MARTINSVILLE – Looking to take down incumbent U.S. Rep. Leonard Lance (R-7), 7th Congressional District candidate Tom Malinowski welcomed U.S Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) to his side this evening in the hills of Bridgewater Twp., giving every indication of a gear-up in one of the most closely watched contests in the country.

Malinowski referenced an ad uncorked last month by the incumbent.

“They’re scared right now,” the Democrat told a room packed with supporters, many of them campaign volunteers. “Another great milestone in my campaign is I believe I am the victim of the earliest negative attack ad in district history.

“Yes!” the candidate added to claps. “I want more people to hear it. To choose the one thing I have said in my life that will make people dislike me – the one thing they could find, brace yourself: ‘I am a lifelong progressive Democrat.'”

Jeers rained.

“Behind that there is something dark from not necessarily from poor, old Leonard Lance, but from a Republican Party that doesn’t want to lose this seat,” Malinowski added. “They’re going to call me a Democratic socialist and you know my answer to that? I’m a proud Democrat who escaped a socialist country.”

The challenger left his native Poland when he was six, a biographical nugget noted in his own first ad, released today.

The bottom line, Malinowski said, is Lance and a GOP muddied by President Donald J. Trump “will run on fear.”

“We are all fiscally responsible,” he said of the those in the room, unlike a Republican Party that “added two trillion to the national debt so Warren Buffett could get a tax cut he didn’t want. We stand by law enforcement; we’re not the ones attacking the FBI every single day. The Republicans used to say they are those things. They used to say they are for family values. Now they’re taking kids from their parents at the border and putting up child molesters to run for the U.S. Senate. They used to be pro-military and now they elected a guy who thinks the military’s job is to parade in front of him at taxpayer’s expense to build up his ego.

“This was a sleepy congressional district for too long,” the challenger added. “Our campaign has contacted more voters and knocked on more doors than any Democratic house campaign in the United States of America. Since the primary you guys have knocked on over 50,000 doors. You have had actual meaningful conversations with 13,000 people.”

Booker came in with the keynote, mostly to make the case that Malinowski is also a reach-across-the-aisle kind of guy, much like himself.

The ad Malinowski released appears below: