The "I almost won" club

Over the last fifty years, Linda Stender was one of just seven challengers – and one of only two Democrats – to come within two percentage points of unseat an incumbent Congressman when she held Michael Ferguson to a 49%-48% win in 2006. If she wins her second bid in 2008 for the seat Ferguson has decided to vacate, Stender would become the first member of the “I almost won” group to actually serve in Congress.

The others:

* 1990: Republican Paul Kapalko, a former Asbury Park Councilman and, for six weeks an Assemblyman, held freshman Frank Pallone to a 49%-47% win amidst voter resentment over the Florio tax increase. He nearly won, despite being outspent by a 5-1 margin. Kapalko had run for an open Assembly seat in 1989, when Joseph Palaia gave up his seat to run in a Special Election for the remainder of Pallone's term in the State Senate. Palaia won and Kapalko lost; when Palaia resigned to take his seat in the Senate, Kapalko won a Special Election Convention to fill the remaining 44 days of Palaia's Assembly term.

* 1980: Republican Assemblywoman Marie Muhler, helped the a big win by Ronald Reagan held Jim Howard to a 50%-49% victory. She ran again in 1982 and got clobbered: he won 62%-36% -- the second best margin of his career. (The Field Director of Muhler's 1982 campaign was a recent college graduate with signs of potential: Joe Kyrillos.)

* 1978: Republican Charles Wiley, a conservative journalist and WOR radio personality from Sayreville, lost to eight-term Congressman Edward Patten in a traditionally Democratic Middlesex County district by a 48%-46% margin. Patten, who served as Mayor of Perth Amboy and as Middlesex County Clerk, and then as New Jersey Secretary of State under Governor Robert Meyner before winning a newly-created House district in 1962, had been implicated in the House Koreagate scandal. The near-loss to Wiley was the last campaign of Patten's long career; he retired in 1980, when he was 75. Wiley ran again, but the local Republicans instead backed businessman William O’Sullivan, who won the GOP primary. The seat stayed Democratic, with Bernard Dwyer easily beating O'Sullivan.

* 1976: Republican William Schluter had a political career that spanned five decades. He served as a Pennington Councilman, lost a State Senate race in 1965 (to ex-Senate President Sido Ridolfi), won Assembly races in 1967 (he defeated future Senator Francis McManimon and was part of a GOP freshman class that included future Governor Tom Kean and current Assemblyman Ralph Caputo), and won election to the Senate in 1971 (by a 55%-45% margin against former Johnson administration aide Robert Klein. He was a casualty of the 1973 Watergate landslide; two Republican Assemblymen (Walter Foran and Karl Weidel) held their seats, but Schluter lost by 671 votes to Anne Clark Martindell, the sister of former CBS News Editor Blair Clark who managed the 1968 presidential campaign of Eugene McCarthy. In 1976, Schluter ran for Congress against freshman Democrat Helen Stevenson Meyner, the wife of the former Governor, who had unseated Republican Congressman Jospeh Maraziti in the Watergate landslide two years earlier. The old 13th district was fairly Republican -- it included parts of Morris, Warren, Hunterdon and Mercer counties -- but Schluter fell short, losing to Meyner by a 50%-48% margin. Almost immediately, Schluter decided to run again. But in the 1978 primary, he faced an unexpected challenger: Jim Courter, a conservative First Assistant Prosecutor from Warren County who had just finished a high profile criminal case and showed a knack for fundraising. Courter won the primary by 134 votes and went on to beat Meyner in the General Election -- his campaign was run by two young Republican operatives, Roger Bodman and Bob Franks. Schluter remained out of politics until 1987, when he won a Special Election Convention for an open Assembly seat. He returned to the Senate in a 1991 Special Election Convention and stayed until 2001 when -- facing the elimination of his Senate seat in redistricting -- mounted an Independent campaign for Governor. He won just 1% of the vote.

* 1968: Republican Assemblyman Peter Moraites of Bergen County came within 2,332 votes -- 50%-49% -- of unseating two-term Congressman Henry Helstoski. Moraites was a lawyer who had worked as a staffer for U.S. Senator Jacob Javits and Bergen County Congressman Frank Osmers, who had lost to Helstoski in 1964 and 1966. He was elected to the State Assembly in 1961, at age 39, and re-elected in 1963. After defeating incumbent State Senator Pierce Deamer in the GOP primary, he lost the 1965 General Election -- a Democratic year across the state -- and returned to the Assembly in 1967. He became Majority Leader in 1968 and in 1969 (after losing the House race) he became Assembly Speaker.

But Moraites career imploded in 1971, when a federal grand jury indicted Moraites on charges that he and a partner accepted $66,000 in bribes in return for getting a Paramus bank where he was a Director to make $2.4 million in unsecured loans (and later unrecovered) to several Greek shipping interests. The indictment also charged that a close Moraites ally, Walter Jones, a former State Senator and Assembly Speaker and 1961 gubernatorial candidate who founded the bank, discovered the fraudulent loans and conspired with Moraites to issue $2.2 million in new bank stock to make up the cash deficit and merged their bank with another without disclosing their financial difficulties. Moraites served a sixteen month term in federal prison.

* 1960: Democrat Robert Peacock, a young businessman and party leader, faced freshman Republican Congressman George Wallhauser and lost by 3,826 votes -- 50%-48%. Wallhauser was elected in 1958 when ten-term incumbent Robert Kean (the father of the future Governor) ran for U.S. Senator. Peacock ran again in 1962 and lost 53%-47%. He returned to politics in 1996 as the Democratic candidate for the State Assembly; he lost a Special Election that year to Joel Weingarten, who had won a Special Election Convention to replace the late Monroe Jay Lustbader, by 10,125 votes (57%-43%).