Teddy Liddell, a U.S. Army veteran and frequent candidate for local office, has announced that he’ll run against Norcross this year, joining two other candidates already in the race.
Rep. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) represents a South Jersey congressional district that leans heavily towards Democrats, but that hasn’t stopped an increasingly crowded field of Republican challengers from seeking to take him on.
Teddy Liddell, a U.S. Army veteran and frequent candidate for local office, has announced that he’ll run against Norcross this year, joining two other candidates already in the race. And Claire Gustafson, the GOP nominee against Norcross in both 2020 and 2022, has filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run again, though she does not appear to have said anything publicly about a potential threepeat campaign.
(After this story was published, Gustafson confirmed on social media that she is planning to run again, saying that a “formal announcement and new website [are] coming soon.”)
Liddell, a resident of Gloucester Township in Camden County, is a graduate of West Point and served in the Army for six years before retiring as a captain in 1996. After returning to civilian life, he spent several decades working at a variety of healthcare companies and now operates his own law practice.
In 2013, Liddell challenged Assemblymembers Paul Moriarty (D-Washington) and Gabriela Mosquera (D-Gloucester) in the 4th legislative district, a Democratic-leaning district in Camden and Gloucester Counties; Liddell came in 4th place for two seats with 21.4% of the vote. Liddell has also unsuccessfully run for county freeholder and township council, and came 634 votes away from winning a school board seat in 2012.
Gustafson, meanwhile, lives in Collingswood and is a former member of her local Board of Education. She, too, has run a number of unsuccessful campaigns: for Congress in 2014, 2020, and 2022 (winning the GOP nomination the latter two times), for county freeholder in 2016, 2018, and 2019, and for State Assembly in 2015.
Already in the race against Norcross are two other Republican candidates: Damon Galdo, a union carpenter who lost the district’s Republican primary to Gustafson in 2022, and Nick Whitelock, a real estate investor who has never run for office before.
It’s not immediately clear who among the four candidates has the edge for party support, which is set to be determined in the coming month or so. But it’s unlikely to matter all that much to Norcross, who’s never faced a close election in his congressional career; in 2022, he beat Gustafson 62%-35%.