Woodrow Wilson

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.

Only six independent candidates have hit the five percent mark in New Jersey statewide elections.  Five of the six were running for President; only Murray Sabrin, the Libertarian candidate for Governor in 1997, was running for state office.

Only two independents made it into the double-digits in New Jersey: Theodore Roosevelt finished second with 34% against Gov. Woodrow Wilson (41%) and President William Howard Taft (21%); and  Ross Perot, in his 1992 presidential campaign, won 16% in a three-way race with Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.  When Perot ran again in 1996, he received 9%.  John Anderson (1980) and George Wallace (1968), clearly on opposite sides of the political spectrum when they made third party White House bids, each won 8%.

Left to right: Alfred Sieminski, Norman Roth, James Tumulty, and Vincent Dellay.

Republican Norman Roth, a 40-year-old lawyer for the Jersey City Board of Education, came with 57 votes of winning a seat in Congress in 1956, but fortunately for the incumbent, Jersey City came through with a few extra votes for the Democratic incumbent after the polls had closed.  This was one of the closest House races in New Jersey history.

Roth's bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Alfred Sieminski, 45, benefitted greatly by the coattails of President Dwight Eisenhower, who carried Hudson County in his re-election campaign against Adlai Stevenson.  Two years earlier, Sieminski, a veteran of World War II and Korea who went to Princeton and Harvard Law School, won a third term in Congress with an easy 61%-27% victory over Roth. 

In another Hudson district, Republican Vincent Dellay upset Democratic U.S. Rep. James Tumulty by a 52%-46% margin.  Tummulty was the nephew of Joseph Tumulty, a former Assemblyman who was Woodrow Wilson's Chief of Staff (in those days, the job was called Secretary) in the Governor's office and in the White House.

Seeking his first term in 1954, the 41-year-old Tummulty, a former Assembly Minority Leader who later became Secretary to the Mayor of Jersey City, beat Dellay, 62%-35%.  Dellay, 47, was state Treasury Department auditor,

Hoping for a second term as the Congressman from Hudson County, Dellay switched parties; the Hudson County Democratic Organization denied him party support and instead sent 50-year-old Dominick Daniels, a Jersey City Municipal Court Judge, to Congress. 

Morris County Freeholder Doug Cabana

BOONTON - District 25 Assembly candidate Doug Cabana says the holidays shouldn’t be about politics so much as spending time with family.

But when Cabana last month sat down to Thanksgiving dinner across a table of family fellowship, the Morris County freeholder couldn’t avoid looking into the eyes of his chief political rival in District 25: Tony Bucco, Jr., husband to his only sister, Amy.

“I spent Thanksgiving at their house,” Cabana said.

"Doug and his parents have come to our house every year for Thanksgiving," said Bucco. "The way I see it, family is family and politics is politics. So when this Thanksgiving rolled around, it was no different. We had family and football."

There will likely be a few more weeks of these encounters, of tearing into gifts and food.

Then the campaigns of Bucco and Cabana will tear into each other, as most political insiders see the two men as chief combatants in the fight to succeed retiring Assemblyman Richard Merkt (R-Mendham).

Getty Images Photo

U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), convicted of criminal charges a few weeks ago, is trailing in his bid for re-election to the U.S. Senate seat he's held since 1968

If Republican Ted Stevens loses he'll become the fifth incumbent U.S. Senator to lose re-election in a year when a home state candidate is on the national ticket.  It happened twice in 1916, and again in 1964 and 1980.

Despite Gov. Sarah Palin's presence on the GOP ticket in Alaska, Stevens -- convicted on federal corruption charges last month -- trails Democrat Mark Begich by 814 votes, with 35,000 ballots still to be counted --

The first time that happened was in 1916, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson was re-elected to a second term as President.  But in Wilson's home state of New Jersey, Republican Joseph Frelinghuysen, a cousin of U.S. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, ousted Democratic U.S. Sen. James Martine by a 56%-39% margin. And in Indiana, the home state of Wilson's vice president, Thomas Marshall, Republican Harry New unseated incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. John Kern by a 48%-46% margin.

Biotech millionaire John Crowley is still mulling a bid for the Republican nomination for Governor.  If he wins, he'd be the first Governor with no previous public sector experience since Woodrow Wilson moved from college president to Governor in 1910.  But in U.S. Senate races, the lack of political experience is more prevalent: New Jersey sent first-time candidates to the Senate in 1942, 1978, 1982 and 2000.

And if you're an extreme political junkie: if Leonard Lance wins a House seat tomorrow, he'll join a fairly elite group -- New Jersey  Congressmen who have served in both the State Senate and General Assembly.  The last ones were Bob Menendez in 1992, Jim Saxton in 1984, Harold Hollenbeck in 1976, Joseph Maraziti in 1972, and Elijah Hutchinson in 1914.

Former Newark Mayor Jacob Haussling was one of New Jersey's most colorful and tragic political figures.  He was 33-years-old Democrat when he launched his political career in 1888 as an unsuccessful candidate for Essex County Sheriff.  He ran for County Clerk in 1891 and lost to Republican Richard Cooper by just seventeen votes countywide.  He was elected Sheriff in 1893, but lost his 1896 bid for re-election to Republican Henry Doremus.

Ten years later, Haussling sought a political comeback -- and a rematch with Doremus -- on a single issue: his opposition to the "Bishop's Law," a local ordinance that forced saloons to close on Sundays. His "liberality with decency" agenda met with the approval of voters.  Haussling defeated Doremus, who was seeking re-election to his third term as Mayor of Newark.

"Mr. Haussling was no reformer.  Once a reform organization said of him that he ran on a single platform and that plank was 'What'll you have?," according to a published report.  "He never resented the accusation nor was he ashamed of the fact that he could start campaigning at 7 o'clock in the evening, keep going till the next morning, always know one more place where men in receptive mood were to be found, and always leave by the wayside candidates of weaker fiber."

Joseph Biden is the seventh vice presidential nominee from a state that borders New Jersey since William McKinley picked New York Gov. Theodore Roosevelt to run on his ticket in 1900, following the death of Vice President Garrett Hobart, a resident of Paterson. New Jersey hasn’t cast its electoral votes for a border state VP candidate since U.S. Rep. James Sherman (R-Utica) ran with William Howard Taft in 1908. New Yorkers Jack Kemp (1996), Geraldine Ferraro (1984), William Miller, (1964), and Franklin Roosevelt (1920) did not carry New Jersey when they ran with Bob Dole, Walter Mondale, Barry Goldwater and James Cox, respectively. Sherman ran for re-election with Taft in 1912 (he died a few weeks before the election, but Taft decided not to replace him), but New Jersey supported favorite son Woodrow Wilson instead.

The New Jersey Legislature passed the first absentee ballot law after President Woodrow Wilson missed the 1919 general election. Wilson had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage on a trip to Colorado the previous September and was unable to return to New Jersey to vote in the gubernatorial and legislative elections. Wilson voted by absentee ballot from the White House in 1920, and moved his official residence to Washington, D.C. after leaving office in March 1921.

New Jersey has not had a serious favorite son presidential candidate since Woodrow Wilson won in 1912, but that could change in the future: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, a West Caldwell resident, may want to seek a future Republican presidential nomination. That’s according to New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams, who says “that's what friends who don't want their names mentioned are telling other friends who are telling me the man wants.”