Warren Harding

For New Jersey Republicans, there was never a better year than 1920.  With GOP presidential candidate Warren Harding carrying New Jersey with 70% of the vote, Republicans won 59 of sixty seats in the State Assembly and eleven of the state's twelve congressional seats.    That victory included twelve Republican Assemblymen from Hudson County; the next time the Hudson County would win a legislative race was in 1985.

Republicans ousted three Democratic Congressmen, and picked up a fourth seat where the Democratic incumbent did not seek re-election.  The GOP won six of seven State Senate races.

Just three Democrats survived: Thomas Barber and Harry Runyon, who won Senate and Assembly seats, respectively, in Warren County, which leaned Democratic in those days, and Charles O'Brien won a Hudson County congressional seat with just 53% of the vote. 

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.

Actor Dick Foran, the son of Senate President Arthur Foran and the brother of veteran legislator Moose Foran, in The Sisters with Bette Davis.

Arthur Foran was elected Mayor of Flemington in 1916 and during the campaign became friends with the Republican candidate for Governor, Walter Edge.  After Edge won, Foran went with him to Trenton as his aide.  He left to become a Colonel in the U.S. Army during World War I and was the military aide to the Governor of New Jersey.  He served as Controller of the Port of New York under Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. 

In 1930, the Anti-Saloon League opposed his renomination, saying that he had looked the other way when alcohol shipments came into the port.  Political opponents, including a candidate for Republican State Committeeman in Hunterdon and a disgruntled former customs agent, organized a dry raid on Foran's Hunterdon County hunting lodge, which had a bar and a slot machine.   The controversy went on for several months, but with the support of New Jersey's two U.S. Senators, Edge and Hamilton Kean, the grandfather of the future Governor, Foran won Senate approval.

Despite major endorsements from prominent Democrats like former New Jersey Secretary of State Joan Haberle and her daughter, Dawn, and support from Alfredo Gutierrez, the owner of Xtra Supermarket in Newark, John McCain has fallen far behind Barack Obama in the race for New Jersey's fifteen electoral votes.  A Quinnipiac University poll released this morning has Obama with a 23-point lead, 59%-36%, while a new Monmouth University/Gannett New Jersey poll shows similar numbers: Obama 55%, McCain 38%.