Jay Vaingankar, former Dept. of Energy official, runs for NJ-12 Democratic nomination

Jay Vaingankar, a former Department of Energy official, is running for the NJ-12 Democratic nomination, which includes Princeton and its surrounding areas. He is one of 17 candidates.

Previously, Vaingankar was a Special Advisor in the Secretary’s Office of Policy for the DOE under former U.S. President Joe Biden, where he focused on implementation of clean energy through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

In the recent Princeton Community Democratic Organization forum on Sunday, Feb. 15, where the group voted on the candidate they would endorse, Vaingankar received the fifth most votes among the Democratic candidates.

His campaign centers on bringing new energy to American politics, both literally and figuratively.

“We literally need more energy on the grid, but we also just need some more vibrancy — some sort of backbone in our politics,” he told The Daily Princetonian in an interview.

He added that clean energy can increase employment and lower the cost of living for New Jersey residents. “Clean energy gives us an opportunity to do all three at once, where you can grow the economy but also empower workers and empower consumers,” he said.

An East Windsor, N.J., local himself, Vaingankar said, “at my heart, I’m a community organizer.”

“My family’s from India, but I actually grew up speaking Spanish because of how diverse the community was; the town was often considered a sanctuary town,” he continued. This experience in part prompted his interest in immigration reform and abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency.

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Vaingankar recalled that, at his elementary school, he had classmates who were part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides protection from deportation for people brought to the U.S. as children.

“[These kids] were afraid every day that they would come home and their parents would be abducted. And now those kids are grown up, and they have kids of their own. Every day, they put their child’s birth certificate or passport card in their child’s backpack out of fear that an ICE agent might abduct them for their accent or their appearance,” he said.

Vaingankar cites his time as an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania as formative in his organizing experience. “When I was at Penn, I got really deeply involved in organizing in Philly. [I] would often come home to New Jersey [and] bring volunteers over to Philly because my first semester of freshman year of college was when Trump won in 2016,” he shared.

In the fall of 2020, Vaingankar became a field organizer for Biden’s presidential campaign, ultimately leading to his 2021 appointment in Biden’s Office of Management and Administration focusing on COVID-19 operations. He then moved to the DOE for two years. After the Biden administration left the White House, he became the Director of Policy and Markets for Solar Landscape, a solar energy development company.

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The top priorities listed on his campaign website are clean and affordable energy, housing, healthcare, immigration, gun control, and innovation.

Vaingankar also highlighted his support for Medicare for All. “Once we flip the house, hopefully we also flip the Senate, and then it’ll take another two years to hopefully flip the White House. As we build toward that Medicare for All majority, there are so many things we can do in the meantime to get closer to universal coverage,” he continued.

Regarding gun control, Vaingankar stated that he thinks that “immediate measures like banning assault rifles [and] requiring gun storage and training could easily get a ton of popularity in Congress. We just have to elect leaders that have the courage to do that.”

Vaingankar said that he would “want to maintain a good relationship with the University administration” if elected.

“We want to make sure they’re also held accountable to making sure they’re taking care of their students.”

Vaingankar also said that he would ensure that “universities aren’t getting bullied by the federal government.”

“Bad faith Republican actors, many of whom went to Princeton or Harvard or Penn, are now deciding to come after universities because they think that’s the way to fire up their base. And they, by starting those culture wars, promote this idea that college is only for a very select few elite folks,” Vaingankar said.

“What they’re ultimately trying to do is distract from the fact that their core economic policies are extremely unpopular,” he continued.

“Because the status quo is not working, we can’t just keep nominating the same politicians over and over again and expect different results. I’ve never run for office before, but I’m ready to step up because the system isn’t working for people of our generation.”

Emily Murphy is a senior News writer and senior Copy editor from New York City. She focuses on the N.J. 12th congressional district election and can be reached at emily.murphy[at]princeton.edu.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.