Woodrow Wilson

The race for Governor of New Jersey in 1919 centered around the national debate on prohibition, with Democrats running as the wet party and Republicans taking the dry position.  One week before the election, the Republican-controlled Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, overriding Woodrow Wilson's veto.  

The winner was Democrat Edward Edwards, a 56-year-old former banker who had been elected to represent Hudson County in the State Senate two years earlier.  He defeated Republican State Chairman Newton Bugbee by a 49%-46% margin.  Edwards called himself "as wet as the Atlantic Ocean," while Bugbee said he was personally wet but politically dry.  (He even drank a beer at a public event in Clifton to demonstrate his point.

Sometimes politicians get it right, and sometimes politicians -- even 96 years later -- just don't get it. Consider the words of Woodrow Wilson after he took the oath of office as Governor of New Jersey on January 17, 1911:

"Back of all reform lies the method of getting it. Back of the question what you want lies the fundamental quest of all government: how are you going to get it? How are you going to get public servants who will obtain it for you? How are you going to get genuine representatives who will serve your real interests and not their own, or the interests of some special group or body of your fellow citizens whose power is of the few and not of the many?"

One of the closest statewide primaries in New Jersey history was for United States Senator in 1910, one of the last Senate contests before the 17th amendment, which allowed for the direct election of Senators by the voters.

Three Republicans ran in the primary for the seat of John Kean, who was not seeking re-election to a third term: former Governor Franklin Murphy, who served from 1902 to 1905; Edward Stokes, who served as Governor from 1905 to 1908; and Congressman Charles Fowler, the Chairman of the House Banking and Currency Committee.

Stokes won by 736 votes statewide, a 34.4%-33.8% victory over Fowler.  Murphy finished third with 31.8%, just 3,214 votes behind Stokes.

New Jerseyans traditionally support New Yorkers running for President: Garden State voters backed Thomas Dewey, the Governor of New York, when he ran against President Harry Truman in 1948. Dewey didn't carry New Jersey in 1944; he lost to Franklin Roosevelt, a former Governor of New York who carried New Jersey four times. New Jersey even went for a New Yorker over a favorite son: former New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes beat President Woodrow Wilson, a former Governor of New Jersey.

Former New York Governor and New York City Mayor Theodore Roosevelt won New Jersey in 1904, but not against Wilson when he mounted a third-party White House bid in 1912. New Jersey-born Grover Cleveland, who also served as Governor of New York, carried New Jersey three times.

New York Governor Samuel Tilden won New Jersey against Rutherford Hayes in 1876, and former New York Governor Horatio Seymour carried New Jersey in 1868 against General Ulysses S. Grant. Martin Van Buren, who had served as a U.S. Senator from New York, carried New Jersey (by 545 votes) in his 1836 race against William Henry Harrison, but did not when he lost his 1840 rematch.

There are some exceptions: New York Governor Alfred E. Smith lost New Jersey to Herbert Hoover in 1928, and New York Tribune publisher Horace Greeley was defeated in New Jersey by Grant.

Richard Nixon was a New York resident when he carried New Jersey in the 1968 presidential election. He was a New Jersey resident at the time of his death.

For candidates from the other 49 states, including John McCain, John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, Sam Brownback, Newt Gingrich, Wesley Clark and Mike Huckabee, the historical precedent is good and bad.

The only Arizonan to run nationally, Senator Barry Goldwater, lost New Jersey by 903,828 votes. But most presidential candidates from Massachusetts win in the Garden State: Senator Kerry (2004) and John F. Kennedy (1960), and former Governor Calvin Coolidge (1924). John Quincy Adams, who served the Bay State as a U.S. Senator, lost New Jersey to Tennesse Senator Andrew Jackson in 1824, but carried it in his 1828 re-election loss to Jackson. Governor Michael Dukakis lost the state in 1988.

Presidential candidates from Illinois don't do well in New Jersey: Governor Adlai Stevenson lost it twice, in 1952 and 1956; so did former Congressman Abraham Lincoln, in 1860 and 1864.

Candidates from Kansas (Governor Alfred Landon in 1936 and Senator Robert Dole in 1996) don't win New Jersey; neither did the one from Georgia: Jimmy Carter in 1976. But Arkansians do fine: Bill Clinton won New Jersey twice.

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.

The winner of today's gubernatorial election will become the first Governor who did not grow up in New Jersey since Woodrow Wilson won in 1910. Wilson spent his childhood in Georgia and Virginia and moved to New Jersey in 1875 when he transferred from Davidson College to Princeton University. Jon Corzine grew up in Illinois and moved to New Jersey in the 1975 when he took a job at Goldman Sachs. Doug Forrester grew up in California and came to New Jersey in the mid 1970's after graduating from Harvard to study at at the Princeton Theological Seminary.