New Jersey politicians running during congressional midterm cycles have a tough task early on in their campaigns: trying to build up their profiles and get their messages out while everyone in New Jersey focuses instead on the ongoing race for governor.
In the highly competitive 7th district, both incumbent Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) and a busy array of Democratic foes have still found ways to cut through the noise and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars; the same goes for 9th district Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon), but her two GOP foes are finding it harder to keep up. And elsewhere around the state, campaigns that aren’t as close to the spotlight are just heating up.
Here’s what the state’s congressional fundraising looked like during the 3rd quarter of 2025, which covers July 1 through September 30. Click here for a web version of the New Jersey Globe’s fundraising tracker, or scroll to the bottom of this article for a PDF version.
Senate (2026): A little over a year out from Election Day, Senator Cory Booker still doesn’t have any challengers, but he’s got plenty of money in case one shows up.
Booker raised $2,825,285 in Q3 – not as high as the astronomical $10 million he raised in Q2 in the wake of his marathon Senate speech, but still nothing to sneeze at. The ambitious senator has stockpiled $21,288,776, which he could use to boost his Senate re-election campaign, to help out other Democrats around the country, or to prepare for other hypothetical campaigns he might run in the future.
1st district: Like Booker, Rep. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) has not yet drawn any opponents from either party in the 1st district, South Jersey’s Democratic stronghold. Norcross raised $280,897 in the 3rd quarter and has a huge amount of money – $2,074,989 – saved up in his campaign account.
2nd district: A four-way Democratic field has developed to take on Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) in South Jersey’s conservative-leaning 2nd district, but Van Drew has built up a sizable financial advantage ahead of next year.
Van Drew raised $368,910 in the 3rd quarter and $1,110,378 on-hand after years of steady fundraising. The congressman hasn’t had a closely contested race since 2020, though he did raise and spend quite a bit during a brief Senate campaign exploration in 2023.
Former USAID official Bayly Winder is Van Drew’s best-funded Democratic opponent so far this year, having raised $139,228 in Q3 and $310,780 since launching his campaign. Civil rights attorney Tim Alexander, who previously ran for the district in both 2022 and 2024, reported raising just $16,560 (around $7,200 of which came from donors) in the 3rd quarter; Winder has a $201,333-to-$1,471 cash-on-hand advantage over Alexander.
The two Democrats quickly used their fundraising numbers against one another; Alexander sniped that anyone aggressively fundraising while the gubernatorial election is still ongoing “cares more about themselves than about saving democracy,” and Winder’s campaign retorted that Alexander is a “perennial candidate whose previous campaign ended deeply in debt.”
Terri Reese and Bill Finn, the other two Democrats running for the district, did not file Q3 reports by the October 15 deadline, which is allowed if they raised less than the threshold of $5,000.
3rd district: Rep. Herb Conaway (D-Delran), who is running for a second term after succeeding now-Senator Andy Kim last year, raised a modest $128,290 in the 3rd quarter and has $338,754 on-hand.
The Burlington County-based 3rd district voted for both Conaway and Kamala Harris by single digits last year, but Republican recruitment in the district has so far been lacking; Conaway’s only declared GOP challenger, registered nurse Linda McMahon, filed a report stating she raised no money in the 3rd quarter.
4th district: Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester), so far on a glide path to a 23rd term in New Jersey’s reddest congressional district, raised $100,145 in the 3rd quarter – in line with what he typically raises – and has $400,586 in his campaign account.
No Republican primary challengers have yet emerged to take on Smith, but an unexpectedly crowded Democratic primary has developed, featuring registered nurse Keith Doll, Rutgers professor Julie Flynn, and union electrician John Blake. None of them filed Q3 reports, so it’s not clear how much – if any – Democratic money is flowing into the Ocean and Monmouth County district.
5th district: After whittling down his warchest by half during his campaign for governor earlier this year, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly) is beginning to build it back up for his re-election campaign in the Bergen County-based 5th district. The congressman raised $525,405 in the 3rd quarter and has $9,374,676 in the bank.
Gottheimer’s best-funded GOP opponent, 2024 nominee Mary Jo Guinchard, unexpectedly ended her rematch campaign in July, leaving two lesser-known challengers in the race, corporate consultant Sean Kirrane and former sales associate Sandy Gajapathy; neither filed a 3rd quarter report.
6th district: Facing two Democratic primary challengers (but no Republicans yet), long-serving Jersey Shore Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) raised $301,989 in Q3 and kept his huge warchest steady at $3,264,371.
One of his primary challengers, activist John Hsu, raised $38,328 during the quarter, but $30,000 of that came from himself. The other, investment analyst Katie Bansil, hasn’t yet filed a 3rd quarter report at all; she did file reports for the first two quarters of the year, and reported having just $21 on-hand at the end of June.
7th district: The race for the 7th district has gotten expensive – and fast.
Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield), who first won his swingy suburban district in 2022 after unseating Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes), raised $666,973 in the 3rd quarter, bringing his yearly haul up to an enormous $2,569,182. With Democrats eager to go on offense against him next year, Kean has $1,972,172 in his warchest.
None of his eight Democratic opponents have been able to match that yet, but several of them are raising amounts of money that are essentially unprecedented for off-year New Jersey congressional candidates.
Two Democrats have hit the $1 million mark: former Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett has raised $1,391,541, including $477,694 in Q3, and daycare businessman Brian Varela has raised $1,008,792, $308,259 of it in Q3. (Varela’s total includes $600,000 in self-funding, though, so he’s raised much less from donors overall.) A third contender, physician Tina Shah, has only been in the race for three months but has already raised $603,810, the largest non-self-funded single quarter of any Democrat in the race.
Former Small Business Administration official Michael Roth raised $147,468 in Q3 and has raised $450,348 overall; climate scientist Megan O’Rourke raised $247,168 during her single quarter in the race; former Summit Councilman Greg Vartan raised $30,531 in Q3 and has raised $187,552 overall; and criminal justice professor Beth Adubato raised $67,216 after officially entering the race in Q3, nearly $50,000 of which was self-funded.
One final Democratic candidate, attorney Vale Mendoza, still has not filed her 3rd quarter report.
For comparison’s sake: at this point in the 2024 race for the 7th district, eventual nominee Sue Altman had raised just over $500,000; in the 2018 race, Malinowski didn’t even launch his campaign until after the 3rd quarter had ended.
8th district: Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City) – who has no declared opponents yet but whose Hudson County-based district is one of the most perennially politically tumultuous parts of the state – raised a healthy $320,410 in Q3 and has $595,670 to defend himself against any potential primary challengers that might come his way.
9th district: Republicans are really hoping to unseat Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon) next year, but the candidates they’ve got so far are struggling to keep up with the congresswoman in the money department.
Pou, who’s had to ramp up her campaign apparatus massively this year in a seat previously thought to be safely blue, raised $491,051 in the 3rd quarter and more than $1.3 million since the beginning of the year.
Her best-funded GOP competitor, Clifton Councilwoman Rosie Pino, entered the race during Q3 and raised a far smaller $155,509. It’s not unexpected for an incumbent to outraise a challenger, but high spending and outstanding debts meant that Pino seemingly ended the quarter with almost no money left to spend.
She’s still found more fundraising success, though, than the other 9th district Republican, Billy Prempeh, who was his party’s nominee for the same seat in 2020, 2022, and 2024. Prempeh raised $16,281 during the 3rd quarter – far more than he’d raised in both preceding quarters combined, but still not enough to do things like run ads or hire full-time staff.
10th district: Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark), facing federal assault charges after an incident at the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center, fundraised like gangbusters during the 2nd quarter of this year, receiving more than $750,000 from donors eager to see her fight back against the Trump administration.
In the 3rd quarter, though, McIver substantially slowed down on fundraising, raising $148,118 and ending the quarter with $669,072 on-hand. Much of that will likely be needed for her high-powered legal defense team; oral arguments will be heard on October 21 on whether the judge in her case should throw out the charges against her, and if he doesn’t, a trial will follow soon afterwards.
The congresswoman has no declared challengers of either party in her deep-blue Newark-based district.
11th district: For the second quarter in a row, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair) raised $0. That’s hardly a surprise, given that Sherrill is the Democratic nominee for governor and is laser-focused on that race rather than her hypothetical 2026 re-election campaign.
If Sherrill does win the governorship, Democrats in the 11th district are gearing up for a special election to replace her, and two of them started raising serious money in Q3. Morris Township Committeeman Jeff Grayzel raised $339,506 – $100,000 of which was self-funded – and Obama administration official Cammie Croft raised $187,726; both have spent almost nothing, since their campaigns will only kick into gear if Sherrill wins.
One other Democrat, Anna Lee Williams, is in the race and says she’ll keep running even if it means going up against Sherrill; she raised $16,194 in the 3rd quarter. And a Republican challenger, Randolph Mayor Joe Hathaway, says he raised $107,106 in his first week, though he entered the race after the end of the 3rd quarter.
Lots of other Democrats are looking at the race behind-the-scenes, but unlike Grayzel, Croft, and Williams, they haven’t made their intentions public yet, and thus have no fundraising to report.
12th district: Running for re-election to a seventh term in her Central Jersey district, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing) raised $82,808 in Q3, a fairly standard quarter for her, and has $99,659 in her warchest.
One primary challenger, fitness studio owner Kyle Little, has stepped up to challenge the 80-year-old Watson Coleman on a message of generational change, but he raised just $4,042 in the 3rd quarter and ended the quarter with $1,256 on-hand.
Senate (2030): Senator Andy Kim, nearing his one-year anniversary of winning election to the Senate – and still five years off from the next time he has to face voters – raised $388,037 in Q3 and has $1,195,901 on-hand.
2026 cycle fundraising – Q3 2025
