By Greyson McMillian

Joe Hathaway is a self-proclaimed community-focused Republican candidate who is running for Congress in the November midterms after his loss during a special election just over three months ago to Democrat Analilia Mejia — who assumed office in April.

Speaking about his campaign to high school journalists for the Princeton Summer Journal, Hathaway stated that while he and Mejia ran on similar campaign issues — lowering high costs and raising low opportunities — his opponent’s candidacy has focused instead on “ideology, hyperpartisanship, extremism and more of what we’ve come to see as the furthest extremes of her side of the aisle.” 

Further characterizing his opponent as an extremist and someone who does not deliver on her campaign promises, Hathaway criticized Mejia’s vote against the Stop Insider Trading Act and the absence of a vote on the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act. “And that’s just what she’s done in Washington,” he said, followed by the claim that Mejia was “sparking more riots and chaos” during protests this spring at Delaney Hall, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Newark.

Mejia was invited but unable to attend the Princeton Summer Journal press conference.

Not only did Hathaway heavily criticize Mejia, but he also used these characterizations as a foil for his own campaign, which he claimed was “a path of a new generation of common sense, of practicality, of track record and of government that works well for people at the local level.”

When asked about how he’d sway a majorly Democratic district to vote for him, he said that “people are tired of just extremism across the board. If you look to the left, you look to the right, there’s too much extremism.” 

Hathaway said that he — and not his opponent — was the counter to such extremism. “There is only one candidate in this race who’s willing to come to the middle. It’s me,” he said.

Hathaway also highlighted what he said was a lack of experience on Mejia’s part by contrasting his own surplus of expertise: “I think what our district sees is a choice between someone who’s running on ideology and someone running on practicality, right? Who served as a mayor, who served as a councilman, who has ideas that actually get to the heart of what the main challenges are for us in New Jersey.”