For most of his life, there has been a buzzing in Rob Menendez's ears.
It was there in first grade, when he earned a blue ribbon at his school science fair for showing how boats float.
He only won because of his dad.
In eighth grade, when he was nominated for the "Most Likely to Succeed" class superlative, there it was again.
Well, you know who his father is.
In law school, when he won the senior alumni prize for the student with "the greatest promise as a future member of the legal profession," classmates told him their parents hissed about his father to each other.
Those whispers only grew louder in 2022 when he won his first congressional election. The shadow of his father — Bob Menendez, by then a U.S. senator and one of the most formidable political operators New Jersey has ever produced — loomed over him. Words like "coronation," "clearing the field" and "nepo baby" were tossed around as if the seat had been gift-wrapped for him. It was no longer murmured in the back of the classroom but trumpeted in newsprint and broadcast chyrons.
"It's literally undeniable," said one high-ranking Hudson County Democrat, granted anonymity to speak candidly, "that if his last name was not Menendez, he would not be in the U.S. Congress. There's no other path."
Then it all came crashing down for Dad.
In September 2023, just nine months into Menendez's first term as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Bob Menendez was indicted on charges of acting as a foreign agent for Egypt and accused of stuffing nearly half a million dollars in bribes into the various nooks and crannies of his New Jersey home. He was convicted the following summer and resigned the Senate seat he'd held for nearly two decades. He is currently serving his 11-year sentence at a federal facility in Cumberland, Maryland.
Consequently, the name that had once opened every door for his son abruptly transformed into a liability so severe that 62% of Democrats polled in the blue-leaning 8th Congressional District said there was "no chance" they would vote for a Robert Menendez — any Robert Menendez.
His inheritance curdled faster than you can say "Gold Bar Bob." The buzzing, which had followed him since first grade, threatened to become a roar that would drown him out completely.
U.S. Rep. Rob Menendez speaks in 2023 as his father looks on. Reena Rose Sibayan | The Jersey Journal
Menendez won re-election in 2024. Even his critics — and there are plenty — have to admit that he's hardly kicked his feet up on the winner's podium since then.
Now 40 years old, the Democrat has become one of the more prominent members of New Jersey's House delegation. He sits on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, having beaten out several more senior members to get there. He cruised to a primary victory in June, defeating his opponent by a nearly 40-point margin. The Republicans have declined to challenge him in the fall.
He has also, against odds that should put it entirely out of the question, built alliances with the very progressives and reformers who were supposed to despise his nepo baby guts — most improbably with the man now sitting in his father's old Senate seat.
Andy Kim, who launched his campaign for Bob Menendez's seat the day after the indictment and tore down the county-line ballot system that had been the machinery of Menendez family power for a generation, is now one of Rob's closest allies in Washington.
"I owe it to him to get to know him for who he is — not for his family, not for anything else," Kim said.
"Rob Menendez is Rob Menendez. He's not Bob Menendez," said Jose Arango, the Hudson County Republican Chairman, who has known Menendez his entire life. "He has to live with what happened with his dad. I think it's an injustice if we judge him for it."
Rob Menendez is either a politician who arrived at a moment of crisis and found something genuinely worth fighting for — or a shrewd operator who knows what survival requires.
In New Jersey, those two things have a way of looking identical.
Menendez, for his part, doesn't entertain the distinction.
"In this moment, with what we're seeing happen across our communities, across our country," he said, "you have to put everything you have into it — even if it drains you, even if it means there will be fewer years you can do this at this pace and at this depth. So be it."
Bob Menendez was the kind of father who belted out show tunes in restaurants and reassured his cringing kids, Rob and his sister Alicia, that nobody was listening. Who stayed up late after they fell asleep to play Rob's Super Nintendo. Who was being floated as a potential running mate for Al Gore by the time Rob entered high school.
He was also twice indicted on federal corruption charges.
The son of Cuban immigrants who'd fled the Batista regime, Bob was elected mayor of Union City in 1986, the year of Rob's birth, and never really stopped running.
The Menendez political operation and the Menendez family operation were, from the beginning, more or less the same thing. Rob and Alicia grew up in an apartment above their father's law firm. They attended political events at Schuetzen Park in North Bergen as children. Rob took a semester off from the University of North Carolina to work on his father's first Senate campaign in 2006, sometimes stepping in to accept awards on his father's behalf when Bob was indisposed.
U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez waves to the crowd after launching his reelection campaign in Union City, flanked by his son Rob Menendez and daughter Alicia Menendez, on Monday, May 21, 2012. Andrew Miller | NJ.com
After Rutgers Law — Dad's alma mater — Menendez went directly to Lowenstein Sandler, a firm known for its political connections in New Jersey, where he spent a decade counseling private equity clients at a salary that would eventually climb to $456,000 a year.
At Bob's first corruption trial in 2017, Rob, then in his early 30s, was called as the first witness for the defense. It ended in a hung jury, and Rob stood next to his father as the the senator addressed a phalanx of reporters outside the courthouse. His message? To those who were digging my political grave so they could jump into my seat, I know who you are and I won't forget you.
Bob Menendez won reelection the next year with 54% of the vote.
In 2021, Gov. Phil Murphy appointed Rob to be a commissioner of the Port Authority. Rob had sniffed around a mayoral run in Jersey City the previous year (then-Mayor Steve Fulop, who'd never really forgiven Menendez Sr. for thrashing him in a House primary back in 2004, duly declared that the patriarch was "hellbent on forcing his son down the throats of Jersey City voters to expand his own political power"), but never declared his candidacy.
At the end of the year, the 70-year-old Albio Sires announced that he would retire after eight terms representing the 8th Congressional District, a patch of northern New Jersey containing some of the state's largest cities and immigrant populations, including Elizabeth and parts of Newark and Jersey City. A day later, he said he'd found the perfect man to replace him.
"He's young. He's intelligent. He's very likable, and I think that his positions fit in well with Hudson County," Sires told The Jersey Journal of the junior Menendez.
Menendez hadn't even filed to run before a crush of powerful Democrats started clawing over each other to endorse him.
"I'm obviously a huge fan of his dad," Murphy gushed. "But Rob I know on his own merits, and I'm a huge fan."
Rob and Alicia Menendez flank their father outside the Newark federal courthouse in 2017. Aristide Economopoulos | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
Critics were quick to point out that Rob had never run for city council or school board or even dog catcher.
"To help your kid land a job interview and buy him a new suit is one thing. To hand him a seat in Congress, and thereby elbow out more qualified contenders, is something else," an NJ.com columnist complained.
Arango, the county Republican chair, pointed out that political dynasties are hardly a rarity in the United States.
"Are we gonna criticize the Kennedys next? The Bush family?" he asked.
Craig Guy, the Hudson County executive and another avowed Menendez fan, bristles at the idea that he was anointed.
"There was no clearing of the field that I'm aware of," he said.
Instead, Guy said, his fondness for Menendez dates back to 2015, when he began seeing Menendez at community events across Hudson County: senior luncheons, high school graduations, local civic gatherings.
"He wasn't asked to be there," Guy said. "He showed up. Whether he had ambitions at that point, I don't know, but that shows me something."
Buying into that rosy argument was a little harder if you glanced over at Menendez's primary opponents, who were struggling to avoid being crushed by the weight of the county political machine. His two biggest threats had the signatures on their voter petitions — required to get on the primary ballot — challenged in court. One candidate, an election law professor who had planned to run under the slogan "No to nepotism. No to Menendez," was knocked out this way, his petitions invalidated. The other lost two-thirds of his signatures in the same fashion.
In November, Menendez coasted into the House with 73% of the vote, a wider margin of victory than Bob had gotten in his first race for the same seat 30 years prior.
"I'm proud of the campaign he ran," his father said.
The timing couldn't have been worse.
In September 2023, just as Menendez was starting to think about reelection, his father was indicted. The trial would start five days before the primary. His name was suddenly mud, and though he didn't know it yet, the county-line ballot design that had helped propel him to victory in 2022 was about to get struck down by a judge.
He had promised his wife, Alex, the first time around: If this doesn't work for our family, it won't work for me. He would walk away from elected office entirely, find another way to serve, volunteering somewhere, staying involved in the community somehow. But they had navigated some difficult stretches in that first term, built more support at home, stabilized things. There was a presumption he — they — were good to run again.
Then Bob was accused of acting as a foreign agent for Egypt in exchange for nearly $500,000 in bribes he stuffed into various items of clothing in his closet. Rob, still at that point referred to as "the other Menendez," immediately insisted he had "unwavering confidence" in his father.
But would he run again? Should he run again? And if he did, would anyone support him?
The promise he made Alex still held. Yet he also knew he was not leaving this race under any circumstances.
Rob Menendez and his wife, Alex, arrive at their polling place with their children in November 2022. Joe Shine | For The Jersey Journal
"This one, I have to win," he told her.
Not because of the seat, or the title, or what came next. Because if he lost — with his father's name in the headlines, with everything that had been said about him for the entirety of his adult life — legions of people would have felt what they'd always said had been confirmed.
That he couldn't do it on his own. That none of it had ever really been his.
"I knew that wasn't the truth," he said. "It wasn't my truth. But we all have a sense of pride."
Luckily, Alex, who had been a cross-country and track star at Princeton, knew a good race when she saw one. Menendez announced his reelection campaign three days later.
The primary campaign that followed was, by any measure, brutal. Both Menendez and his opponent, Ravi Bhalla, then the two-term mayor of Hoboken, drew blood. One analyst deemed it a "street fight."
Bhalla told voters he'd essentially been shaken down for his endorsement of Menendez's 2022 campaign and that Bob had been listening in as an aide wrangled it out of him, warning him that "Hoboken might get hurt" otherwise. He called Rob "the same Menendez machine, just a smaller font size." A PAC supporting the mayor ran ads declaring that Menendez's refusal to condemn his father proved he was "rotten to the core" — the apple, the ad reminded viewers, doesn't fall far from the tree.
Menendez, in turn, assailed Bhalla as sleazy and hypocritical in an attack ad that clumsily compared him to the eponymous shyster of TV's "Better Call Saul."
The powerful Hudson County Democratic Organization, after only a brief moment of hesitation, threw its weight behind Menendez again. Brian Stack, the mayor of Union City, delivered for Menendez so thoroughly that Union City posted the highest early in-person turnout of any municipality in the state. (Stack did not respond to a request for comment.) The Congressional Hispanic Caucus beamed half a million dollars' worth of bilingual ads into a district where 44% of residents speak Spanish at home.
Menendez won the primary by 15 points, then glided to an easy victory in November. He went back to Washington and snagged the competitive seat on the Energy and Commerce committee.
The committee, which has broad authority over health care, technology, energy and consumer protection policy, is among the most powerful in Congress. Menendez went through eight rounds of voting against several other Democrats to win the seat. U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, the committee's ranking Democrat and the second longest-serving member of Congress from New Jersey, had pushed for him.
"I think he's a great member," Pallone said. "He's very tough and tenacious."
On a handful of occasions, Alex, who runs her own consulting firm, has come down to visit, and colleagues or constituents have said kind things about Menendez in her presence. Her verdict has evolved accordingly.
"All right," she told him. "Maybe you are OK at this. Maybe we'll do this for another two years."
Andy Kim didn't know what to say.
He and Rob Menendez had never really spoken. As a congressman, Kim represented South Jersey, and their paths hadn't crossed much.
Then Bob was indicted, and Kim jumped into the Senate race the next day. Then he took down the county line. The whole question of whether to reach out to Menendez acquired a layer of awkwardness that he didn't quite know how to navigate.
So Kim kept his distance. Months passed, and he won the primary in June. The next month, Bob resigned from the Senate after being found guilty. Kim won easily in November.
Eventually, Kim just picked up the phone. "Out of the blue," he said.
He expected a short, diplomatic nothingburger of a conversation, but the two men ended up talking for an hour. They discovered they shared a birthday: July 12th (Kim is two years older). They discussed their kids, New Jersey, what they were each trying to build.
It was "a very meaningful and powerful conversation," Kim said.
In September 2024, Menendez endorsed Kim for Senate and took him on a walking tour of Newark's North Ward. The pair exchanged a bro-y side-hug and stood together outside a smoothie shop on Bloomfield Avenue, sipping aloe vera iced tea.
"We're big boys," Kim said at the time. "We're grownups. We understand the dynamics here."
So it was hardly a surprise that Kim jumped into his corner when Menendez announced he would run for a third term. So did Gov. Mikie Sherrill, as well as U.S. Reps. LaMonica McIver and Bonnie Watson Coleman.
"I think that people recognize that Rob is smart, that he is a servant of the people and that he is his own man," Watson Coleman said.
Menendez greets firefighters and rescue squad members at North Hudson Regional Fire & Rescue in West New York, New Jersey on Tuesday, April 7, 2026. Ian Peters | For NJ.com
What's more, some of the holdouts from the last cycle came around.
Emily Jabbour, who succeeded Bhalla as mayor of Hoboken and backed Bhalla during the last primary, called Menendez a "relentless fighter" and tossed him her endorsement. So did the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council and 32BJ SEIU, powerful unions that stayed neutral in 2024. (Jersey City Mayor James Solomon — another Bhalla supporter — and Bhalla himself, now a state assemblyman, declined to endorse anyone.)
Menendez is effusive, if deliberately vague, in his gratitude.
"I feel extremely fortunate to have gone through what I've gone through the last couple of years, the challenges I've had to face and my family has had to face," he said, "and to be on the other side of it with more support than I had going in."
Menendez's sole primary challenger in June was Mussab Ali, a 28-year-old former president of the Jersey City Board of Education, who pitched a platform of Medicare for All, abolishing ICE and ending what he called the influence of AIPAC money in the district. In an interview before the primary, he referred to Menendez as "a moderate, corporate Democrat who inherited this seat."
He only won because of his dad, Ali seemed to say, just the latest voice in the chorus. But where Bhalla made Bob the centerpiece of his campaign, Ali wanted to talk about Rob.
"I think that he's had time to sort of show us that he's different from his dad," Ali said. "He's had time to establish his own track record. And frankly, I just don't see that. I see somebody who takes positions when they're safe."
None of it mattered. Menendez emerged from the June primary with 69.8% of the vote, a nearly 40-point margin over Ali. It was a bigger blowout than his 15-point win against Bhalla in 2024, and it came without the county line.
And with no Republican having filed to run in the general election — making the 8th the only single-party congressional race in New Jersey this cycle — the primary was, effectively, the whole enchilada. Rob Menendez is going back to Washington for a third term.
"Menendez has been helped by the fact that the anti-establishment wing of the Democratic Party and the progressive wing of the party are the same wing," Fairleigh Dickinson University political science professor Dan Cassino observed. "The voters who would be most inclined to kick him out for being too close to his father, or the party establishment, are the same ones he's been courting with his policies."
If Menendez was still seen as a moderate, Cassino added, he'd likely be in trouble. "But so long as he's seen as progressive and delivering for his constituents, he's safe."
One wonders what Bob is thinking. (He did not respond to a letter requesting comment for this story.)
"I still, to this day, don't necessarily know what his relationship is with his father, with his family," Kim said.
At this point, Menendez is practiced at evading questions about his father. Asked whether they're in contact right now, he offered a nonresponse about trying to show everyone grace, because "everyone in their lives is navigating something."
Bob, 72, will be eligible for release in 2035. Rob will be 49.
The heckler carried an American flag over his shoulder.
"Hey, how's your dad?" he yelled at Menendez, who stood a few feet away talking to a journalist in May outside Delaney Hall in Newark. "How's your dad, Congressman?"
Menendez looked over and smirked. It was only when the heckler changed tack — insinuating that Menendez's stance on immigration somehow played a part in the death of Dayanara Cortes, an 11-year-old girl killed last summer in a drunken driving crash in Red Bank involving an undocumented immigrant — that he broke off his conversation to walk over.
The two began yelling at each other. Photographers took notice and swarmed them.
"How's your dad?" the heckler demanded again.
"He's fantastic," Menendez snapped. "By the way: f--- you." He gave him a Jersey salute and stalked off.
Sometimes the anger gets the better of him, but rarely has it been on full display as it was outside Delaney Hall amid its reopening as an immigrant detention center last year.
On a raw morning in May 2025, he stood outside the facility's razor wire fence, flanked by Watson Coleman and McIver, spitting mad.
"How is this acceptable? To anyone in this country?" he shouted. "How is this acceptable?"
What had just happened, exactly, was that Newark Mayor Ras Baraka had been bundled away in handcuffs and accused of trespassing — moments after a guard had opened the gate to let him in. Menendez, Watson Coleman and McIver tried unsuccessfully to shield him from the swarm of windbreaker-wearing federal agents. The charge against Baraka was later dismissed, but the resulting scuffle led to three felony counts of assault for McIver, who still faces up to 17 years behind bars as her attorneys continue to fight the case.
"This will not be the end of it," Menendez vowed to the crowd that day.
Menendez gets held back by an agent outside Delaney Hall in Newark on Friday, May 9, 2025. Michael Dempsey | For NJ Advance Media
He's kept that promise. In the months since, Delaney Hall has again become national news — a hunger strike by some 300 detainees, human chains blocking ICE vehicles, pepper spray deployed on demonstrators and lawmakers alike, tire fires, dueling rallies and dozens of arrests. Menendez has visited Delaney Hall 20 times, according to a spokesperson for his office. After all, showing up is most of the job.
To that end, his office claims one of the more robust constituent services operations in the state, boasting of 1,187 cases closed in 2024 and a further 1,573 in 2025 — that is to say, individual constituents who came to the office needing help navigating a federal agency, from immigration paperwork to a delayed Social Security check to a lost VA benefit, and got a resolution.
"So many people don't have a good relationship with government," Menendez said. "So if they're reaching out to us and view us as someone who can help them, we have to be as helpful as we can."
Guy, the Hudson County executive, said "Rob plays the role in a way where you would think he was a local commissioner or a council person. He's down in the neighborhood. And 90% of those people are calling him Rob."
Pallone, who has served in Congress since 1988, sees the same orientation.
"He's not looking to help large corporate interests or billionaires," he said. "He's thinking about how this affects the average person."
Every Friday, Menendez's office circulates a weekly report: intake numbers, open cases, resolutions — favorable, unfavorable, neutral. Wins get highlighted, too. He has a folder on his desktop for the nice emails people send him about his staff and keeps every letter constituents write to him on his desk. He reads them when he needs to reset.
But not every case gets resolved. Not every weekly report includes a highlighted win.
A few weeks ago, a woman named Adriana was removed to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She had protected status in the United States under the Convention Against Torture and family living in North Bergen.
Mike McCurry, a senior caseworker in Menendez's office, had been working her case for nearly two years, trying to keep her from being sent to a third country. He had not succeeded.
Menendez found out on the drive back from Elizabeth, where he had just visited Pastor Yeison Cortes Vasquez, an evangelical minister who had been detained at Delaney Hall for three weeks earlier this year. Take the day, he told McCurry. We can't do this work if we're not taking care of ourselves.
It's not entirely clear Menendez follows his own advice. He has no hobbies to speak of, and doesn't really see much of his friends these days. He wishes he had more time with his kids, ages 6 and 3 and growing up fast. Catching a college basketball game at some point would be great. But there's too much to do right now.
Critics question how bone-deep his motivations are. A politician who adopts progressive causes because the political winds demand it will, presumably, abandon them when the winds shift.
"Can we look at the prior 20 years?" a high-ranking Hudson County Democrat asked. "Where's his track record of advocacy on these issues?"
Rob Menendez speaks at a press conference after touring Delaney Hall in Newark in December 2025. John Jones | For NJ Advance Media
Arango, the Republican chairman, chalks it up to the cost of practicing politics.
"If you are in a Mexican neighborhood, you have to sell tortillas," he said. "If you are in a Cuban neighborhood, you have to sell Cuban sandwiches. Politics, sadly, is a business."
When Menendez and his staff go to Delaney Hall, they bring release forms, take down names and case numbers, follow up with lawyers and families. On one visit, Menendez went specifically to see two young men from Union City who had been apprehended outside a church. On another, he sat with a mother who had come to the United States to get her daughter medical treatment unavailable back home and was now detained, her daughter's care in limbo.
Whether any of this answers the question of who Rob Menendez really is — whether it is the expression of a value system or the construction of one, arrived at late and under no small amount of pressure — is a question the past cannot answer. The future will have to.
Across the country, political dynasties are fraying. Democratic voters recently rejected a Cuomo in New York, a Carter in Georgia. The family name is losing its political currency in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a generation ago.
Half a mile. 770,000 pounds of butane. And nearly 200 new homes about to go up next door in this N.J. town.Jul. 12, 2026, 8:30 a.m.
Former N.J. police chief sues to get $782K retirement payout Jul. 6, 2026, 6:45 p.m.
And yet here is Rob Menendez — son of a convicted felon, beneficiary of a machine his own allies helped dismantle, a congressman whose name, Googled, still summons his father — holding vigil at Delaney Hall, insisting he just wants people to believe in government again.
Here's the thing about the buzz: You can't kill it. You can't control it. You can't even argue with it. You can only make peace with it.
"There will likely always be people trying to discredit the things I've been able to achieve. That's their decision," Menendez said. "My decision is to do the most I can with the time I have, and give myself to the things that give me the most purpose and fulfillment — my work, my children. That's where my focus is."
Read the original article on NJ.com. Add NJ.com as a Preferred Source by clicking here.