Marge Roukema

Few Washington insiders believe New Jersey Congressman Christopher Smith has much of a chance to win the chairmanship of the House International Relations Committee if the GOP hold control of Congress in the 2006 election. Last year, the House Republican leadership deposed Smith as Chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee for not being conservative enough for their needs. Smith faces three other House members in the contest to replace Henry Hyde as head of the powerful foreign relations panel.

Despite their seniority, New Jersey Republicans have had little success in securing positions of influence in the Congress. In addition to Smith, Marge Roukema was passed over for the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee in 2001, Jim Saxton lost a bid to head the House Natural Resources Committee in 2003, and Rodney Frelinghuysen lost his Appropriations Subcommittee Chairmanship in 2005. Still, New Jersey Republicans are split over the contest to succeed Tom DeLay as House Minority Leader. One Capitol Hill staffer suggested that New Jersey Republicans might be better off trading a united block of six votes in exchange for assurances that leadership won't pass over New Jerseyans in future battles for key committee chairmanships.

Democrats have not nominated a woman for statewide office since 1930, when Thelma Parkinson, then a 32-year-old Democratic activist, ran for the United States Senate. Walter Edge resigned from the Senate in 1929 to become the U.S. Ambassador to France, and David Baird, a Camden County Republican leader, was appointed to fill the seat. Republicans ran millionaire industrialist Dwight Morrow, the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico and the father-in-law of aviator Charles Lindbergh. Democrats decided to run two candidates: Alexander Simpson, a State Senator from Bergen County, for the six-year term, and Parkinson in a Special Election for the remaining two months of Edge's term. Parkinson won 38.6% of the vote, Simpson received 39%.

Women have won Republican statewide nominations five times: Millicent Fenwick (1982), Mary Mochary (1984) and Christie Whitman for U.S. Senate, and Whitman for Governor in 1993 and 1997.

Of the ten most populous states, New Jersey is the only one without a woman in its congressional delegation. New Jersey has been without a Congresswoman since Marge Roukema retired in 2003, and has only elected five women to Congress: Mary Norton (1924), Florence Dwyer (1956), Helen Meyner (1974), Fenwick (1974) and Roukema (1980). Norton and Meyner were Democrats; Dwyer, Fenwick and Roukema were Republicans.