Peter Rodino

John Adler won a seat in Congress eighteen years after his first House race.

Now it seems trendy to run for Congress, lose, then spend a lot of years in state government before finally making it to Washington.  In 2006, Albio Sires won an open House seat twenty years after his first attempt.  Sires had challenged U.S. Rep. Frank Guarini as a Republican in 1986; he later won local office in West New York, and after switching parties in 1999, he beat an incumbent Assemblyman in the Democratic primary.  He became Assembly Speaker after the 2001 election, and went to Congress after Bob Menendez joined the United States Senate.

Both of New Jersey's freshmen Congressman had previously lost House races.  John Adler ran against Jim Saxton in 1990 and lost 60%-40%.  A year later, despite one of the two biggest Republican landslides in state political history, he ousted four-term GOP State Sen. Lee Laskin.  Leonard Lance first ran for Congress in 1996, when Richard Zimmer gave up his seat to run for U.S. Senate; he finished third in the GOP primary, behind Michael Pappas and John Bennett. Lance moved from the Assembly to the Satate Senate in 2001, and became Minority Leader in 2004.

If John Adler and Linda Stender win their races for Congress, they'll accomplish a feat that rarely occurs in New Jersey -- winning the seat of a retiring Congressman from the other party in a contest unrelated to the drawing of new districts. The last time this happened was in 1994, when Republican Frank LoBiondo won after Democrat William Hughes retired.

The last time the GOP failed to hold the seats of retiring incumbents was in 1964, when Democrat James Howard succeeded Republican James Auchincloss, and Democrat Paul Krebs followed Republican George Wallhauser.

John Adler could be the first Democrat to capture a congressional seat (Jim Saxton's seat) in his district since Thomas Ferrell won in 1882, and Linda Stender, if she wins, she'll be the first Democrat to hold that seat (Mike Ferguson's seat) since Harrison Williams lost to Florence Dwyer in 1956.  New Jersey's House seats, with the last time the other party held them:

There is some chatter among Passaic County Democrats attending the Democratic National Convention in Denver that veteran State Sen. John Girgenti could be in his last term.  Girgenti, a legislator since 1977, is the last white male to represent a district where minority voters represent the majority of the district.  Two years ago, Assemblywoman Nellie Pou went as far as to present her name to the Passaic Democratic screening committee as a Senate candidate, but Girgenti—rather easily – secured party support for another term.  Pou, by the way, says she’s not interested in challenging the popular Girgenti in 2011. 

The Essex-Hudson tenth district congressional seat has elected just three people over the past 80 years: Fred Hartley, who served from 1929 to 1949, Peter Rodino from 1949 to 1989, and Donald Payne, who won the seat when Rodino retired in 1988.

But in the sixteen years prior to Hartley's election, the seat changed hands seven times.

Fred Hartley was once the boy wonder of New Jersey politics: he was appointed to Kearny Library Commission at age 19, and in 1924, at age 21, bucked the local political establishment to election as a Kearny Town Commissioner.  In 1928, the 26-year-old Hartley became the youngest person ever to represent New Jersey in the U.S. House of Representatives: he won a three-way Republican primary by just 714 votes in a district that included parts of Essex (Belleville, Bloomfield, Nutley and parts of Newark) and Hudson (Harrison, Kearny and East Newark) counties when the Essex and Hudson GOP organizations backed different candidates (turnout was boosted by a hotly contested contest for the U.S. Senate nomination between Republican National Committeeman Hamilton Fish Kean, former U.S. Senator Joseph Frelinghuysen, former Governor Edward Stokes, former Congressman Edward Gray, and Lillian Ford Feickert, the first woman to run for statewide office) and by 344 votes (after a recount) over freshman Democratic Congressman Paul Moore.

Peter Rodino, who as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee won a place in American political history when he presided over impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon in 1973 and 1974, nearly gave up his seat in Congress twenty years earlier to run for the United States Senate.

Buoyed by their success in the 1953 gubernatorial election, New Jersey Democrats set their sights on winning a United States Senate seat in 1954. Democrats had not won a Senate race since 1934 and both parties viewed the incumbent, Robert Hendrickson, as vulnerable. Rodino, 45, an Essex County Democrat, was actively seeking support from party leaders for the chance to take on Hendrickson.

By early 1954, GOP leaders had already decided to withdraw party support for the 56-year-old Hendrickson, a former State Senate President from Gloucester County who served as State Treasurer after losing the 1940 gubernatorial race to Charles Edison. Former Congressman Clifford Case and former State Treasurer Walter Margetts had already announced their intention to challenge Henrickson in the Republican primary.

Congressman Robert Kean, the father of the future Governor, was interested in running for the Senate and had considerable support among party leaders for the nomination. But Kean refused to enter the race as long as Hendrickson remained a candidate for re-election. Hendrickson waited until the day before the filing deadline to announce that he would not be a candidate for a second term, leaving Case with a clear path to the GOP nomination. Kean waited until 1958, when Senator H. Alexander Smith retired; he lost to Democrat Harrison Williams.

On the Democratic side, two other candidates were competing with Rodino for party support: Charles Howell, 50, a three-term Congressman from Trenton and the Democratic State Chairman, and former State Treasurer Archibald Alexander, a Wall Street lawyer who had been Undersecretary of the Army in the Truman administration. Alexander, a decendent of the Rev. Archibald Alexander, who was the first Professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary, had run for the U.S. Senate twice before: he lost 50%-47% to Hendrickson in 1948, and lost 56%-44% to Smith in 1952.

Robert Meyner, in his second month as Governor, weighed in with a public endorsement for Dwight R.G. Palmer, a millionaire industrialist from Short Hills who had served as Treasurer of the Democratic National Committee. Palmer was about to retire after 23 years as President of General Cable, which supplied power line cables.

But the 67-year-old Palmer declined to run (he later spent twelve years as the state Highway Commissioner, now the Department of Transportation) and Meyner then picked Howell. Rodino, who would have become the first Italian-American to run statewide in New Jersey, remained in the House until his retirement in 1988.

Case won the general election by about 3,3000 votes statewide, a 48.7%-48.5% margin. Case served four terms in the Senate before losing the 1978 Republican primary; his grandson, Matthew Holt, was elected Hunterdon County Freeholder in 2006. Howell served as state Banking and Insurance Commissioner from 1955 to 1969.

For extreme junkies: a group of conservative Republicans, led by former National Association of Manufacturers President James P. Selvage, strongly opposed Case as a liberal with ties to organized labor and the Amerians for Democratic Action (ADA). Most of their anti-Case efforts centered around a jingle sung to the tune of Three Blind Mice:

A, D, A; A, D, A.
They made them run. They made them run.
First they nominate Clifford Case, Then they throw Howell in the race. A, D, A; A, D, A . . .
Have you ever seen such a race as this? You can only vote for two socialists . . . A,D,A ...

After Sharpe James became Mayor of Newark in 1986 (he defeated four-term incumbent Kenneth Gibson), he was able to influence the way Essex County Democratic leaders picked state legislators. His first opportunity came a month after taking office when State Senator John Caufield, a white Democrat who had been Newark Fire Director under Gibson, died. James picked Ronald Rice, a West Ward Councilman who had been among a small group of elected officials to publicly back him against Gibson, to fill the Senate seat. The following year, James claimed one of the 29th district Assembly seats -- dumping five-term incumbent Eugene Thompson so that his Chief of Staff (and cousin), Jackie Mattison, could go the Legislature.

One of James' first moves after defeating Gibson in May 1986 was to endorse his friend, South Ward Councilman Donald Payne , for Congress in a Democratic primary challenge against 19-term incumbent Peter Rodino, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Payne lost that primary, but in 1988, when Rodino (who was helped by Gibson's support in a district where white's were the minority) retired, James made it clear that the seat would go to Payne.