How Rebecca Bennett Is Threading The Needle On Tom Kean Jr.'s Depression

While Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. was missing for four months, his Democratic opponent, Rebecca Bennett, only occasionally talked about his absence.

And when she did, she didn’t have to say much.

Kean’s silence spoke louder than anything Bennett could put into words. His Republican colleagues from New Jersey called it “radio silence.” Reporters staked out his house. One intrepid scribe even traveled to an exclusive island where his father, a beloved former governor, owns a vacation home. Democratic political organizations issued scathing press releases and paid advertisements. And Congressional reporters needled House Speaker Mike Johnson about it.

Bennett took a decidedly different approach. She repeatedly wished Kean well before attacking him for his links to President Donald Trump and his voting record. When Kean announced on Tuesday he was hospitalized for depression, Bennett didn’t change that strategy.

Bennett’s challenge until the November midterms is how to convince residents that Kean doesn’t deserve their vote while not appearing insensitive to his mental health. The contest between the two was already one of the country’s most competitive, but Kean’s lengthy absence and his recent health disclosure adds a new element that is likely to dominate attention in the 7th Congressional District.

While Kean backers attempt to paint Bennett as being too harsh toward the two-term incumbent, Bennett’s campaign is trying to keep attention on his record and loyalty to the unpopular president. She’s had little need to highlight an absence that’s been so front and center.

“Rebecca is keeping the focus on Congressman Kean’s failed record and his failure to stand up for the district,” Dan Bryan, a political consultant for Bennett, told POLITICO. “She’s been pretty consistent about wishing him well, but also not shying away from continuing to tell the story of his failures in the district.”

Kean now finds himself having to make up a lot of ground against a well-funded and well-practiced opponent in Bennett in what’s shaping up to be a hostile political environment for Republicans.

“You can expect an active campaign. You can expect an active congressman. He’s fully back. We’re running full speed ahead. Rebecca Bennett is a terrible fit for this district. We’re going to make that case and charge forward to reelection,” Kean consultant Harrison Neely said in a phone interview.

But Kean’s lengthy absence underscores something reporters and political insiders have long complained about when it comes to the congressmember. While he’s long been a reliable presence on the rubber chicken circuit and at district events like festivals and parades, he rarely responds to questions from reporters outside of official events and has long refused to hold an in-person town hall meeting with constituents.

“He was kind of famous for showing up at parades for five minutes, for showing up at ceremonial events to have a picture taken or maybe read a statement that somebody drafted,” said former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski, whom Kean unseated in 2022. “But he would not engage with people in a free, easy and unstructured way.”

The downsides of Kean’s approach were on display just weeks before he went missing, when the Department of Homeland Security purchased a warehouse in Roxbury — a reliably Republican town in his district — with plans to convert it into a massive immigrant detention facility.

The all-Republican town council opposed the facility on environmental and infrastructure grounds. So did New Jersey’s Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill, who has also been highly critical of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement. They joined together to sue to stop it.

But Kean took a milder approach. He announced in a press release that he introduced legislation to create a grant program to help towns that host such facilities. And during Kean’s absence in April, his office sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin urging him to “take a deeper look at the proposal and give careful consideration to the concerns raised by local officials,” but not outright opposing it.

Even before Kean went quiet for his then-unknown treatment, the entirely Republican governed town issued a statement complaining that they hadn’t heard enough from him.

"Despite repeated outreach, our federal representative, Congressman Tom Kean Jr., did not engage to the level we had hoped to provide the advocacy our residents deserved," read a February statement issued by the town.

Meanwhile, Bennett has gone to Roxbury five times since January, according to her campaign, and addressed a council meeting over the detention center.

The issue ultimately resolved itself following a change in strategy at DHS after Mullin took over from former Secretary Kristi Noem and the agency decided to offload several of the properties it had purchased for detention centers, including the one in Roxbury.

“[Kean’s] work on this goes back to December 2025. He has his own style of getting things done. He’s an effective public servant and legislator,” Neely, Kean’s consultant, said. “Ultimately, that community got the result they wanted. He was working on it behind the scenes for way more time than he wasn’t.”

When Kean finally revealed his depression diagnosis and hospitalization on Tuesday, he saw an outpouring of support from Republican colleagues and expressions of sympathy from Democrats. New Jersey GOP State Chair Christine Hanlon sought to turn it against Bennett, who upon securing the Democratic nomination last month addressed Kean "wherever you are” before calling him a “coward” for not standing up to Trump.

“Kicking people when they are down does not demonstrate the right temperament for a public servant,” Hanlon said in a statement shortly after Kean revealed his diagnosis. “Rebecca owes Congressman Kean, his family, and the people of New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District an apology.”

Bryan scoffed at those initial attempts to make the issue reflect poorly on Bennett, saying Republicans had them “locked and loaded” before they even saw what Bennett had to say. He also noted that the diagnosis won’t change their broader strategy.

“Obviously the day-to-day narrative and coverage has been different than what we anticipated because of what the congressman has been going through,” he said. “But Rebecca has been really trying to stay focused on the policies and substance of his voting record rather than on personal issues.”

And the persistent news coverage of Kean’s disappearance and subsequent diagnosis means that most voters will know about it regardless of what Bennett says — and make their own conclusions about it.

“I feel tremendous sympathy. But it raises a lot of other objective questions, and I think a lot of voters are going to be in exactly that place,” Malinowski said. “On a human level they’re going to have sympathy for him and wish him well. But he’s interviewing to be their representative in Congress again, and this does raise a lot of questions that were already there, and that are accentuated by this experience that literally everyone in the district has read about.”