Clifford Case

Left to right: Clifford Case, Harrison Williams and Frank Lautenberg
Frank Lautenberg, 84, never ran for office until he was 58-years-old and has never won more than 55% of the vote in a statewide election, but if he wins a fifth term later this year, he would become the longest serving United States Senator in New Jersey history.

Joseph Minish, who passed away on Saturday at age 91, may be one of the top vote-getters in Essex County history.  He won eleven races for Congress without ever falling below 58% in a district that was potentially competitive for Republicans. 

When Minish first won in 1962, the eleventh district included the Central and West Wards of Newark and suburban (sometimes Republican-leaning) Essex town.  By 1972, Newark was entirely out of his district, and his district included working class (and politically competitive) towns like Belleville, Bloomfield, West Orange, Montclair Hillside, North Arlington and Little Falls, Republican strongholds like the Maplewood and the Caldwells.

Republican presidential candidates carried the eleventh district in four successive elections: Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by a 50%-40% margin in 1980, Gerald Ford carried it 54%-46% in 1976, Richard Nixon won it 60%-40% over George McGovern in 1972 and by 166 votes over Hubert Humphrey in 1968.  But Reagan, Ford and Nixon had no coattails for Minish’s GOP opponents.

Hunterdon County Freeholder Matthew Holt says Leonard Lance should run for Congress, and that if the Senate Minority Leader ultimately declines to run, he would consider seeking the GOP nomination.

Holt is the grandson of former U.S. Sen. Clifford Case, who served as Congressman in the 7th district from 1945 to 1953 before moving to the Senate in 1955.

Lance has expressed interest in entering the seat that became available on Monday when Mike Ferguson announced he would not seek re-election.

Clifford Case represented the 7th district from 1945 to 1953Born in Rahway in his grandfather's house when the 7th Congressional district included that tough prison town, Matt Holt remembers U.S. Sen. Clifford Case as a public servant who put the common good ahead of partisan politics.

Case's career included four terms in the House representing the 7th district and four terms in the Senate, and now 25 years after his death, grandson Holt is considering a run for Congress.

"The single biggest challenge is to return to the art of negotiation," says Holt, 49, a Hunterdon County freeholder from Clinton, who served as the town's mayor for two years.

The national political environment favored the GOP in 1966.  It was the mid-term election of Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the war in Vietnam had just begun to divide the nation.  

In New Jersey, Republican Clifford Case was seeking re-election to a third term in the United States Senate, and even though Democrats scored huge wins a year earlier (Governor Richard Hughes was re-elected in a landslide and Democrats captured both houses of the Legislative), few believed the popular Case, with strong support from traditional Democratic base voters like organized labor, was going to lose.

Henry Alexander Smith represented New Jersey in the U.S. Senate from 1944 to 1959.H. Alexander Smith was a late bloomer in New Jersey politics. Born in New York, he spent twelve years practicing law in Colorado Springs (his nephew, Peter Dominick, was the Senator from Colorado before losing his seat to Gary Hart in 1974) and worked at the U.S. Food Administration in Washington during World War II. He moved to New Jersey at age 39 to become Executive Secretary of Princeton University, and was elected New Jersey's Republican National Committeeman 23 years later.

After U.S. Senator Warren Barbour died in office at the end of 1943, Smith decided to run for the United States Senate. He was 64-years-old when he defeated Congressman Elmer Wene, a onetime chicken farmer from Cumberland County, by 25,725 votes -- a 50%-49% margin. He was re-elected in 1946 (by nearly nineteen percentage points against Camden Mayor George Brunner) and again in 1952, by a 56%-44% margin over Archibald Alexander.

Peter Rodino, who as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee won a place in American political history when he presided over impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon in 1973 and 1974, nearly gave up his seat in Congress twenty years earlier to run for the United States Senate.

Buoyed by their success in the 1953 gubernatorial election, New Jersey Democrats set their sights on winning a United States Senate seat in 1954. Democrats had not won a Senate race since 1934 and both parties viewed the incumbent, Robert Hendrickson, as vulnerable. Rodino, 45, an Essex County Democrat, was actively seeking support from party leaders for the chance to take on Hendrickson.

By early 1954, GOP leaders had already decided to withdraw party support for the 56-year-old Hendrickson, a former State Senate President from Gloucester County who served as State Treasurer after losing the 1940 gubernatorial race to Charles Edison. Former Congressman Clifford Case and former State Treasurer Walter Margetts had already announced their intention to challenge Henrickson in the Republican primary.

Congressman Robert Kean, the father of the future Governor, was interested in running for the Senate and had considerable support among party leaders for the nomination. But Kean refused to enter the race as long as Hendrickson remained a candidate for re-election. Hendrickson waited until the day before the filing deadline to announce that he would not be a candidate for a second term, leaving Case with a clear path to the GOP nomination. Kean waited until 1958, when Senator H. Alexander Smith retired; he lost to Democrat Harrison Williams.

On the Democratic side, two other candidates were competing with Rodino for party support: Charles Howell, 50, a three-term Congressman from Trenton and the Democratic State Chairman, and former State Treasurer Archibald Alexander, a Wall Street lawyer who had been Undersecretary of the Army in the Truman administration. Alexander, a decendent of the Rev. Archibald Alexander, who was the first Professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary, had run for the U.S. Senate twice before: he lost 50%-47% to Hendrickson in 1948, and lost 56%-44% to Smith in 1952.

Robert Meyner, in his second month as Governor, weighed in with a public endorsement for Dwight R.G. Palmer, a millionaire industrialist from Short Hills who had served as Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. Palmer was about to retire after 23 years as President of General Cable, which supplied power line cables.

But the 67-year-old Palmer declined to run (he later spent twelve years as the state Highway Commissioner, now the Department of Transportation) and Meyner then picked Howell. Rodino, who would have become the first Italian-American to run statewide in New Jersey, remained in the House until his retirement in 1988.

Case won the general election by about 3,3000 votes statewide, a 48.7%-48.5% margin. Case served four terms in the Senate before losing the 1978 Republican primary; his grandson, Matthew Holt, was elected Hunterdon County Freeholder in 2006. Howell served as state Banking and Insurance Commissioner from 1955 to 1969.

For extreme junkies: a group of conservative Republicans, led by former National Association of Manufacturers President James P. Selvage, strongly opposed Case as a liberal with ties to organized labor and the Amerians for Democratic Action (ADA). Most of their anti-Case efforts centered around a jingle sung to the tune of Three Blind Mice:

A, D, A; A, D, A.
They made them run. They made them run.
First they nominate Clifford Case, Then they throw Howell in the race. A, D, A; A, D, A . . .
Have you ever seen such a race as this? You can only vote for two socialists . . . A,D,A ...

One prominent New Jersey political family had some success at the ballot box this year: former Clinton Mayor Matthew Holt was easily elected to the Hunterdon County Board of Freeholders. Holt is the grandson of Clifford P. Case, who represented New Jersey in the United States Senate from 1955 to 1979. Case, who also served as a Rahway Councilman, Assemblyman and Congressman, is the last Republican to win a U.S. Senate seat from New Jersey.

New Jersey has gone longer than any other state without a Republican winning a statewide election; the last GOP candidate to carry New Jersey was Christine Todd Whitman in 1997. Since that election, each of the 49 other states have elected at least one Republican statewide. If this statistic were to be limited to only races for Governor and the United States Senate, New Jersey would rank 47th -- behind Delaware (1994), Washington (1994) and West Virginia (1996).

New Jersey Democrats have not lost a race for the United States Senate since 1972, when Clifford Case defeated Paul Krebs. Only two states have a better Democratic streak: Hawaii, which has not sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate since Hiram Fong won re-election in 1970, and West Virginia, where William Chapman Revercomb won in 1952.

Maryland Democrats have ended the political career of one of the most venerable political leaders of the last half century. William Donald Schaefer, who began his political career in 1955, won four terms as the Mayor of Baltimore, two as Governor of Maryland, and then another two as State Comptroller; he finished third in yesterday's primary election, winning just 30% of the vote.

The 84-year-old Schaefer joins a club that includes American political leaders like Clifford Case, Jacob Javits, Warren Magnuson, Margaret Chase Smith, John Bricker, Frank Lausche, Ernest Gruening, Bill Roth and Terry Sanford -- all of whom ended their political careers with a loss at an advanced age.