Tom Kean Jr. holds one of the most fought-over congressional seats in the country. Right now, nobody in the Capitol can tell you where he is.
The New Jersey Republican, who flipped his district in 2022 and has held it since, stopped casting votes on the House floor on March 5.
As of this week, nearly 50 roll call votes have come and gone without him. His colleagues have been left dialing a phone that goes unanswered.
Reps. Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew — the two other Republicans representing New Jersey in the House — both confirmed to Politico they reached out by call and text out of concern for the absent lawmaker. Neither heard back. The pair described the response from Kean’s end as “radio silence.”
Broader conference leadership has not yet moved to formally address the prolonged disappearance, according to Politico’s reporting published late Wednesday.
Kean’s Washington office did not answer a request for comment submitted by the Daily Caller News Foundation before publication.
Voting data from GovTrack shows that even before his complete disappearance, Kean was skipping more than one in five House votes during the first quarter of the year — a record that raises questions about his availability long before the unexplained absence began.
Insiders close to both the congressman’s office and his reelection campaign have told Politico the explanation is medical. An unspecified and unannounced health issue, they said, sidelined Kean unexpectedly.
He is expected to return to the Capitol within the next few weeks, though no formal timeline has been confirmed and no details about his condition have been released.
The campaign’s attorney, Bill Palatucci — who also holds a seat on the Republican National Committee — stepped forward to offer reassurance.
“Everyone understands from their own family experiences that people run into unexpected health issues. Voters will be completely sympathetic, and it’s so early in the year that it will be long forgotten come the fall,” said Bill Palatucci, RNC member and Kean campaign attorney.
Whether voters agree with that assessment may hinge on the political climate Kean returns to.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report currently rates his Seventh Congressional District as a flat “toss-up,” flagging a deteriorating environment for Republicans in the district, the likelihood of a stronger Democratic challenger, and a slow but steady demographic drift away from the GOP over recent election cycles.
The district’s margins bear that out. President Donald Trump carried it by a single percentage point in November 2024 — a narrower win than many Republicans secured nationally. Four years earlier, Trump lost the same seat by four points.
Kean faces no opposition in his own primary and will advance to November unchallenged on the Republican side. The general election is a different matter entirely.
His 2022 victory came against Tom Malinowski, the Democrat who had unseated Kean in 2020 by a narrow margin.
Kean returned the favor two years later, flipping the seat back. Malinowski recently attempted a political comeback in the adjacent 11th District but lost his Democratic primary to Analilia Mejia, a former labor union director backed by the party’s left flank.
Mejia went on to rout Republican Joe Hathaway in the special general election for that seat — 60 percent to 40 percent — in the district left open when Rep. Mikie Sherrill departed to serve as New Jersey’s governor.
Kean comes from one of the Garden State’s most prominent Republican families. His father, Thomas Kean, governed New Jersey for two full terms between 1982 and 1990, and remains one of the state’s most recognized GOP figures.
The timing of Kean’s absence lands at a precarious moment for his party.
House Republicans are clinging to a narrow majority heading into a midterm cycle already complicated by a wave of vacancies — members resigning, retiring, or in one case dying in office — that has kept leadership scrambling to keep its margin intact.
An extended absence from a member representing a toss-up district only adds pressure to an already strained caucus.
