Dr. Adam Hamawy, a progressive plastic surgeon whose life-saving work in the Army has been contrasted with his long ago association with a terrorist Muslim cleric, prevailed in a crowded Democratic primary field Tuesday to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, the Associated Press projects.
Hamawy was one of a dozen active candidates in the 12th Congressional District, where the liberal Watson Coleman is retiring after 12 years in office (a 13th candidate was on the ballot but dropped out of the race).
Hamawy is now the prohibitive front-runner to win the seat in November.
Background: Hamawy, who lives in South Brunswick and runs a plastic surgery practice in Princeton, entered the race as a political unknown. His campaign quickly gained traction as progressives simmered over Israel and its war with Hamas in Gaza. Hamawy’s work volunteering at a Gaza hospital during the war earned him support. He also earned the endorsements of high-profile progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna.
“Courageous candidates like Dr. Adam Hamawy are the fighters voters want to take on corporate power and fight for working people. Dr. Hamawy won because voters saw him as a fearless fighter for the working class against a political and economic system rigged for billionaires and other powerful interests,” Stephanie Taylor of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which endorsed Hamawy, said in a statement.
Hamawy, 56, led the Democratic field in fundraising even before a new super PAC called American Priorities, founded as a pro-Palestinian counterweight to the pro-Israel AIPAC, spent $2 million on his behalf.
Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth has credited Hamawy, an Army National Guard veteran, with saving her life when her Blackhawk helicopter was shot down in Iraq in 2004. Hamawy also worked as a first responder at the World Trade Center following the 9/11 attacks.
Hamawy’s campaign planks are unabashedly progressive, including “Medicare For All” and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which his campaign website says is “full of neo-Nazis at all ranks”) and dismantling the Department of Homeland Security.
But the heroic picture portrayed by Hamawy’s campaign and allies met a stark contrast when a publication tied to an anti-Islamic group resurfaced news reports of his 1995 testimony in defense of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheikh” who was convicted on terrorism and seditious conspiracy charges, and whose followers conducted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Hamawy, then a medical student in his 20s, had four years earlier accompanied Abdel-Rahman on a trip from New Jersey to Michigan, where Abdel-Rahman spoke at a conference and talked of “conquering the land of the infidels.” Even after the World Trade Center bombing, Hamawy acknowledged translating a document for Abdel-Rahman for a press conference.
Hamawy said on the campaign trail that he disavowed Abdel-Rahman’s calls for violence and called the critiques against him as “guilt-by-association attacks on Muslim and Arab candidates.”
While the Abdel-Rahman controversy got significant media attention and criticism from the right, most of Hamawy’s rivals declined to touch it. Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp, an exception, called Hamawy a “radical extremist.”
What’s next? Hamawy in November faces Republican Gregg Mele, who has run unsuccessfully for several offices in New Jersey as a Republican and libertarian.
But Hamawy’s victory in the primary is tantamount to winning the general election. There are more than twice as many registered Democrats than Republicans in the district, where Watson Colman won reelection by 25 points in 2024, when Republicans performed more strongly in New Jersey than expected.
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