Harold Hollenbeck

Superior Court Judge Harold Hollenbeck will reach the mandatory retirement age of seventy on December 29, possibly ending a career in public service that began with his election to the East Rutherford Borough Council in 1966.  But some Republican insiders say that Hollenbeck could be the GOP’s strongest candidate to challenge Bergen County Executive Dennis McNerney in 2010.

Hollenbeck was elected to the State Assembly in 1967, at the age of 29, as part of a Republican sweep of Bergen County in the second mid-term election of Democratic Gov. Richard Hughes. After two terms in the Assembly, he won a State Senate seat in 1971. 

One of the reasons Burlington County Republicans picked Christopher Myers, the relatively obscure Mayor of Medford, to succeed Jim Saxton in Congress was his ability to raise money.  When the Lockheed-Martin Vice President entered the race, the buzz among GOP insiders was that he had the ability to compete with State Sen. John Adler in the fundraising department.  Adler has raised $1.9 million in a district where Democrats haven’t won since 1882, and Myers, after a tough primary, has just a little more than $150K on hand.

One of the legendary scams in Bergen County politics came in 1984, when Republicans were considering candidates to take on newly-elected Democratic Congressman Robert Torricelli. Torricelli had won the seat two years earlier, when he ousted three-term GOP incumbent Harold Hollenbeck by a 53%-46% margin. The political climate in 1982 (and congressional redistricting in the 9th) favored Democrats and Torricelli leveraged the national contacts he made working for Vice President Walter Mondale and running Jimmy Carter's 1980 re-election campaign in Illinois to help him raise $266,000 -- about $70,000 more than Hollenbeck had.