Leonard Lance, a former five-term congressman, celebrates his 71st birthday today – and his 71st anniversary in New Jersey politics.
At the time of his birth in 1952, his pops, Wesley L. Lance, had already completed four terms in the State Assembly and a short stint in the Senate representing Hunterdon County; he reigned to go on active duty in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He returned to the Senate in 1954 and served two four-year terms, including a rotation as Majority Leader, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Senate President.
His great uncle, H. Kiefer Lance, a Democrat, was an assemblyman from Hunterdon County in 1933.
As Wesley Lance’s son and a political junkie since childhood, Leonard Lance frequently had a front-row seat observing insider politics; he witnessed some of the state’s epic presidential and gubernatorial elections and knew many of the state’s dominant political leaders over the last seven decades.
After graduating from Lehigh University and Vanderbilt Law School – and later earning a master’s degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton – Lance served as a law clerk in Warren County.
He became an assistant counsel to Gov. Thomas Kean in 1983 and spent nearly seven years on the governor’s staff working for three chief counsels: Cary Edwards, Michael Cole, and Deborah Poritz.
Lance made his first bid for public office in 1987 in a bid for the State Assembly in the 23rd district, which included parts of Hunterdon, Mercer, Morris, Sussex, and Warren counties.
State Sen. Walter “Moose” Foran died in December 1986, and Assemblyman Dick Zimmer (R-Delaware) moved up to the Senate; four Republicans sought the open Assembly seat: Joseph Maraziti (R-Washington), a former one-term congressman who had represented Morris County in both houses of the legislature former State Sen. Bill Schluter (R-Pennington); Flemington attorney Jeff Moeller; perennial candidate Joseph Shanahan; and Lance.
Schluter narrowly edged out Lance by just 640 votes, with Maraziti finishing fifth in a field of six candidates for two seats, 1,109 votes behind Lance; incumbent Richard Kamin (R-Flanders) was the top vote-getter.
The retirement of six-term Rep. Jim Courter (R-Allamuchy) in 1990 led to Zimmer winning a congressional seat and Schluter returning to the Senate seat he held from 1972 to 1974. Schluter beat Hunterdon County GOP Vice Chair Connie Myers, 127-80, with former Assemblyman Karl Weidel (R-Pennington) finishing third with thirteen votes.
That created an opening for Lance to run for Schluter’s Assembly seat in a February 1991 special election convention. He faced Myers and Weidel; two other potential candidates, Warren County Freeholder Ken Miller and Anthony Vaida, an attorney from Readington, considered running but opted not to.
Lance defeated Myers by 25 votes, 117 -92 (54%-42%), with Weidel receiving just seven votes.
Legislative redistricting in 1991 reshaped the state’s two Northwestern New Jersey districts, with the 23rd including all of Warren County and parts of Hunterdon and Mercer. That flipped Kamin into the 24th and Chuck Haytaian (R-Hackettstown), the Assembly minority leader, into the 23rd.
Lance ran unopposed in the primary. In his first general election, he defeated Democrat Rosemarie Albanese by a 2-1 margin. Her husband, Donald Albanese (R-Belvidere), was a Republican assemblyman from 1976 to 1982. He had run briefly for governor in 1981 and then lost a GOP State Senate primary to Wayne Dumont (R-Phillipsburg) by twenty percentage points that year. (Dumont had served as Senate President and sought the governorship three times; he was the GOP nominee against Gov. Richard J. Hughes in 1965.)
Lance won re-election by huge margins four times. After Haytaian left the Assembly in 1995, Lance wound up running with Myers. In his last Assembly re-election, he defeated Tom Palmieri, now the Warren County Democratic Chairman, by 12,458 votes.
In 1996, three-term incumbent Bill Bradley declined to run again, and Zimmer gave up his 12th district House seat to run for the U.S. Senate. Lance became a candidate for Congress.
He had become chairman of the Assembly Appropriations Committee but was stripped of his post in 1997 for refusing to support Gov. Christine Todd Whitman’s plan to borrow billions to fund the state pension plan. Most Republicans followed the proposal, allowing Whitman to skip a pension payment before her re-election campaign.
The Republican primary was won by Somerset County Freeholder Michael Pappas (R-Franklin), who defeated Senate Majority Leader John O. Bennett III by 1,175 votes, 38%-34%. Lance finished third with 26%, with another candidate, Luis De Augustin, receiving 2%.
Lance won Hunterdon County by a 59%-33% margin over Pappas, and carried Mercer by twelve points, 41%-29%. But Pappas won 66% in Somerset, Bennett won 63% in Monmouth; Lance finished third in those two counties and in the Middlesex portion of the district.
Redistricting in 2011 created a path for Lance to run for Senate. Schluter’s hometown, Pennington, was drawn into the 15th district; he declined to challenge freshman State Sen. Shirley Turner (R-Lawrence) and instead mounted an independent campaign for governor.
He faced no opposition for the Republican nomination and won 70% of the general election vote against Democrat Frederick Cook.
After Bennett lost his own Senate seat in 2003, Republicans turned to Lance to become the new minority leader.
Lance took Gov. James E. McGreevey to court in 2005 to challenge the constitutionality of the state’s bid to borrow money to balance the budget. The New Jersey Supreme Court kicked the can down the road a little, allowing McGreevey to borrow money that year but not again in the future.
Lance v. McGreevey was viewed as a victory for Lance, who was able to control long-term debt in the future.
After the 2007 election, Senate Minority Whip Tom Kean, Jr. (R-Westfield) challenged Lance for minority leader. Lance, who did not have the votes to retain his post, stepped aside. Instead, he became the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee.
Lance goes to Congress
But within ten days, Lance’s political fortunes would change for the better.
Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-Warren), a 37-year-old four-term congressman from New Jersey’s 7th district, unexpectedly announced that he would not seek re-election in 2008. Lance was again in contention to become a congressman.
Democrats were bullish on flipping the seat, with Assemblywoman Linda Stender (D-Fanwood) preparing to run again. Stender had come within 2,945 votes, 49%-48%, of ousting Ferguson in 2006. Republicans saved the seat by branding her as “Stender is a Spender.”
While Kean, Assemblyman Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield), and former Rep. Bob Franks (R-Warren) quickly announced they would not seek the open House seat, the race drew a large field. Somerset County Freeholder Jack Ciattarelli was also mentioned as a possible candidate but wasn’t interested.
Kean endorsed Lance.
The field initially included: Kate Whitman, the daughter of the former governor; Scotch Plains Mayor Martin Marks; former Summit Councilwoman Kelly Hatfield; former Union County Assistant Prosecutor and decorated Operation Iraqi Freedom Army veteran Tom Roughneen; Warren Township Committeeman Victor Sordillo; Bridgewater Councilman Michael Hsing; former Hillsborough Deputy Mayor Chris Venis; Matthew Smith, a former president of John F. Kennedy Hospital in Edison; and A.D. Amar, a professor at Seton Hall University.
Lance overwhelmingly captured the Hunterdon line.
With the backing of State Sen. Christopher Bateman (R-Branchburg) and Assembly Minority Leader Peter Biondo (R-Hillsborough), Lance was able to win the organization line in Somerset County. He led Whitman 100-67 on the first ballot at their convention, with 26 votes for Sordillo, seventeen for Marks, four for Roughneen, three for Hatfield and Amar, and one for Venis. Lance easily won on the second ballot, 136-74.
Whitman won the Middlesex GOP convention, defeating Hatfield 48-17, with Lance receiving fourteen votes. Five votes were cast for Marks and one for Roughneen.
The organization line in Union County went to Hatfield. On the second ballot, she defeated Marks at the GOP convention, 196-135. Hatfield had led Marks on the first ballot, 156-113, with Lance finishing third with 65 votes, followed by Whitman (15), Roughneen (12), Sordillo (4), and Venis (1).
Lance won the Republican primary by 5,042 votes over Whitman, 39%-20%. Hatfield finished third with 15%, followed by Marks (13%), Roughneen (7%), five-time independent candidate Darren Young (5%), and Amar (1%).
Lance took Hunterdon by a 63%-17% margin and Somerset, 50%-25%, over Whitman. Hatfield carried Union by 25 percentage points, 42%-17% over Marks, with Lance at 13% and Whitman at 12%. Whitman won Middlesex, 45%-16%, over Marks in the smallest part of the 7th district.
In the general election, Lance defeated Stender by 23,643 votes, 40%-42%. In the presidential race, Barack Obama had carried the 7th district by a 50%-49% margin over John McCain. He became one of three Republicans nationally to win an open seat in a district that went for Obama.
He was re-elected in 2010 by eighteen points against Ed Potosnak, now the executive director of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters. He beat Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula (D-Franklin) by 16 points in 2012. Mitt Romney carried NJ-7 by a 53%-47% margin in that year’s presidential race.
Lance won in 2014 by twenty percentage points against Clinton Mayor Janice Kovach and by eleven points against progressive Peter Jacob in 2016. That year, Hillary Clinton won the 7th by a 48.6% to 47.5% margin against Donald Trump.
He became the first New Jerseyan to serve on the House Ethics Committee since Rep. Millicent Fenwick (R-Bernardsville) served in the 1970s. He had served on the Financial Services Committee before winning an assignment to the Energy and Commerce Committee in 2011. He was also one of the first members of Rep. Josh Gottheimer’s House Problem Solvers Caucus.
A moderate Republican, albeit a fiscal conservative, Lance faced a series of primary challenges against David Larsen. He won 56%-31% in 2010, 61%-39% in 2012, 54%-46% in 2014, and 54%-33% in 2016.
In 2018, Lance became a casualty of Trump’s midterm election.
Democrats ran a well-financed candidate, Tom Malinowski, a former Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for Human Rights and a former Clinton White House aide. In the Democratic wave that year, Lance became one of thirty Republican congressmen to lose re-election bids, and NJ-7 became one of 41 House seats Democrats picked up that year.
Malinowski defeated Lance by 16,200 votes, 52%-47%.
Lance won Hunterdon by 5,970 votes (54%-44%), Morris by 2,160 (51%-47%), and Warren by 1,498 (54%-43%). But Malinowski carried Union by 13,567 (57%-41%), Somerset by 8,758 (53%-45%), and Millburn in Essex County by 3,503 (69%-30%).
Today is also the 71st birthday of Lance’s twin brother, James, an attorney in Clinton.
Lance’s wife of nearly 27 years, Heidi Rohrbach, launched her own political career this year. She is the Republican candidate for Hunterdon County Surrogate.