New Assembly members Vincent Kearney, top, and Andrew Macurdy, both Democrats, flipped two Republican-held seats in the 21st District. (Photos by Anne-Marie Caruso/Hal Brown)
When Andrew Macurdy and Vincent Kearney were campaigning for the state Assembly last year, voters complained repeatedly about New Jersey’s notorious unaffordability.
The two Democrats said they empathized. Kearney’s a cop whose wife has worked as a custodian, school lunch server, and crossing guard. Macurdy’s children, ages 2 and 4, are in day care.
“It’s like having a second mortgage,” Macurdy said.
Voters weren’t clamoring for election law or campaign finance reform, Kearney said.
“They’re like, ‘Lower my taxes, fix the trains, fund my schools.’ In priority order,” he said.
In November, Macurdy and Kearney flipped Assembly seats in the 21st Legislative District that Republicans had held since 1992, part of a Democratic wave that gave Democrats a supermajority in the Assembly and a third consecutive term in control of the governor’s seat. The district includes towns in Middlesex, Morris, Somerset, and Union counties.
Both new assemblymen say affordability will be their chief mission in the Legislature, which kicked off a new two-year session last week. Macurdy and Kearney were among 12 first-termers elected to the 80-member lower chamber.
“People in my district don’t really want to hear about partisan politics. They want to hear about people who want to build consensus, who can solve problems, and who can try to improve people’s lives on things like getting the cost of living under control and getting to the root causes of why costs go up,” Macurdy said.
Beyond affordability, both also say they’d like to bring more accountability and transparency to Trenton, where lawmakers have hacked away at both in recent years by weakening the state’s public records law, revamping campaign finance statutes, and eliminating public notice requirements.
Macurdy is a former federal prosecutor who now works in private practice in New York City, primarily representing whistleblowers, so he has seen how expensive workplace fraud and misconduct can be. He also was a senior staffer in the New Jersey Attorney’s General Office, where he was one of the architects of Arrive Together. That program pairs police with mental health professionals to reduce the risk of violence when they respond to people in mental crisis.
“Accountability and transparency in government are extremely important, because we need to be doing whatever we can to make sure our government is being done as efficiently and effectively as possible,” Macurdy said.
Kearney, who also was a Garwood councilman until he resigned earlier this month to take his Assembly post, helps handle public records requests for the Union County Sheriff’s Office and co-founded Garwood Live, which has live-streamed government meetings since 2018.
“I’m a big transparency guy. If I do my job right as a cop, there’s no defense attorney that can lay a glove on me. If I’m doing my job right in politics, I shouldn’t have a damn thing to hide,” Kearney said.
An early loss sets a political path
Kearney credits the late Assemblyman Alan Augustine — whose Assembly seat he now occupies — with sparking his interest in state politics.
Kearney lost his father, a career cop, to cancer just few weeks before he graduated high school. When the family applied for survivor’s benefits, officials wouldn’t pay because of an error in his pension paperwork. A friend suggested they ask Augustine for help.
“We couldn’t make our mortgage payments. We were getting ready to lose our house,” Kearney said. “Augustine takes the meeting and hears my mom out — but he can’t get anywhere either. And he’d been an assemblyman for a while at that point, like he had some juice.”
So Augustine, a Republican, wrote a bill to bolster pension payouts for police and firefighters, Kearney’s mom testified in support of it, and then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman signed it into law in 1996.
“That ignited my interest in state government, and I always followed what the Legislature did from that point forward,” Kearney said.
Kearney went into law enforcement like his dad, working as an emergency medical technician, 911 dispatcher, an officer at Kean University, and now a sheriff’s detective and firearms instructor in the police academy. He is also municipal chair of Garwood’s Democratic committee.
He said he had always heard that “cops and politics don’t mix,” but he learned he needed to be able to operate in that sphere because politicians are the ones who craft budgets, write laws, and appoint prosecutors.
“As I go through my career, you see things sometimes go sideways, or the law just hasn’t caught up to what’s going on, so you get the idea of: ‘Maybe I could write the laws.’ And so here we are,” he said.
Kearney, who has twin 13-year-old sons, will serve on Assembly’s state and government committee.
From upholding laws to writing them
Macurdy has worked in the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey, and for three state attorneys general (Gurbir Grewal, Andrew Bruck, and Matt Platkin), jobs that prohibited political service.
A Harvard grad, he joined Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, a Manhattan-based law firm, in 2023, and that cleared the way for him to consider running for office. Calling voters and canvassing for U.S. Sen. Andy Kim (D) during Kim’s 2024 campaign cemented his resolve to go into politics himself, he said.
“As a prosecutor, upholding public safety, executing the laws, is really important work. But at the end of the day, it is our legislatures that are making the laws and are in a position to make systems more efficient, more fair, and more effective at a more systemic level, and so that is really the work that I’m interested in,” Macurdy said.
He won on his first try. He and Kearney ousted Republicans Michele Matsikoudis, who had served two terms, and Nancy Munoz, a 16-year incumbent who was the chamber’s highest ranking Republican woman.
“Voters were definitely looking for change. They’re frustrated with government and feeling like politics is not working for everyday people,” Macurdy said. “That’s another reason that called me to run. I have little kids. I just want people in government who are thinking about the long term and making investments in our future generation.”
Beyond tackling affordability broadly and child care, energy, and health care costs specifically, Macurdy aims to focus on improving NJ Transit and persuading his legislative colleagues to change their budgeting process, which critics have blasted as rushed, packed with political giveaways, and not transparent.
“There’s a structural deficit, and we’ve run a multi-billion-dollar deficit for the last couple of years, so I think that responsible budgeting is extremely important,” Macurdy said. “People want to know they’re sending good stewards of taxpayer money down to Trenton.”
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