dianne gove

Former Long Beach Mayor DiAnne Gove is expected to be sworn in as a member of the State Assembly on November 23.  Gove won an August special election convention to replace Daniel Van Pelt (R-Ocean Twp.), who resigned following his arrest last July.  Gove retired in 2006 after 32 years as a high school history and government teacher - making her the only NJEA member in the Republican caucus.  She won a full two-year term in November.

Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts (D-Camden) has no plans to change the seating chart for the Legislature's lame duck session, which will leave three indicted Assemblymen sitting in their old seats.  That will leave Democrats Linda Greenstein (D-Plainsboro) and Wayne DeAngelo (D-Hamilton) sitting in between the indicted three - Joseph Vas (D-Perth Amboy) to their right, and Harvey Smith (D-Jersey City) and Anthony Chiappone (D-Bayonne) to their left. 

Assemblywoman-elect DiAnne Gove (R-Long Beach), who will be sworn in this month to replace another indicted legislator, Daniel Van Pelt (R-Ocean Twp.), will set next to Chiappone.

The Courier News is recommending the election of two Republicans seeking to unseat incumbents Linda Stender and Gerald Green in the 22nd district Assembly race.  The endorsement went to former Scotch Plains Mayor Martin Marks and first-time candidate Bo Vastine.

The Press of Atlantic City and the Asbury Park Press have endorsed Republicans Brian Rumpf and DiAnne Gove for State Assembly in District 9.  Rumpf is seeking his third term and Gove won a special election following the arrest and resignation of Daniel Van Pelt and his waiting to be sworn in. 

The Asbury Park Press is backing the re-election of freshman GOP incumbents Mary Pat Angelini and David Rible for State Assembly.

DiAnne Gove, who is expected to replace Daniel Van Pelt in the ninth district State Assembly seat, would become the sixth woman to represent Ocean County in the Legislature, and the first since Virginia Haines left in 1994.  Under the current State Constitution, Ocean County has elected 22 men and 4 women. 

The first Assemblywoman from Ocean County was Lila Thompson, who was elected in 1923 and re-elected in 1924.  Thompson gave up her Assembly seat in 1925 to run for the State Senate, challenging incumbent Thomas Mathis in the Republican primary.  Mathis was one of the most venerable politicians in Ocean County history.  Known as Cap'n Tom because he commanded J. Pierpont Morgan's America's Cup yacht for eleven years,

Starting his career as a Tuckerton Councilman, Mathis won a special election for an unexpired term in the State Senate in 1910.  He lost re-election in the 1911 primary, won his seat back in 1913, and lost it again in the 1915 primary.  Mathis returned to the Senate in 1923 and became Chairman of the Joint Appropriations Committee.

Thompson's campaign against Mathis was dominated by a process story: the Assemblywoman's husband, a state employee, was sent to Massachusetts for several weeks during the primary to conduct a survey of correctional institutions there.  The problem for Thompson was that at night, her husband was her driver; in those days, women did not drive alone at night, especially in a county that was then sparsely populated and without major roads.

Thompson decided to drive alone anyway, and accused the Ocean County Republican organization of engineering her husband's exile out of state.  Her husband, according to local lore, was offered a deal to return to New Jersey if he would sign a document exonerating two Department of Institutions and Agencies employees for their role in the exile.  He refused, and after several newspaper editorials slammed the GOP organization, he came home.

Delegates from Republican county committees in Ocean, Burlington and Atlantic counties last night picked Long Beach Township Commissioner DiAnne Gove to complete former Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt's (R-Ocean) term ending in January, the AP reports.

Gove will replace Van Pelt on the fall election ballot.

A freshman Republican legislator, Van Pelt resigned after federal law enforcement officials arrested him last month in a federal corruption sweep.

There is some speculation that the leading candidate to replace Daniel Van Pelt (R-Ocean) in the ninth district State Assembly seat is DiAnne Gove, a Long Beach Commissioner and former Mayor.  Van Pelt resigned on Friday, a little more than a week after he was arrested on federal corruption charges.  There is really only one voter in this race: Ocean County GOP Chairman George Gilmore. Gilmore will need to call a special election convention sometime between August 7 and September 4.  The timing is not critical; the new legislator is not likely to get sworn in before the Assembly goes back into session after the November election.