Richard Nixon

The outcome of the 2009 campaign for Governor of New Jersey is not historically significant to Barack Obama's presidency. It is almost twice as likely that New Jerseyans elect a governor who is not a member of the president's party.  Indeed, the party of the incumbent president is 15-26 in New Jersey gubernatorial races since a Democrat won in Abraham Lincoln's mid-term election.

The last five gubernatorial elections went that way: Republicans lost in 1989 (George H.W. Bush), 2001 and 2005 (George W. Bush), and Democrats lost in 1993 and 1997 (Bill Clinton). But in the seven contests before that, the party of the sitting president went 6-1: Republicans won in 1969 (Richard Nixon), 1981, and 1985 (Ronald Reagan), and Democrats won in 1961 (John Kennedy), 1965 (Lyndon Johnson), and 1977 (Jimmy Carter); Republicans lost in 1973, after the incumbent was defeated in the primary and in an election that was held under the backdrop of the Watergate scandal.

None those twelve campaigns influenced the outcomes of the next presidential campaign, either nationally or in pursuit of New Jersey's electoral votes - although the 1973 results were a harbinger of the 1974 Democratic landslide.  By 1976, New Jersey was supporting a Republican presidential candidate.

Democrats won both gubernatorial elections held during Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, and Republicans won both governors' races held while Harry Truman was president.  During the four campaigns for governor that occurred during Franklin Roosevelt's tenure in the White House, Democrats won two (1937 and 1940) and lost two (1934 and 1943).  Eisenhower carried New Jersey twice, and Roosevelt won the state four times.

A poll of New Jersey voters taken three weeks before the 1968 presidential election had independent George Wallace with 14% of the vote, with Richard Nixon leading Hubert Humphrey by a 43%-38% margin.  Both parties agreed that Wallace was taking more votes from the Democrats than the Republicans. 

A Gallup poll conducted outside two New Jersey auto plants had Wallace getting 73% of the vote among 500 members of the United Auto Workers Union.  "Listen, the men in the plants want to zap the Negros by voting for Wallace.  It's that simple.  And I don't see how anyone can stop them," a UAW official told the New York Times in a quote that 41 years later appears rather incredible.

On Election Day, Nixon carried New Jersey by 61,261 votes, 46%-44%.  Wallace took 9%, less than where he was polling, receiving 262,187 votes.

Gov. Richard Hughes

The #1 process issue of the 1965 campaign for Governor of New Jersey was over a Rutgers University professor who was a self-professed Marxist.  The GOP nominee, State Sen. Wayne Dumont (R-Phillipsburg) sought to hold Democratic Gov. Richard Hughes accountable for refusing to call for the firing of Prof. Eugene Genovese.

During an April '65 teach-in on the Vietnam War, Genovese told students: "Those of you who know me know that I am a Marxist and a Socialist.  Therefore, unlike most of my distinguished colleagues here this morning, I do not fear or regret the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam.  I welcome it."

Hughes called Genovese's comments offensive, but declined to get involved in the politics of calling for the termination of a state university professor.  Dumont demanded that Genovese be fired, and said that the Rutgers teach-ins were "part and parcel of an organized conspiracy to undermine our position in Vietnam."

Dumont spent the next three months seeking to link the governor to the Rutgers issue, even going as far as to suggest that Hughes did not understand the danger of communism.  But the Warren County Republican stopped short of saying that Hughes was soft on communism. 

Hughes accused Dumont of politicizing dead American soldiers in Vietnam, and said that his Republican rival was an extremist.  "By using for his own little political gain the individual tragedies of young men dead in Vietnam, in what can only be called a kind of ‘vampire politics,' my opponent has opened a Pandora's box for the extremists of this state and nation," Hughes said.

One of Robert Novak's last public appearances was at an Americans for Prosperity Summit in New Jersey last year. Novak is shown meeting with some conservative bloggers.

Journalist Robert Novak, who died today of brain cancer at age 78, was a central figure in American politics for parts of six decades. 

One of the most memorable stories about the conservative columnists influence on presidential elections was in 1972, when Novak quoted an unnamed Democratic U.S. Senator as saying: "The people don't know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion and legalization of pot.  Once Middle America - Catholic Middle America, in particular - finds this out, he's dead."  Novak's label of McGovern as the "amnesty, abortion and acid" candidate stuck, and the Democratic presidential candidate was never able to win the votes of conservative Democrats and Independents who went in huge numbers for Richard Nixon.

An estimated 1,700 people, "mostly women," joined Eunice Kennedy Shriver at a campaign tea in Far Hills a few weeks before the end of the 1960 presidential campaign, according to the New York Times' coverage of the event.

"They tell me this is Republican country," Shriver told the crowd while campaigning for her brother, then-U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy.  "But I don't think so anymore."

The tea was held at the home of industrialist Charles Engelhard.  According to published reports, Shriver spent nearly two hours in a receiving line shaking hands.  She made the New Jersey campaign stop "because Jack asked me to come."

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.

There is some risk involved as political rivals of former U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie seek to make Herbert Stern an issue in the 2009 gubernatorial campaign.  A former Federal Judge and U.S. Attorney, Stern is a man of considerable gravitas.  Making him look like a common pay-to-play lawyer could backfire if they seek to impugn his integrity. 

Stern was a career prosecutor who went from law school to trying Homicide cases as an Assistant Manhattan District Attorney. (He was the DA sent to the scene when Civil Rights leader Malcolm X. Shabbaz was murdered.) He spent four years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice's Organized Crime and Racketeering Section. When Frederick Lacey became the new U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in 1969, he hired Stern as Chief Assistant. The two met a year earlier during the prosecution of Peter Weber, the powerful head of the New Jersey Operating Engineers Union. Stern was the prosecutor and Lacey was the defense attorney; Stern won.

Stern was named U.S. Attorney in 1970, when Lacey became a Federal Judge. In 1974, Stern joined Lacey on the bench and was replaced by his deputy, Jonathan Goldstein, also a career prosecutor.

This trio of federal prosecutors won national attention for their war on political corruption and for their aggressive prosecution of organized crime figures. While nominally Republican (they were appointed by Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford at the suggestion of GOP U.S. Senator Clifford Case), they were viewed as fairly non-political. In fact, they took town several key members of Republican Governor William Cahill's administration; that scandal contributed toward Cahill's defeat in the 1973 GOP primary.

Since 1824, when direct elections began, nine American Presidents never carried New Jersey: Martin Van Buren, James Polk, Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush.  Of the ten best Presidents ranked by historians in a 2009 C-Span poll, New Jersey cast a majority of its electoral votes for all but Lincoln and Truman, and voted to support six of the worst: James Buchanan, William Henry Harrison, Warren Harding, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Pierce, and Hayes.

One of the ten best Presidents was a New Jerseyan, Woodrow Wilson, who served as Governor from 1911 to 1913.  Wilson carried New Jersey in his first campaign, but lost it when he ran for re-election in 1916.  Before the direct election of Presidents, New Jersey supported James Madison for President in 1808, but not when Madison ran for a second term in 1812.

Getty Images Photo

Four years after Richard Nixon carried N.J. by a 2-1 margin, more New Jerseyans claimed to have voted for George McGovern than Nixon.

Two weeks after leaving office, New Jerseyans give George W. Bush an upside-down 25%-69% approval rating - horrible numbers, but substantially better than the 18%-78% he had in a November Quinnipiac University poll.  In November, for the first time in his presidency, he was upside down (45%-48%) among Republicans.  Today's Quinnipiac poll has his GOP approvals at 58%-33%, a major shift.

The last poll had Bush's approvals in New Jersey lower than Richard Nixon's were in May 1974, three months before the Watergate scandal forced his resignation. Nixon was upside-down at 19%-76%.  Among Republicans, Nixon was at 46%-44%.

Getty Images Photo

'Deep Throat' Mark Felt died today yesterday at age 95.

As a Republican Congressman who served out his final term during the Watergate scandal, Peter H.B. Frelinghuysen did not know Mark Felt, the FBI’s number two man who turned out to be the famous “Deep Throat.”

But, reflecting on Felt’s passing yesterday at the age of 95, Frelinghuysen said he did the right thing by leaking information to Bob Woodward, and wishes there were more whistleblowers like him.

“If it’s something that should be talked about, we should talk about it,” said Frelinghuysen, 92, whose family has been prominent in New Jersey politics for over two centuries. “The sad part about Nixon was we were ready to impeach him if he hadn’t resigned.”

Frelinghuysen entered the House in 1953 – the same year Dwight Eisenhower took over the presidency. But unlike many of his fellow Republicans in the mid-1970s anti-Nixon wave, Frelinghuysen’s retirement was not forced. After 22 years, he felt he had been in office long enough in his safe district.

Looking back on it, Frelinghuysen has a hard time understanding he motivations behind the players of the Watergate scandal.