William Hughes

One candidate for the Comeback of the Year Award will be James Biggs, who won 63% of the vote yesterday in a special election for Mayor of Island Heights (pop. 1,877).  The 67-year-old Biggs was first elected Mayor in 1974, at age 32, and gave up the job four years later to run for Congress.

In 1978, Democrat William Hughes was a two-term Congressman from a Republican district.  A 41-year-old former Assistant Prosecutor from Cape May County, ousted four-term incumbent Charles Sandman, by a 57%-41% margin in the 1974 Watergate landslide - one year after Sandman beat incumbent William Cahill in the Republican gubernatorial primary and then lost the general election by 721,328 votes.

Republicans believed they would win the seat back in 1976 with an exceptionally strong candidate, five-term Assembly Assistant Minority Leader James Hurley (R-Millville).  But Hughes proved to be a stronger incumbent than Republicans imagined, and Hurley turned out to be a weak general election candidate.  Hughes beat Hurly 68%-32%, running twenty percentage points ahead of the Democratic presidential candidate.

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U.S. Rep. Jim Saxton (R-Mt. Holly) will retire tomorrow after 24 years in the U.S. House of Representatives.

When Jim Saxton and Mike Ferguson leave Congress tomorrow, New Jersey will have nineteen living former Congressmen.  The oldest is Peter H.B. Frelinghuysen, the 93-year-old father of U.S. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen.  He first won an open seat in 1952 and served until his retirement in 1974.  The youngest is the soon-to-be-unemployed Michael Pappas, 48, a Republican who won an open seat in 1996 and lost his bid for re-election to a second term two years later.  Pappas works for the Small Business Administration and will likely lose his job when the new administration takes office this month.

Some pundits are wondering whether Democratic State Sen. Jefferson Van Drew made the wrong decision by decling to challenge U.S. Rep. Frank LoBiondo this year.  LoBiondowas re-elected to his eigth term in the House with 59%, his weakest showing since his unsuccessful 1992 campaign against Bill Hughes.  But LoBiondo didn't need to burn through his warchest in a race with a relatively unknown, underfinanced Democrat, Cape May City Councilman David Kurkowski; a race against Van Drew would have been exponentially more expensive, and LoBiondo would have been more engaged.

If John Adler and Linda Stender win their races for Congress, they'll accomplish a feat that rarely occurs in New Jersey -- winning the seat of a retiring Congressman from the other party in a contest unrelated to the drawing of new districts. The last time this happened was in 1994, when Republican Frank LoBiondo won after Democrat William Hughes retired.

The last time the GOP failed to hold the seats of retiring incumbents was in 1964, when Democrat James Howard succeeded Republican James Auchincloss, and Democrat Paul Krebs followed Republican George Wallhauser.

New Jersey Republicans have nine non-incumbent candidates for Congress in 2008, the most since 1976 when the state's House delegation had a 12-3 Democratic majority.  For the last decade, New Jersey Democrats have held a 7-6 majority in the House.

Here's a brief history of the party turnover of New Jersey House seats: