Sires was a Republican? Wow. I didn’t know that.
New Jersey is a particularly sad case. In 1988, Bush carried all but Donald Payne and Bob Menendez’s congressional districts. Before that, Reagan carried it with 51% in 1980 even when Carter held him to narrow margins in much of the south. Even Ford held it against Carter. Now it’s really gone down the tubes. In an earlier era, Kean Jr. might have beaten Menendez, Frank Pallone and Rush Holt would have been vulnerable, and Mike Ferguson wouldn’t be.
Sires is a rank opportunist. He started out a rodent, became a Kean Republican, was still one apparently when he got elected Mayor of West New York, then became an Indy afterwards, and back to the rodents again in preparation to run for the Assembly. Ironically, in ‘86 he got thumped by Frank Guarini, the last non-Hispanic Congressman from that district (Guarini was a Dem), and 20 years later, Guarini’s Republican cousin was Sires’s opponent.
Indeed, NJ is a damnable mess. Presidentially, aside from some instances, it had become a fairly reliable GOP state... until 1992 (right about the time so many RINO Gubernatorial regimes in different parts of the country helped to put formerly reliable states out of reach, such as NJ, CA, IL). Even 9/11 wasn’t enough to bitchslap the state back to reality (despite all but 2 GOP counties trending towards Dubya, and losing 46-53%).
Kean, Jr. should’ve beaten Menendez, as Forrester should’ve beaten the Torch or the Corpse, Franks over Corzine, even Chuck Haytaian probably beat the Corpse in ‘94, but the voter fraud probably kept him from doing so. I frankly think the RINO Country-Club set is quite content to allow the rodentry to run the state now, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their control of the shrinking apparatus (almost like the reverse of inner-city Black Dem fiefdoms, where they’re content to hold onto shrinking fortunes, as long as they aren’t dislodged from their perches).
Speaking of Rush Holt, Jr. (he’s a junior). You may not know about his father, who was a political wunderkind from the FDR era. His dad got elected to the U.S. Senate as a New Deal liberal from West Virginia in 1934 at the age of 29 (he couldn’t take his seat until mid 1935 when he turned 30). Eventually Holt lost renomination in 1940 and at some point not long after that, got fed up with the Dems and became a Conservative Republican. He would’ve probably ended up back in the Senate or as Governor before long, but he ended up dying at the age of 49 in 1955 (Junior was only 6 when he died) while in the state legislature. Holt’s wife (Jr’s mother) became the GOP Secretary of State of WV in the late 1950s. But Junior is about as far afield from his parents as you can imagine, and is an outright Marxist. His dad must be spinning in his grave.