The Big Five eye higher office

The Big Five who flipped New Jersey House seats in 2016 and 2018 are all expressing some interest in running for higher office either next year or the year after that.

Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) is running for the U.S. Senate in 2024, and Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) is also mulling a Senate bid.  Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-Wyckoff) and Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair) are considering running for governor in 2025.  The fifth, former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes), has not precluded the possibility that he will also seek the Senate seat.

That’s reminiscent of the five New Jersey freshmen elected nearly fifty years ago.  Three of the five members of the Class of 1974, known as the “Watergate Babies,” tried to run for higher office.

Jim Florio was the most successful, winning election as Governor of New Jersey in 1989.  But that didn’t happen easily: he lost a Democratic primary challenge to incumbent Gov. Brendan Byrne in 1977. Then he came within 1,797 votes of winning the 1981 general election, the closest governor’s race in New Jersey history.

Andy Maguire spent most of 1977 and early 1978 trying to run for the U.S. Senate, but he was eclipsed by Bill Bradley, a former New York Knicks star with a bigger name, and State Treasurer Richard Leone, a political insider who had endorsements from Byrne and some key county chairmen.  He wound up losing his House seat in the 1980 Reagan Revolution; he ran for the Senate in 1982 but lost the Democratic primary to self-funder Frank Lautenberg.

The only Republican freshman from the Class of 1974 was Millicent Fenwick, who won the open seat of retiring eleven-term Rep. Peter Frelinghuysen.   She ran for U.S. Senate in 1982 but lost the general election to Lautenberg.

(Florio toyed with a 1982 Senate race until March 31; had he run, Lautenberg’s name identification 41 years later might be about the same as Howard Rosen or Angelo Bianchi.)

Two others didn’t run statewide: Bill Hughes, who remained a force in Congress for two decades before retiring, and Helen Meyner, a former First Lady of New Jersey who lost her seat in 1978.

Jump ahead to now

Gottheimer, who took out seven-term Republican Scott Garrett in 2016, is mulling a bid for governor in 2025; so is Sherrill, who frightened House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen out of the 2018 race and then flipped the 11th district seat after 34 years of GOP control.

Kim is prepared to leave the House after six years to run for the U.S. Senate next year, either against incumbent Bob Menendez in the Democratic primary or for an open seat.  He narrowly defeated a two-term Republican, Tom MacArthur, in 2018.

He announced his candidacy last weekend, one day after Menendez was indicted on federal corruption charges.  Kim raised nearly $1 million in his first week.

Also looking at next year’s U.S. Senate race is Van Drew, who spent seventeen years in the New Jersey Legislature and nearly one in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat before switching parties in 2019.  He left the Democratic Party after refusing to vote to impeach Donald Trump and has become hugely popular in state and national GOP circles.

The fifth group member, Malinowski, lost his seat last year.   There had been speculation that he might have challenged Menendez in the primary if no one else had stepped up to run.

How the Class of 1974 got there

In a rematch of their 1972 fight, Florio ousted Hunt by 19 points, 57.5%-38.5%, in the 1st district.  Hunt defeated Florio, a 35-year-old assemblyman, in a Camden-Gloucester district by a 52.5%-47% margin.   Nixon carried the 1st, 60%-40%.  The GOP has never been able to win that seat back.

In the 2nd district, four-term Rep. Charles Sandman, the unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor in 1973, lost his seat to Hughes, a former Cape May County First Assistant Prosecutor, by 16 points.

Democrats flipped the Bergen County-based 7th district seat of 12-term Rep. William Widnall by five points.  The winner was Democrat Andrew Maguire, who had served in the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson.  This is the seat Gottheimer now holds.

Meyner, also Adlai Stevenson’s cousin, scored an easy win in an impossibly red congressional district.  As a state senator, State Senator Joseph Maraziti made the new 13th district hugely Republican.  It started in East Hanover and went through northern Morris County, picked up all of Hunterdon, Sussex, and Warren counties, and ended in northern Mercer.   In the 1968 presidential election, the towns in the new 13th had given Richard Nixon a 55%-36% win over Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

Convinced to take on Maraziti for the open seat in 1972, Meyner lost 25,154 votes, 56%–43%.    Nixon carried the 13th by a 70%-40% margin over Democrat George McGovern.

But after accumulating severe political liabilities of his own – in addition to being a Nixon defender in nationally-televised House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings, Maraziti was found to have put his mistress on his congressional payroll – Meyner beat Maraziti by a 57%-43% margin in a district that continues to be solidly Republican.

There was one open seat in 1974:  Frelinghuysen retired after 22 years in Congress.  Fenwick defeated Assembly Minority Leader by 83 votes in the GOP primary.  She won the general election by a 53%-43% margin against Fred Bohen, a former Johnson White House staffer.