Lee B. Laskin, a Republican state senator from Camden County who cast the deciding vote to give tenure to Chief Justice Robert Wilentz in 1986 and then lost his seat in a GOP wave election when South Jersey Democratic powerhouse...
In 2020, Gov. Phil Murphy was the first governor to stay out of the presidential race in 28 years, leaving Democratic county chairs — and in some cases, Democratic County Committee members — to award the organization line in the...
Kenneth Gibson (1932-2019) became the first Black to serve as mayor of a major northeastern city when he ousted two-term incumbent Hugh Addonizio in 1970. Gibson had served as an engineer for the New Jersey Highway Department and as the...
One of the dominant themes of this year’s New Jersey legislative elections was turnover. Thanks to a large number of retirements and defeats, there will be a whopping 29 new faces joining the legislature in January, plus another seven current...
The last New Jersey Democrat to lose a U.S. Senate race in New Jersey was Paul Krebs (1912-1996), labor leader and one-term congressman from Livingston. His story involves one of the great New Jersey labor union feuds. The account starts...
George E. Norcross (1928-1998), the father of a U.S. Congressman, the managing partner at a major New Jersey law firm, and the state’s most powerful Democratic powerbroker, spent his career as a labor leader. Norcross served as president of the...
Decades of infighting among Parsippany Republicans led to Democratic mayors for 35 of the last 55 years in a town that once provided huge pluralities for GOP candidates running statewide and in Morris County. But intra-party quarrels and changing demographics...