James Howard

Sal Vega, West New York Commissioner and Hudson County Freeholder, is the leading candidate to replace Congressman-Albio Sires as Mayor of West New York -- and possibly as the 33rd district Assemblyman as well. Sires is eligible to take his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as soon as the state certifies his election -- as long as the House returns for a lame-duck session. (In 1988, Frank Pallone won a Special Election to fill the remaining two months of the late James Howard's term, but never took the oath of office.)

If Sires' running mate, Assemblyman/Union City Mayor Brian Stack runs for the State Senate next year against Senate Majority Leader/Hudson County Democratic Chairman Bernard Kenny, look for Hoboken Councilman Christopher Campos to run for the State Assembly.

Before there was Frank Pallone and James Howard, the Congressman from Monmouth County was James Auchincloss, a Republican who was 50-years-old when he walked away from his seat on the New York Stock Exchange to begin concentrate full time on his political career. He had been elected to the Rumson Borough Council in 1930 and won his first of three terms as Mayor in 1937. He challenged five-term Democratic Congressman William Sutphin in 1942 and won easily.

Over the next 22 years, he assembled a fairly conservative voting record in Congress and became popular with voters in Monmouth and Ocean counties -- running ahead of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. He retired in 1964, at age 79; the Democratic landslide that year helped Howard, an elementary school principal and political newcomer, narrowly upset the Republican candidate in the race for Auchincloss' open seat. Auchincloss, whose cousins included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' stepfather, spent his retirment in Washington, where he died in 1976 at age 91.

The man who was supposed to succeed Auchincloss was another wealthy conservative, Marcus Daly, whose uncle had founded Anaconda Copper. Daly had held a diplomatic post in the Eisenhower administration -- he was in charge of resettling several hundred thousand European refugees -- and then won a seat on the Monmouth County Board of Freeholders in 1963.

As a Freeholder, Daly sought to stop the county from making welfare payments to women who had children out of wedlock, and wanted to see those women prosecuted. Eventually he backed down when Governor Richard Hughes said that his actions could result in a huge loss of federal aid. Lyndon Johson defeated Barry Goldwater in the Monmouth/Ocean district with 61% of the vote, and Daly lost to Howard by less than 2,000 votes.

Instead of a rematch with Howard in 1966, Daly ran for re-election as Freeholder and won. He won the GOP nomination for Congress in 1968, but was forced to drop out the race in early September when he was diagnosed with cancer. He died the following year at the age of 60.

Marie Muhler's announcement that she would not seek re-election to a fourth term as Monmouth County Surrogate marks the end of a political career than spanned four decades. A mother of five, Muhler began by running for the Marlboro Board of Education, and then moved up to the Freehold Regional Board of Education.

When she first ran for the State Assembly in 1975, the 37-year-old Muhler was facing two Democratic incumbents who had won upset victories in the '73 Watergate landslide. The was was an exceptionally close one: Assemblyman Walter Kozloski was the top vote-getter, with Muhler finishing 142 votes behind him -- and just 271 votes behind the other incumbent, Morton Salkind. Muhler's running mate, Jerome Burke, who had served as an Assemblyman from Essex Couny in 1964 and 1964, finished only 13 votes behind Salkind.

When veteran Republican State Senator Alfred Beadleston retired in 1977, Monmouth GOP leader decided to run Surrogate Thomas Gagliano for the Senate seat instead of Muhler, who was easily re-elected to a second term in the Assembly, by a margin of more than 3,300 votes. (Muhler finished first in that race, and Kozloski won a third term by just 213 votes over former Assemblyman John Dawes, whose law firm employed a young attorney named John Bennett. In 1979, with Kozlowski dying at the age of 44, Bennett won that seat.)

She won a contested race for the Assembly Republican leadership in 1976, becoming Assistant Minority Whip -- back in the days when there were only four leadership posts. When the Minority Leader, Thomas Kean, left the Legislature to run for Governor in 1977, a series of move-ups put Muhler in the Minority Whip post, and she became the #2 Republican in the Assembly leadership in 1982 when she became Assistant Minority Leader. But after the 1983 mid-term elections, a shake-up in the GOP caucus led to her defeat in a bid to keep her leadership post.

In 1980, Muhler nearly won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, coming within 1,900 votes of ousting eight-term Democrat James Howard. Muhler ran against Howard again in 1982, but lost by a much wider margin. She resigned from her Assembly seat in 1986 when she took a job with the state Department of Community Affairs. She returned to electoral politics in 1991 when Monmouth Republicans picked her to run against an incumbent Democratic Surrogate Patricia Bennett (who had won five years earlier against the GOP candidate, Frederick Niemann.) She was easily elected to three terms.