary challenge this time around – especially with Trump now on his side – but Canfield has evidently chosen to take up the mantle anyways.
A growing field of Democrats is also interested in taking on Smith, although in a district that voted for Donald Trump by 30 percentage points in 2024, Smith is likely to be guaranteed a spot in Congress as long as he can keep winning Republican primaries.
This story was updated at 11:33 p.m. to reflect President Trump’s endorsement of Smith.
