Between the two of them, Richard Codey and Nia Gill, have served nearly 80 years in the New Jersey legislature. But one will be gone after Tuesday after the pair of veteran lawmakers face off in the first incumbent vs. incumbent Senate in New Jersey history.
While either Codey or Gill will lose, five other incumbent senators face primary challengers, albeit of varying difficulty levels. They all want to avoid spending eternity as members of an exclusive club: just fourteen senators have lost primaries since voters ratified the new State Constitution in 1947.
From time to time, legislative redistricting created primary fights between two senators from the same party, but they never pan out. Typically, one of the senators doesn’t run, like Nicholas Sacco (D-North Bergen) retiring after 30 years in the Senate rather than duke it out in a primary with Brian P. Stack (D-Union City).
On three occasions, one of the senators instead ran for the Assembly: William Bate (D-Clifton in 1973, to avoid a primary with Joseph Hirkala (D-Passaic); Kevin O’Toole (R-Cedar Grove), who got pushed from a district that went as far south as Roselle Park into one that extended north to Mahwah represented by Hank McNamara (R-Wyckoff) in 2001; and Sean Kean (R-Wall), who returned to the lower house in 2011 to avoid a primary against Robert Singer (R-Lakewood).
(O’Toole made it back to the Senate in 2007 and served there for nearly a decade; Bate tried to return in 1981 but lost, and Kean remains in the Assembly).
The first incumbent to lose a primary under the new State Constitution was Freas Hess, a Johns-Manville employee and World War I veteran elected councilman in Somerville in 1929, at age 34, and became Mayor four years later. He was elected to the State Assembly in 1938 and served as Majority Leader in 1944 and Speaker in 1945.
Hess moved up to the State Senate in 1947 but lost his seat four years later when magazine publisher Malcolm Forbes decided he wanted to use the Senate as a springboard to a gubernatorial run. A former Bernardsville councilman, Forbes self-funded his off-the-line legislative campaign.
Forbes won in a landslide, defeating Hess by 3,923 votes, 62%-38%. He carried sixteen of the 21 municipalities in Somerset County, dealing the powerful county Republican machine a rare primary loss.
(Forbes lost a gubernatorial primary in 1953, won re-election to the Senate against industrialist Charles Engelhard in the 1955 “Battle of the Billionaires,” and lost a 1957 governor’s race to incumbent Robert Meyner.
The One-Man, One-Vote losers
Pierce Deamer (R-Bergenfield) was elected in 1961; he was the last Bergen County lawmaker to serve as a member of the elite 21-member State Senate, where each county had one seat. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s One-Man, One-Vote decision, Bergen got four Senate seats but a split in the party – Deamer had challenged former State Sen. Walter Jones (R-Norwood ) for Bergen GOP chairman – led to his being dumped from the Republican ticket in 1965. He finished fifth in a field of nine candidates, over 10,000 votes out of fourth place.
Two incumbents lost primaries in 1967, the first election that followed the 1966 Constitutional Convention called to deal with legislative apportionment issues:
* The new map gave Morris County two Senate seats, and Republican assemblymen Harry Sears (R-Mountain Lakes) and Joseph Maraziti (R-Boonton) both challenged three-term State Sen. Thomas Hillery (R-Boonton) in the GOP primary. Sears finished first, 1,852 votes ahead of Maraziti, while Hillery, a 22-year legislator, came in third, losing by 3,151 votes.
(Sears sought the Republican nomination for governor in 1969 and became Senate Majority Leader; he chaired Richard Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign in New Jersey and became implicated as a minor player in the Watergate scandal. Maraziti was elected to Congress in 1972 but lost in the 1974 Democratic landslide after defending Nixon and becoming involved in his own scandals. Hillery lost a comeback bid in the 1971 primary.)
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* Redistricting also switched up another Northwestern New Jersey district. Republican Milton Woolfenden (R-Newton) was the 39-year-old former Newton mayor when he won a 1964 special election for the Sussex County Senate seat after George B. Harper (R-Layton), a former Senate President, resigned to become New Jersey State Auditor.
In 1965, a new district was drawn to include Morris, Sussex, and Warren counties with two senators; Hillery and Woolfenden sought re-election and had a clear path in the primary because another incumbent, Wayne Dumont (R-Phillipsburg), was giving up his seat to seek the Republican nomination for governor.
But a third round of redistricting in 1967 created a Hunterdon-Sussex-Warren “Lambertville to High Point” district. Dumont, who had lost the 1965 governor’s race to incumbent Richard Hughes, sought a return to the State Senate and challenged Woolfenden in the Republican primary.
Dumont was a tough out in a Republican primary. He defeated Senate Minority Leader Robert Meyner (D-Phillipsburg) in 1951 – Meyner was elected governor two years later – served as Senate President, and had run three statewide campaigns.
He defeated Woolfenden by eight percentage points, 54%-46%, and a margin of 1,648 votes.
Woolfenden won Sussex by 2,958 votes, 69%-31%, but Dumont carried Warren by 3,241 votes, 78%-22%, and Hunterdon by 1,365, 63%-=37%.
That ended Woolfenden’s political career, although he later served as chairman of the Delaware River Joint Toll Bridge Commission and the New Jersey Business and Industry Association.
(Harper’s father was Hackensack Harry Harper, a former New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who served as Bergen County Sheriff and state Labor Commissioner and ran for Congress and U.S. Senate.)
The 1977 Massacre
With Gov. Brendan Byrne facing ten primary opponents, 1977 was a bit of a dumpster fire for Democrats. While Byrne won renomination for a second term with 30% of the vote, five of the 23 Democratic state senators seeing re-election were defeated in the primary. Byrne’s decision to create a State Income Tax loomed large in these races.
* In Burlington County’s 7th district, four-term Assemblyman Charles Yates (D-Edgewater Park) defeated two-term State Sen. Edward Hughes, Jr. (D-Cinnaminson) by 352 votes, 515-49%. In a fight between two millionaire industrialists, Yates, an unabashedly liberal Democrat, voted for the income tax. Hughes, who had staked out a more right-of-center, pro-life record during his six years in the Senate, opposed it.
While Yates had voted for the tax, he was never a Byrne ally. Initially, he had entered the Democratic gubernatorial race but dropped out to run for the Senate instead.
Hughes had also feuded with Byrne over appointing a new prosecutor and used senatorial courtesy to block several of the governor’s nominations, including Burlington County Democratic Chairman George Lee to the New Jersey Civil Service Commission. Lee endorsed Yates; Rep. Jim Florio (D-Runnemede) outpolled Byrne in Burlington, 42%-37%.
* State Sen. Alene Ammond (D-Cherry Hill), a surprise winner of the 1973 Democratic primary and the Watergate Democratic wave against State Sen. John Miller (R-Cherry Hill) was known as the “Terror of Trenton” during her four-year stint in the New Jersey State Senate.
Ammond went rogue within a few weeks of entering the Senate, attacking the new Senate President, Frank Dodd (D-West Orange), on conflict of interest charges and then fighting with the Camden County Democratic chairman, James Joyce. She used courtesy to block Byrne’s nominees and feuded with Camden County Prosecutor Thomas Shusted.
She tried to open the caucus to the press.
By January 1975, Senate Democrats had enough. Ammond was barred from attending the Democratic caucus. They stripped her of her senatorial courtesy. She was removed from the Judiciary Committee. And they launched an internal probe into her conduct as a senator.
Dodd said that all Ammond did was try to grab headlines. She said the senators were retaliating against her because she was a reformer. Ammond said that she felt physically threatened by State Sen. William Vincent Musto (D-Union City)
Ammond got a federal judge to issue a temporary restraining order that prevented the Senate Democrats from locking her out of the caucus. The judge, Mitchell Cohen, said that excluding her from the caucus was essentially the same as not allowing an elected senator to vote.
By February, the Senate backed down and let Ammond back in. They even let members of the press sit in once in a while.
By 1976, Ammond became less aggressive. She was an ally of Senate President Matthew Feldman and became less publicly critical of her Senate colleagues. She had a second term in mind.
In March 1977, Assemblyman Jack Gallagher (D-Cherry Hill) announced he would challenge Ammond in the Democratic primary. Republicans were set to run 30-year-old lawyer William Cahill, Jr., the son of the former governor.
Byrne’s re-election campaign complicated Ammond’s political future. Florio decided to challenge the governor in the Democratic primary and had the support of the Camden Democratic organization. Ammond endorsed Byrne.
But Michael Keating, the Camden County Clerk and Democratic county chairman, decided to run himself and moved from Haddon Township in the 5th district to Cherry Hill. Gallagher dropped out just after the filing deadline Ammond challenged Keating in court, saying he did not meet the residency requirement to run in the 6th. A Superior Court Judge and the appellate court agreed, and Keating was dropped.
In May, Camden County Democrats replaced Keating on the ballot with Victor Pachter, a former Cherry Hill councilman.
Despite the short campaign, Pachter beat Ammond by 533 votes, 47%-43%, with 11% for Michael Ianetta, a former Camden County purchasing agent. Florio carried Camden, 71%-18% over Byrne.
The Republican side took an interesting turn. A few party leaders got cold feet about running Cahill and went with Addison Bradley, the president of the county parks commission. Bradley was accused of using his county post to help a private land deal, so the GOP dumped him.
Former Assembly Speaker William Dickey (R-Collingswood) and Cherry Hill Mayor John Rocco sought party support, but the nomination went to Camden County Republican Chairman Lee Laskin, a former assemblyman and freeholder. Laskin defeated Pachter by 2,374 votes, 52%-48%.
* In Middlesex County’s 19th district, freshman State Sen. Jack Fay (D-Woodbridge) lost to Woodbridge businessman Laurence Weiss by 2,686 votes, 56.4% to 43.6%.
Fay’s political woes revolved around political alliances in Woodbridge. Weiss had run for mayor in 1976 but lost the general to Republican incumbent John Cassidy. Fay endorsed Cassidy, and Weiss blamed him for his defeat.
The race was also part of a feud between Sheriff Joseph DeMarino and Democratic municipal chair Lee Stoukas. DeMarino was for Fay, and Stoukas backed Weiss, a decorated World War II veteran, and Purple Heart recipient. The Middlesex County Democratic chairman, Nicholas Venezia, dumped Fay and gave the line to Weiss, who ran with Assemblymen Alan Karcher (D-Sayreville) and George Otlowski (D-Perth Amboy). Fay also took a hit among party leaders by getting a temporary restraining order to stop a screening committee meeting that appeared ready to endorse Weiss.
Middlesex Democrats endorsed Joseph Hoffman, a former state labor commissioner, for governor; Fay went with Florio. Hoffman won Middlesex, 36%-26%; Florio finished fourth with 8%.
With help from Otlowski, who was also mayor, Perth Amboy went for Weiss by a 3-1 margin. Fay carried Woodbridge by over 800 votes.
The other two losses came in Hudson County, where all politics is local, and Jersey City Mayor Paul Jordan was one of the ten Democrats challenging Byrne in the primary.
The 31st district included Bayonne and part of Jersey City, two-term State Sen. James Dugan (D-Bayonne), the sitting Democratic State Chairman, and a Jordan supporter.
Dugan was among the first to back Byrne in 1973 and became the state party chairman. But the relationship between Dugan and Byrne became strained as the two engaged in a public feud that began with the Bayonne senator’s opposition to Byrne’s proposal to create a state income tax. As Senate Judiciary Chairman, Dugan publicly opposed Byrne’s call to eliminate senatorial courtesy. In 1976, Dugan was part of a move to stop Jimmy Carter from winning the Democratic presidential nomination despite Byrne’s endorsement of the former Georgia governor.
By running for governor, Jordan had to forego a third term as mayor of Jersey City. Instead, he picked William Macchi, Jersey City’s director of Human Resources, to run in his stead.
But Macchi lost the May 1977 non-partisan municipal election to City Clerk Thomas F.X. Smith by a 54%-26% margin. The upset caused a seismic shift in Jersey City politics, leading to Jordan’s withdrawal from the gubernatorial race.
Dugan became a casualty of that election and his fights with Byrne and Bayonne Mayor Dennis Collins.
In the June 1977 Democratic 31st district Senate primary, Walter Sheil, an administrator at Jersey City State College and an ally of Tommy Smith, won 49% of the vote to win the nomination. Bayonne High School football coach Donald X. Ahern, whom Collins backed, received 29%, and Dugan finished third with 20% of the vote, 8,328 votes behind Sheil. A fourth candidate, Frank Gorman, received 2%.
The senator from the Jersey City-based 32nd district came from political royalty: Joseph W. Tumulty, elected to the Senate in 1973, was the nephew of Joseph Tumulty, a former assemblyman who helped recruit Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson to seek the Democratic nomination for governor in 1910 and served as his private secretary – the equivalent of today’s chief of staff model. After Wilson was elected president in 1912, Tumulty became the president’s private secretary, a post known today as White House Chief of Staff.
Tumulty had been part of a reform movement in Jersey City, opposing Hudson County Democratic boss John V. Kenny and later helping to elect Jordan in 1971. With Jordan’s support, Tumulty won the 1973 Senate primary by a 2-1 margin.
But Tumulty’s campaign collapsed after Jordan dropped out. David Friedland (D-Jersey City), a former Assembly Minority Leader who organized a deal with Republican Thomas Kean to make him Speaker in 1972 after Democrats had narrowly won control of the lower house, defeated Tumulty in the primary by 14,780 votes, 77%-23%.
(Friedland was removed from the Senate following his criminal conviction in 1980 and then faked his death while scuba diving in the Bahamas; he was later arrested in the Maldives Islands.)
Wally Sheil and the collapse of Tommy Smith’s run for governor
Wally Sheil, who had played college basketball with Tommy Smith at St. Peter’s, wound up losing his 31st district Senate seat in 1981 the same way he won it: a bad outcome in the May election for Jersey City mayor.
A week after Sheil ousted Dugan in the 1977 Senate primary, he was elected Hudson County Democratic Chairman with Smith’s help. But Smith and Sheil had a fallout in 1980, and Smith tried to remove him from the county chairmanship, but without success.
Smith didn’t seek a second term as mayor, instead seeking the Democratic nomination for governor. By 1981, Smith and Sheil were friends again, sort of, and Smith backed Sheil to succeed him as mayor; Sheil also sought re-election to the Senate.
In an upset, Sheil led City Councilman Gerald McCann by less than 2,500 votes, 34%-29%, forcing him into a runoff. That led to Smith’s statewide campaign unraveling in Hudson County. McCann and Bayonne Mayor Dennis Collins were backing Rep. Robert Roe (D-Wayne) for governor.
A few weeks later, a McCann ally, Edward O’Connor (D-Jersey City), defeated Sheil by 2,999 votes in the Democratic Senate primary, 52%-42%. In the gubernatorial race, Smith carried Hudson County but with an unimpressive 32% of the vote. Roe finished second with 22%, followed by Florio (11%) and Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson (10%).
(Statewide, Smith finished seventh in a field of thirteen candidates with 9% of the vote.)
Two weeks later, McCann bested Sheil in the mayoral runoff by a massive sixteen-point, 9,521 vote landslide, 58%-42%.
DiFrancesco jumped a Morris senator, who then lost re-election
After three terms in the State Senate, James Vreeland (R-Montville) was 74-years-old with a political career on a downward trajectory. Serving in an era when legislative leadership posts frequently, Vreeland had moved through the ranks, and after the 1981 election, it was his turn to become minority leader.
But 36-year-old Donald DiFrancesco (R-Scotch Plains), who won a special election for Senate in 1979, argued that Republicans needed energetic new leadership and challenged Vreeland. Boosted by five of his former Assembly colleagues moving up to the Senate, DiFrancesco defeated Vreeland 10-7.
Sensing Vreeland’s vulnerability, Leanna Brown (R-Chatham), a former Morris County freeholder who had won a special election for State Assembly in 1980, decided to challenge the incumbent in the GOP primary. Brown, 48, beat Vreeland by a narrow 389-vote margin, 52%-48%.
That allowed Brown to leapfrog ahead of Dean Gallo (R-Parsippany), the Assembly Minority Leader, and in no rush to go to the Senate. (Gallo got lucky a year later when the federal court redrew congressional districts, and he ousted eleven-term Rep. Joseph Minish in NJ-11.
The end of Tom Paterniti, and the rise of Nick Sacco
Despite the unpopularity of Florio’s $2.8 billion tax increase, only two Democratic senators faced serious primary opposition, and only one, Thomas Paterniti (D-Edison) in the 18th district, lost.
Paterniti, who also served as mayor of Edison, had survived a 1987 primary challenge against former Metuchen Councilman Harry Pozycki, a good government activist who had come within 860 votes, 54%-46%, of winning the Democratic Senate nomination in 1987.
In 1991, Pozycki sought a rematch with Paterniti, slamming the incumbent for raising taxes in Edison; this time, he beat him by 841 votes, 53%-47%.
But Pozycki became the only person under the modern State Constitution to defeat an incumbent in the primary and then go on to lose the general election. Republican Jack Sinagra rode the anti-Florio wave to a seven-point general election win. (Pozycki later served as president of New Jersey Common Cause.)
Thomas Cowan (D-Jersey City), an Operating Engineers union leader who had spent six years in the Assembly and ten in the Senate, lost his job in 1993 when North Bergen Mayor Nicholas Sacco decided he wanted the seat. There is an urban legend – the story is probably true – that Sacco chose to run after Cowan didn’t return his phone call.
Sacco started in North Bergen politics in 1985 when he was elected to the Board of Commissioners. Sacco was a 38-year-old public school principal and was taken under the wing of Mayor Leo Gattoni, Sr. Gattoni convinced the Mocco Brothers to put Sacco on the ticket, even though they didn’t want him. When a scandal finally took the Mocco Brothers down, Gattoni was convinced to step aside in 1991 and let Sacco be Mayor.
Using the clout of the North Bergen mayoralty, Sacco forged an alliance with Union City – then-Rep. Bob Menendez and Mayor Bruce Walter, the Hudson County Democratic Chairman – and challenged Cowan for the Senate. Sacco beat him in the Democratic primary by 7,046 votes – 67%-33%.
Bubba, and the ascent of Mike Doherty
Legislative redistricting created a third State Senate seat for Passaic County in 1981, won by Republican Joe Bubba (R-Wayne), a former freeholder and the Passaic County GOP chairman. Bubba defeated Bill Bate, who had served in the Senate before redistricting back to the Assembly, by six points.
Bubba faced a series of tough races: he defeated Assemblyman Terry LaCorte (R-Clifton) in the 1983 primary by fourteen points and then Passaic County Freeholder James Roe (D-Wayne), the congressman’s bother, by two points in the general. He beat former Freeholder Donald Hetchka (D-Clifton) by eight points in 1987, Assemblyman Joseph Mecca (D-Totowa) by seventeen points in the 1991 Republican wave, and former state Consumer Affairs Director Patricia Royer by 5 points in 1993.
After Bob Roe retired in 1992, Bubba thought he was headed to Congress. He defeated Freeholder Norman Robertson in the Republican primary by a 63%-25% margin in a four-candidate race. But the general election didn’t go his way: Bill Clinton edged out George Bush by three points in the old 8th district, and former Assemblyman Herb Klein (D-Clifton) beat Bubba by six points, 47%-41%, and by 12,068 votes.
By 1997, Bubba was in a lethal feud with Passaic County Sheriff Edwin Englehardt and Peter Murphy, the Republican county chairman at a time when the GOP controlled county government. Bubba was tossed off the line and replaced by Robertson.
Carrying every municipality in the 34th district, Robertson defeated Bubba by 3,001 votes, a 66%-34% margin. Bubba lost his hometown of Wayne by twelve points, and Robertson received 88% of the vote in Murphy’s hometown, Totowa.
The last time an incumbent senator lost a primary was in 2009.
After Leonard Lance (R-Clinton Township) resigned from the State Senate in January 2009 to take his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, the two State Assembly members from the 23rd district faced off in a special election convention to replace him.
Marcia Karrow (R-Raritan) defeated Michael Doherty (R-Oxford) by 52 votes, 195 to 143. But Karrow’s time in the Senate was short: Doherty challenged her in the June primary and won by 997 votes, 52%-48%. Doherty carried his home county, Warren, by 471 votes and took Hunterdon, where Karrow loved, by 526 votes.
(Sheil and Bubba sought to revive their political careers in Florida: Sheil lost a 1996 Republican primary for Sarasota County Commissioner with 31%, and Bubba won just 8% in a race for Pompano Beach City Commission in 2004. Karrow returned to public office in 2022, defeating incumbent Betsy Driver in a race for mayor of Flemington.)
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