NJ-05: New Jersey Democrat faces primary challenge from a former volunteer
(CNN)Two years ago, Arati Kreibich volunteered to help reelect New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer. In Tuesday's Democratic primary, she is running to replace him.
The split came slowly, she said, and then all at once. When Gottheimer and a band of moderate and conservative Democrats pushed to quickly pass a controversial border aid bill in 2019, effectively ending efforts in the House to add new protections to Senate legislation, Kreibich felt betrayed and decided to challenge him in 2020.
Gottheimer first won the seat from a seven-term Republican in 2016, but Kreibich is arguing now that he is out of step with the shifting politics of their northern New Jersey district, which, she argues, has become more liberal during the Trump era. Gottheimer is, by an assortment of metrics from a variety of sources, one of the more conservative Democratic legislators on Capitol Hill. He is also a co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, which yields more power -- as illustrated in contentious terms during the border battle -- than House progressives within the Democratic caucus, despite generating far fewer headlines.
GovTrack, the independent congressional data crunchers, ranked Gottheimer as the House Democrats' second most conservative member and, in 2018, he voted with Trump more than 76% of the time, according to Congressional Quarterly. That figure plummeted to 5% in 2019, which Gottheimer's campaign points to as evidence that the measure itself is unreliable.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/06/politics/new-jersey-5-primary-josh-gottheimer-arati-kreibich/index.html?utm_content=2020-07-06T18%3A00%3A06&utm_term=image&utm_source=twCNNp&utm_medium=social
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