Stephen Wiley

The regions are named after four exceptionally smart legislators of the past: Judge Stephen Perskie (D-Atlantic), who served in the State Assembly from 1972 to 1978 and in the Senate from 1978 to 1982; Bill Gormley (R-Atlantic), who served in the Assembly from 1978 to 1982 and in the Senate from 1982 to 2007; Stephen Wiley (D-Morris), who was a State Senator from 1974 to 1978; and Richard DeKorte (R-Bergen), an Assemblyman from 1968 to 1971.

One difference between Leonard Lance and the other Senate Republican leaders over the last thirty years is that Lance has never run himself in a competitive general election. His predecessor, John Bennett, began his legislative career by ousting three-term Democratic Assemblyman Walter Kozloski in 1979. Donald DiFrancesco, the Senate President from 1992 to 2002, unseated Democratic Assemblywoman Betty Wilson in 1975, and won a State Senate seat against Joanne Rajoppi, now the Union County Clerk, in a politically competitive district that included Plainfield and Rahway. John Dorsey, who followed DiFrancesco as Senate Minority Leader in 1984, defeated incumbent Democrats Gordon MacInnes and Rosemarie Totaro to win an Assembly seat in 1975, and beat incumbent State Senator Stephen Wiley in 1977. And Thomas Gagliano, who was Minority Leader in the late 1970's, won a competitive race for an open Senate seat in 1977, defeating Marlboro Mayor Arthur Goldzweig in a district that elected one Republican and one Democrat to the Assembly that year.

New Jersey is assured of at least twelve new State Senators when the Legislature meets in January 2007.  But with just a handful of competitive general election contests, it seems almost impossible for the next freshman class to be larger than the Senate produced after the 1977 general election -- when twenty of the forty Senators were different than those elected in 1973.