For a while, New Jersey’s presidential primaries were essentially beauty pageants in which voters’ favorite candidates were so unimportant that their names were left off the ballot.
Voters were forced to write in the name of the president they wanted.
Delegate races, which took place during a period when neither the national nor state parties had regulations requiring delegates to support a particular presidential candidate, were the true focus of the primary.
In order to control votes as a national convention, the county chairmen ran delegates’ slates.
There was no petition filing for presidential candidates to appear on the ballot in 1968. Rather, write-in votes were used throughout the full beauty contest primary.
In the Democratic presidential choice primary, Eugene McCarthy defeated Robert Kennedy by a margin of 1,303 votes, 9,906 to 7,603. With 5,578 votes, Hubert Humphrey came in third, followed by George Wallace (1,399). Although President Lyndon Johnson had declared two months prior that he would not run for reelection, he nevertheless garnered 380 votes throughout the state.
Because the Cape May County Clerk chose not to include the write-in option on the ballot, those votes represented the totals of 20 counties.
With 71,809 write-in votes, Richard Nixon handily defeated Ronald Reagan (2,737) and Nelson Rockefeller (11,530). Barry Goldwater (42) and John Lindsay (122) received mixed votes.
McCarthy’s candidates were defeated 2-1 by the Regular Democratic Organization slate, which included former Governor Robert Meyner, Democratic State Chairman/New Jersey Secretary of State Robert Burkhardt, Gov. Richard Hughes, U.S. Senator Harrison Williams, and Jersey City Mayor John V. Kenny, in the at-large contest for Democratic delegates. Of the 76 district delegates, McCarthy won 19 of them.
Humphrey received 62 first-ballot votes from the party establishment during the turbulent Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
New Jersey was crucial in getting Richard Nixon nominated on the first ballot in Miami, the site of the Republican convention.
In order to prevent Nixon from winning the nomination, it was intended for all 40 New Jersey GOP delegates who were elected as candidates for the Republican Party Organization to support U.S. Senator Clifford Case on the first ballot.
However, Nixon managed to get 18 delegates to agree to vote for him on the first ballot with the assistance of State Senator William Hiering (R-Toms River), Bergen County GOP Chairman Nelson Gross, Monmouth County GOP Chairman J. Russell Woolley, and State Senator Frank Farley. The renowned Atlantic Republican boss Frank Hap Farley (R-Ventnor) also helped.
One of the most contentious periods in contemporary New Jersey politics resulted from this.
The 40-member delegation was frantically held by Case and Republican State Chairman Webster Todd, the father of future Governor Christine Todd Whitman. Delegates were informed by Case that supporting Nixon was equivalent to voting against him.
When the convention arrived, he demanded that the delegation be polled after warning the delegates that there would be retaliation. Each of the 40 Republican delegates from New Jersey had to express their personal preference one after the other in front of the full convention and on national television.
Nixon narrowly prevailed by 25 votes to win the nomination on the first ballot.
