Seth Hahn is stepping down as Executive Director of the New Jersey Assembly Majority Office, Speaker Craig J. Coughlin announced August 14th, closing out a six year run on the Speaker’s senior staff that coincided with Assembly Democrats building their largest majority in more than half a century. Hahn’s departure takes effect in September, and Coughlin has said he expects to name a successor within days.

A Majority Built Over Two Election Cycles

Coughlin credited Hahn directly with helping engineer one of the more historically significant runs in recent New Jersey legislative history. Over two consecutive election cycles under Hahn’s tenure, Assembly Democrats grew their caucus from 46 seats to 57, the largest Democratic majority in the chamber in more than fifty years. That growth carried an even rarer distinction attached to it, marking the first time in over 120 years that a party already holding a legislative majority added a significant number of seats in back to back election cycles, a feat that speaks to just how thoroughly the caucus’s political operation outperformed historical norms during Hahn’s time running it.

Coughlin’s public statement on Hahn’s departure ran through a considerable list of policy wins from that stretch, crediting Hahn’s leadership as instrumental in expanding paid family leave, passing landmark affordable housing legislation, increasing ballot access, and positioning New Jersey on what Coughlin described as the leading edge of pushing back against attacks on reproductive care, immigrants’ rights, voting rights, and gun safety laws. Hahn also served as the Assembly’s lead negotiator across five consecutive bipartisan state budgets, a stretch spanning two separate gubernatorial administrations and requiring him to broker consensus across changing political conditions in the governor’s office while Coughlin’s own caucus continued expanding beneath him.

A Career That Started Long Before Trenton

Hahn’s arrival at the top of the Assembly Majority Office in January 2022 capped a political career that had already spanned nearly two decades by that point, built almost entirely outside elected office itself.

Before any of that, Hahn cut his teeth in national politics straight out of college, working as a field organizer for then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s 2004 re-election campaign in South Dakota. He went on to serve as national field director for the National Association of Letter Carriers before joining the Communications Workers of America in 2009, where he spent a full decade as the union’s New Jersey political and legislative director and treasurer of its political action committee, working closely under longtime progressive labor leader Hetty Rosenstein. During his years in organized labor and progressive advocacy, Hahn also served on the boards of New Jersey Citizen Action and the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, and represented New Jersey as a Bernie Sanders delegate at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, a résumé that gave him genuine standing within the state’s progressive coalition well before he ever set foot inside the Statehouse.

Hahn left the CWA in the fall of 2019 to join NJ United, a nonprofit organization built specifically to promote Coughlin’s legislative agenda, a move that put him directly in Coughlin’s political orbit for the first time. He formally joined the Speaker’s legislative staff the following year as deputy executive director under then Executive Director Anthony “Skip” Cimino, stepping into the top job himself in January 2022 once Cimino retired after guiding the office through the pandemic.

What Comes Next

Hahn is expected to remain a close, informal advisor to Coughlin even after his formal departure, though he has not publicly announced his next professional move. Coughlin, for his part, struck an optimistic tone about Hahn’s next chapter, saying he wished him the best of luck entering the next phase of his career and expressing confidence that he would continue to succeed. With a successor expected to be named within days, the Assembly Majority Office heads into a leadership transition at a genuinely unusual moment, not amid political turmoil or an electoral setback, but on the back of the caucus’s strongest position in generations, a rare instance of institutional change arriving from a position of strength rather than necessity.