Pat Schuber

July 21, 2008 - 9:01am

Is Myers the new Neil Romano?

One of the reasons Burlington County Republicans picked Christopher Myers, the relatively obscure Mayor of Medford, to succeed Jim Saxton in Congress was his ability to raise money. When the Lockheed-Martin Vice President entered the race, the buzz among GOP insiders was that he had the ability to compete with State Sen. John Adler in the fundraising department. Adler has raised $1.9 million in a district where Democrats haven’t won since 1882, and Myers, after a tough primary, has just a little more than $150K on hand.

One of the legendary scams in Bergen County politics came in 1984, when Republicans were considering candidates to take on newly-elected Democratic Congressman Robert Torricelli. Torricelli had won the seat two years earlier, when he ousted three-term GOP incumbent Harold Hollenbeck by a 53%-46% margin. The political climate in 1982 (and congressional redistricting in the 9th) favored Democrats and Torricelli leveraged the national contacts he made working for Vice President Walter Mondale and running Jimmy Carter's 1980 re-election campaign in Illinois to help him raise $266,000 -- about $70,000 more than Hollenbeck had.

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October 18, 2007 - 1:07pm

What a difference a decade makes

A decade ago, there were ten Republicans who dominated politics in their counties: Bill Gormley in Atlantic, Pat Schuber in Bergen, Glenn Paulsen in Burlington, James Treffinger in Essex, Robert Prunetti in Mercer, Harry Larrison in Monmouth, George Gilmore in Ocean, Peter Murphy in Passaic, Dale Florio in Somerset, and Donald DiFrancesco in Union. Today, Democrats have completely overtaken five of those counties, and the Republicans are now playing defense in the other five.

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