One of the tightest House races in the country is coming down, in part, to how two candidates are talking about abortion. Republican Rep. Tom Kean is embracing traditionally liberal “pro-choice” rhetoric. Democrat Sue Altman says it’s the record that matters.
A Monmouth University poll released last week shows Kean trails Altman, the former director of the New Jersey Working Families Party, on who voters see as best on abortion, with 47% of voters in the district saying they trust Altman more on the issue and just 27% saying they trust the incumbent more.
Kean is one of a growing number of Republicans painting themselves as pro-choice. In a debate for the New Jersey seat earlier this month, Kean said three separate times that he’s pro-choice and would not support a national abortion ban.
“I think it’s appropriate to send this decision back down to the states,” Kean said during the debate.
This isn’t a new tactic for Kean: He used the same language in 2022 when he narrowly unseated Rep. Tom Malinowski, the Democrat who had held the seat for three terms. This year, he’s hoping calling himself pro-choice will lead him to success once again.
Altman told NOTUS she’s worried some voters might not look past Kean’s language, but she says she believes most of them will see that his words don’t match up with his policy positions.
“Am I worried about it? Definitely. But … I would say people just don’t trust him on the issue,” she said.
“Tom Kean, in his heart of hearts, might feel one way about abortion, right? I don’t think it matters. His entire campaign is being funded by the [Congressional Leadership Fund], by Donald Trump, by Elon Musk, and these guys are no friends to women’s rights,” she added.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which is putting over $1 million into New Jersey’s only competitive House race and has backed candidates with a variety of views on abortion, says it’ll work.
NRCC spokesperson Savannah Viar told NOTUS that the committee is urging its candidates to be forthcoming about their positions on abortion, which she said Kean is doing. His language on the issue, she said, will help him appeal to the “big tent” of Republican voters and others in the district who sit across the spectrum on abortion.
“I think the fact that voters know his stance is helpful,” she said. “They know their congressman. They know him because he’s been elected before and because of his family, and everything else is just noise.”
Some of what Viar called “noise” is coming from people in Kean’s own party, including a prominent New Jersey anti-abortion group that declined to support him even though it officially backed other Republicans across the state.
The state arm of the National Right to Life organization endorsed candidates for various other House races in the state (including Rep. Chris Smith, a co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus) who have all spoken out more strongly against abortion than Kean has.
Marie Tasy, the organization’s executive director, told NOTUS that she wouldn’t comment on Kean’s specific language around abortion because she was “not familiar” with it. She added that she trusts voters will look at candidates’ actions.
“People are going to look at [Kean’s] record and [Altman’s] positions and make their decisions based on that,” Tasy said.
Democrats in the state are making the same point: Voters should look at Kean’s record, which they say proves Kean is being hypocritical.
In the recent debate, Altman pointed out that Kean voted against funding Planned Parenthood 12 times while serving as a senator in the state legislature.
During his tenure in Congress, Kean voted to support an amendment from Rep. Beth Van Duyne that would overturn a policy that allows the defense secretary to pay for travel expenses for service members seeking an abortion. He also voted in favor of a bill that would issue criminal penalties to health care providers who don’t give a “required degree of care” to infants born alive after an attempted abortion; abortion rights advocates argued that this bill was misleading and an attempt by anti-abortion members of the House to stigmatize the procedure.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Aidan Johnson told NOTUS he’s not worried about Kean siphoning votes away from Altman with his messaging.
“This is a highly educated district that has paid close attention to Tom Kean Jr. ’s anti-abortion record and aren’t falling for his phony claims,” Johnson said in a statement.
DCCC is eyeing the race as one of 33 in their “Red to Blue” program, which aims to boost Democratic candidates in competitive House races.
Altman and others have also called out an old, taken-down section of Kean’s campaign website, which detailed more conservative views on abortion — including protecting the “sanctity of life” and fighting against “egregious abortion laws” — that weren’t otherwise published in his campaign materials.
Kean’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Kean’s tactic is not unusual this year, said Ashley Kirzinger, the director of survey methodology at KFF. Increasingly, Republicans are adopting looser language than the usual “pro-life” label in order to align with voters in their party — and independent voters — who support abortion access to varying degrees, Kirzinger explained.
The majority of Republican voters are in favor of laws protecting abortion in at least some circumstances, according to a KFF poll from July. And just over 50% of Republican women between ages 18 and 49 even say they’d support a nationwide right to abortion.
“A really small share of voters say abortion should be illegal … where those limitations are drawn are really where the dividing lines are,” Kirzinger said. “A Republican candidate talking about abortion access is really in line with the views of many in their party.”
Kean has qualified his declaration that he’s pro-choice with follow-ups saying he wouldn’t support a number of “extreme positions,” such as late-term abortions, expanding the ability of medical providers aside from doctors who can perform abortions and removing requirements to inform parents whose children are getting abortions.
Kean’s messaging choices come alongside a national shift in the Republican Party to less forceful language about abortion. The party said in its 2016 platform — the most recent one before this year’s — that it would support “a human life amendment to the Constitution.” This year’s party platform, by contrast, avoided advocating for a national abortion ban for the first time in 40 years, instead simply applauding that the Supreme Court returned the power to decide abortion laws to states.
Candidates’ shift to more liberal language is happening as abortion becomes an increasingly important issue to voters — especially for women of reproductive age, per a KFF poll this month. A different poll from earlier this year, though, found that abortion-related motivation to vote was most prominent in states where measures about abortion will appear on the ballot in November. In states where voters won’t vote directly for or against abortion rights, like in New Jersey, interest was slimmer.
In New Jersey, abortion rights have been codified into law since 2022, so there’s no immediate legal fight at stake this election.
But the DCCC’s Johnson said Democrats are trying to argue that supporting Kean could lead to yet another rollback of those rights.
“Even if they agree with Kean Jr. on some parts of his platform, it’s a deal-breaker once you lay out he’s a guy who pretends to be pro-choice, but has an anti-choice record,” he said.
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Shifra Dayak is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.