CD-12 Democratic Candidates Face NAACP Forum in Somerset

Dozens of Democratic candidates packed First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset on Saturday, auditioning for the chance to flip New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District in 2026. The New Brunswick Area Branch of the NAACP ran the forum. The questions weren’t soft.

Before any candidate said a word, The Rev. Pastor Dante Quick had already drawn a line in the sand.

“ICE is a modern-day Klan institution,” Quick told the crowd, naming the thing directly. He wanted to know where these candidates stood on AI job displacement hitting Black and brown communities hardest, on a tax code that he said grinds working people down, and on an economy pushing families out of their own neighborhoods. “The middle class does not exist,” Quick said. “It exists. We know that in this room,” he said — that last remark aimed squarely at the wealth gap the candidates would spend the next several hours dancing around.

Hard. But that’s Central Jersey telling it straight.

After The Rev. Pastor Charles Boyer introduced debate moderator the Reverend Dr. Bernadette Glover, thirteen candidates settled into chairs arranged in alphabetical order. Matt Adams, Sue Altman, Brad Cohen, Elijah Dixon, Adam Hamawy, Green Party candidate Andres Jimenez, Kyle Little, Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp, Assemblywoman Verlina Reynolds-Jackson, Shanel Robinson, Squire Servance, Jay Vaingankar, and Samuel Wang. Every single one of them pledged to reject corporate campaign money. When Boyer mentioned outgoing U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, who’s represented CD-12 since 2015 and won’t seek re-election, the whole room stood up.

Reynolds-Jackson went back to where she started. “My career as a social worker, I started in housing, making sure people in vulnerable situations had a place to go,” she said. She came out for housing trust programs, for funding community churches directly, and for a living wage rather than a minimum wage. She made clear those aren’t the same thing.

Mapp didn’t dress it up. “I would change the tax code so corporations would pay more,” the Plainfield mayor said. Short and done.

Servance, who runs a business, said it twice because once apparently wasn’t enough: democracy is not for sale.

Cohen, who serves as mayor of East Brunswick, didn’t flinch on the wealth question. “It exists. We know that in this room,” he said. “Billionaires have done incredibly well, and that hurts people in communities of color.” He came out for baby bonds, pointing to the work U.S. Sen. Cory Booker has done pushing that idea forward.

The forum, organized by the New Brunswick Area Branch of the NAACP and covered in detail by InsiderNJ, drew a packed congregation that wasn’t there to hear campaign boilerplate. CD-12 stretches across parts of Mercer, Middlesex, and Somerset counties, running through Trenton, Princeton, and New Brunswick. Watson Coleman’s retirement opens a seat that doesn’t come open often, and every candidate in that room knows it.

Quick’s framing didn’t disappear once the candidates started talking. It hung over the whole thing. He didn’t ask whether these folks supported the right policies in a general way. He asked whether they understood what’s actually happening to the communities he’s been watching for years, the housing instability, the AI-driven job losses nobody in Washington wants to talk about honestly, the tax structure that’s been extracting wealth from working people for decades. The candidates all said the right words. Whether any of them can deliver in a district this complicated is the question that won’t get answered until November 2026.