In June, it's Merkt vs. Garramone for the record

If Assemblyman Richard Merkt (R-Mendham) continues to poll in the one percent range, he could set the record for the worst showing by a sitting state legislator in a gubernatorial primary.  The record is currently held by Raymond Garramone (D-Haworth), a one-term State Senator from Bergen County who gave up his seat to challenge Brendan Byrne in the 1977 Democratic primary.  With 6,602 votes statewide, Garramone finished sixth in a field of eleven candidates, with 1.1% of the vote. 

Garramone was the 46-year-old Mayor of Haworth when he rode Byrne's 1973 coattails to an upset win in the heavily Republican 39th district over Harry Randall, a former Assemblyman and the father of BPU Commissioner Elizabeth Randall. 

When Garramone gave up his Senate seat to run for Governor, Republicans were confident of a pickup in District 39.  But Democrats held the seat when Frank Herbert, a Bergen County Freeholder and former Waldwick Mayor, beat Republican Assemblyman John Markert. 

Markert's running mate, Demarest Mayor Gerald Cardinale, lost his bid for an Assembly seat that year.  Cardinale came back to win in 1979, and moved up to the Senate when he defeated Herbert in 1981.  (When Cardinale sought the GOP nomination for Governor in 1989, he won 8.3% of the vote.)

Garramone went back to running his Manhattan-based air conditioning company and never ran for office again.  He died in 1998 at age 71.

Merkt, a six-term Assemblyman from Morris County, polled 2% of the vote in the most recent Quinnipiac University poll.

For extreme political junkies: When Garramone won his Senate seat in 1973, Democrats also captured two Assembly seats -- Harold Martin and Herbert Gladstone beat Assemblyman Robert Veit and his running mate, Harold Benel.  Veit and Benel had first faced a contested GOP primary against a young lawyer named Gary Stein, who would go on to serve as an Associate Justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court.