Charles Sandman

The Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University will release a poll on the race for Governor on Thursday morning.  Eagleton began polling in September 1971 (Gov. William Cahill had an upside-down 45%-49% job approval rating), and they polled their first gubernatorial race in 1973 -- Democrat Brendan Byrne had a 43%-23% lead over Republican Charles Sandman in October, their fourth poll of the year; Byrne won by 721,000 votes, 66%-32%.

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One factoid that has appeared on PolitickerNJ.com numerous times in recent years is being reprinted in honor of Republican National Chairman Michael Steele's visit to the Garden State: Republicans haven't won a statewide election in New Jersey since 1997; since then, 49 other states have elected a Republican to statewide office.

Despite their winning streak, New Jersey Democrats went fourteen years without re-electing an incumbent to statewide office.  U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-Cliffside Park) was re-elected in 2008, having last won re-election in 1994.  Besides Lautenberg, the last New Jersey Democrat to win re-election was Bill Bradley in 1990.

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One candidate for the Comeback of the Year Award will be James Biggs, who won 63% of the vote yesterday in a special election for Mayor of Island Heights (pop. 1,877).  The 67-year-old Biggs was first elected Mayor in 1974, at age 32, and gave up the job four years later to run for Congress.

In 1978, Democrat William Hughes was a two-term Congressman from a Republican district.  A 41-year-old former Assistant Prosecutor from Cape May County, ousted four-term incumbent Charles Sandman, by a 57%-41% margin in the 1974 Watergate landslide - one year after Sandman beat incumbent William Cahill in the Republican gubernatorial primary and then lost the general election by 721,328 votes.

Republicans believed they would win the seat back in 1976 with an exceptionally strong candidate, five-term Assembly Assistant Minority Leader James Hurley (R-Millville).  But Hughes proved to be a stronger incumbent than Republicans imagined, and Hurley turned out to be a weak general election candidate.  Hughes beat Hurly 68%-32%, running twenty percentage points ahead of the Democratic presidential candidate.

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For New Jersey Democrats, there was never a better year than 1973.  Republicans ousted their incumbent Governor, moderate William Cahill, in the primary and replaced him with Charles Sandman, a conservative Congressman.  Democrats, helped by the Watergate scandal in Washington (two weeks before the general election, Richard Nixon fired the Watergate special prosecutor in what was called "The Saturday Night Massacre") and the criminal conviction of top GOP officeholders in New Jersey, won the governorship by 721,378 votes (68%-32%).  Brendan Byrne won every county but Cape May - Sandman's home county.  Sandman's defeat was the worst for a Republican in New Jersey history.

Democrats picked up thirteen State Senate seats and 26 Assembly seats, leaving the Legislature with ten Republicans in the Senate and fourteen in the Assembly.  Only four legislative districts out of forty elected Republicans to the Senate and both Assembly seats; 36 districts sent at least one Democrat to the Legislature, including Hunterdon, Ocean, Morris, Sussex and Warren counties.

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The announcement today that U.S. Senator Arlen Specter is switching parties is of little significance to New Jersey politics, except that it comes at a time when establishment Republicans are engaged in a fierce battle with conservatives for the Republican gubernatorial nomination.  Specter’s decision will likely upset some party leaders who view him as the type of Republican who can win a state that is trending Democratic.  And his switch will probably evoke a sort of “good riddance, rino” attitude from the conservative wing of the New Jersey GOP.

New Jersey, which hasn’t elected a Republican U.S. Senator since Clifford Case won a fourth term in 1972, has tossed two of their last three GOP Senators before the general election: Albert Hawkes was dumped by party leaders in his bid for a second term in 1948, and Case lost the 1978 GOP primary to conservative Jeffrey Bell.  And New Jersey Republicans have tossed one of their last three GOP Governors: incumbent William Cahill was ousted in the 1973 primary by Charles Sandman, a conservative Congressman.  (Another Republican Governor, Christine Todd Whitman, has been battling conservatives in a bid to keep moderates in the Republican Party.)

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By tradition, the winner of the Republican gubernatorial primary gets to pick the new GOP State Chairman.  But some insiders are saying that if Steve Lonegan upsets Christopher Christie on June 2, its possible - if not likely - that the Republican establishment won't cede control of the state party organization to their standard bearer.

The individual elected to lead the Republican State Committee in June will get a six-month term.  Party leaders can decide next January if they want a new State Chairman.  Republican legislative leaders are not likely to let Lonegan control the state party - and appointments to the legislative redistricting commission - unless he is elected Governor.

Anxious to unite the party after his upset victory in 2001, Bret Schundler chose to retain the incumbent, State Sen. Joseph Kyrillos (R-Middletown), who had been picked for the post a few months earlier by Acting Gov. Donald DiFrancesco.  As part of the deal, Kyrillos replaced his new Executive Director, Alan Raymond, with Evan Kozlow, who had been Political Director of the Schundler campaign.  Kyrillos held the seat until he stepped down in 2004, which left the state party apparatus in the hands of the party leadership and not with Schundler supporters.

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If Steve Lonegan wins election as Governor, he might be the first conservative Republican to win a statewide election in New Jersey since Albert Hawkes ousted incumbent William Smathers in the 1942 U.S. Senate race. Hawkes served as President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce before running for the Senate - his first bid for public office.

Since then, Republican statewide winners have been considered moderates: Governors Alfred Driscoll, William Cahill, Thomas Kean and Christine Todd Whitman; and U.S. Senators Robert Hendrickson, Alexander Smith, and Clifford Case.  Other Republicans widely viewed as conservatives, including Charles Sandman, Jeffrey Bell, and Bret Schundler, were unsuccessful general election candidates.

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Robert Meyner appointed eight men to the New Jersey Supreme Court during his two terms as Governor, many of them relatively young.  As a result, Richard Hughes, who followed Meyner, made no Supreme Court appointments during his eight years in office.  By the time William Cahill was elected Governor in 1969, the court began to turnover as several Justices reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy.  During his four years as Governor, Cahill made six appointments to five seats on the top court.

In early 1971, Cahill replaced retiring Justice Vincent Haneman with Worrall Mountain, a 62-year-old Appellate Court Judge from Morris County.  Both were Republicans.

Two other Justices, John Francis and Thomas Schettino, both Democrats, retired in September 1972.  At the time, the front runners for the two Supreme Court seats were Attorney General George Kugler and Robert Clifford, the Commissioner of Institutions and Agencies (now Human Services).  But Kugler became involved in one of several scandals that rocked the Cahill administraton: he was accused of helping to cover up charges that Secretary of State Paul Sherwin delivered a highway contract in exchange for a $10,000 contribution to the Republican State Committee.  While Sherwin went to prison, Kugler was cleared of any wrong doing by the State Commission of Investigation - although his hopes of going to the Supreme Court ended rather quickly.

There was considerable speculation at in 1972 that one of the Democratic candidates for Associate Justice was a young, politically-connected Superior Court Judge named Brendan Byrne.  Byrne received some attention when an organized crime wiretap called him the "judge that couldn't be bought," but Byrne was well known in the statehouse as Meyner's former Executive Secretary (now Chief of Staff), and as a former President of the Board of Public Utilities and Essex County Prosecutor.

It wasn't until six months later that Cahill, facing a hotly contested Republican primary against U.S. Rep. Charles Sandman, announced his picks for the two open Supreme Court seats: Republican Pierre Garven, his 47-year-old Chief Counsel, and Democrat Mark Sullivan, 62, an Appellate Court Judge.    Both came from prominent Hudson County political families: Garven's father was Mayor of Bayonne from 1906 to 1910 and again from 1915 to 1919; Sullivan's father was a Judge who once ran for Mayor of Jersey City, and his father-in-law was a five-term Democratic Congressman from Jersey City.

Two weeks after Cahill named Garven and Sullivan, Chief Justice Joseph Weintraub announced that he would retire at the end of the year - a move that would later be moved up to September 1.  The 65-year-old Weintraub decided sixteen years was enough and that he wanted to travel.   Read More >

If you are a New Jersey State Senator, you are more likely to die in office than to win higher elective office. Under the current State Constitution, 49 sitting State Senators have asked voters to promote them to a new office, but only twelve have won.

Nearly half of the State Senators seeking higher office have run for Governor and all 21 have lost: Malcolm Forbes (1957), Wayne Dumont (1965), Raymond Bateman (1977) and James E. McGreevey (1997) won major party nominations but list the general election -- each time to an incumbent; William Schluter ran as an Independent in 2001; and Walter Jones (1961), Charles Sandman (1965), William Kelly (1969), Frank McDermott (1969), William Ozzard (1969), Harry Sears (1969), Ralph DeRose (1973), Raymond Garramone (1977), Frank Dodd (1981), William Hamilton (1981), Joseph Merlino (1981), James Wallwork (1981), Bill Gormley (1989) and Gerald Cardinale (1989).

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Only twice have incumbent statewide officeholders lost primary elections.  They were both Republicans: in 1973, U.S. Rep. Charles Sandman defeated Governor William Cahill by a 58%-41% margin; and in 1978, when four-term U.S. Senator Clifford Case lost to Jeffrey Bell, a 35-year-old former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, by a 51%-49% margin.

In 1977, Governor Brendan Byrne had ten opponents in the Democratic primary, including two Congressmen, a State Senator, and his own Commissioner of Labor.  Byrne won with 30% of the vote; U.S. Rep. Robert Roe came in second with 23%.

The most high profile primary against an incumbent came in 2008, when 84-year-old U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg faced a major challenge from U.S. Rep. Robert Andrews.  Lautenberg won 59% of the vote in the Democratic primary, with 35% for Andrews and 6% for Morristown Mayor Donald Cresitello. 

Lautenberg has faced two minor challenges as an incumbent.  He won 81% against Bill Campbell and Lynne Speed in 1994 and 80% against Elnardo Webster (the father of a powerful Democratic lawyer) and Harold Young in 1988.

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