Dick Zimmer obit

Dick Zimmer, former congressman and U.S. Senate contender, dies at 81

Moderate Republican led New Jersey Common Cause, served in both houses of N.J. legislature

 He was not on the list.

Richard A. Zimmer, a three-term Republican congressman from Hunterdon County and longtime state legislator who ran a competitive race for U.S. Senate in 1996 and built a career as an advocate of fiscal conservatism, transparency in government, and the safety of children – and a lifelong opponent of wasteful government spending — died on December 31 after an extended illness.  He was 81.

While Zimmer spent most of his adult life on a small farm in Hunterdon County, he grew up working class in a garden apartment in Bloomfield that he called New Jersey’s version of a log cabin.  His father died when he was three, and his mother worked in a factory until marrying a postal worker from Glen Ridge, where he grew up in a blended family.

After the rape and murder of murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994 by a neighbor with two previous convictions for sexually assaulting young girls, Zimmer became the sponsor of Megan’s Law, a federal law that required law enforcement to make the public aware of registered sex offenders who lived in their neighborhoods.  Zimmer’s bill passed both houses unanimously and was signed by President Clinton in 1996.

As chairman of New Jersey Common Cause in the 1970s, Zimmer advocated for the passage of New Jersey’s Sunshine Law and pushed Democrats and Republicans to reduce the number of “fat cat” campaign contributions and replace them with small donors.  He also pushed for a Sunset Law that would require the legislature to review agencies that are no longer effective, and for personal financial disclosures for all elected officials.

Along the way, Zimmer became friends with Thomas Kean, a young assemblyman from Livingston who had served as Speaker and then minority leader.  Zimmer had advocated for arduous campaign finance requirements, so Kean decided to force Zimmer to implement the policies he’d supported by asking him to be treasurer of his 1975 re-election campaign.

He made his first bid for public office in 1978, at age 33, as a candidate for the Republican nomination for Congress in a western New Jersey district occupied by Democrat Helen S. Meyner (D-Phillipsburg).  A former First Lady of New Jersey – her husband, Robert B. Meyner, had served as governor from 1954 to 1962 – was elected as one of the Watergate Babies in 1974; she defeated freshman Rep. Joseph Maraziti (R-Boonton).

Former State Sen. Richard Schluter (R-Pennington), who had won 48% against Meyner in 1976, was running again; so was James Courter (R-Allamuchy), the first assistant Warren County Prosecutor.

On the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce train to Washington, D.C. that year, Zimmer handed out fortune cookies that said: “Dick Zimmer: He’s a smart cookie for Congress.”  In that campaign, Zimmer began a tradition of detailed personal financial disclosures that continued throughout his political career.  He included an accounting of the 104 chickens and one rooster on his 24-acre Delaware Township farm.

Citing fundraising challenges, Zimmer dropped out of the race after four months.  His withdrawal likely helped Courter score a 134-vote upset victory over Schluter in the five-candidate GOP primary; Courter went on to unseat Meyner.

In 1979, Zimmer became a candidate for the New Jersey State Assembly in a bid to take on freshman Assemblywoman Barbara McConnell (D-Flemington) in the Republican-leaning 14th legislative district, which included parts of Mercer, Hunterdon, Morris, and Middlesex counties.  (McConnell had scored a narrow 1,443-vote win over Regina Haig Meredith, the longtime Mercer Republican State Committeewoman and the sister of General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., two years earlier).

He easily won the Republican nomination but lost the general election.  McConnell was the top vote-getter with 27,104, running 632 votes ahead of five-term Assemblyman Karl Weidel (R-Pennington).  Zimmer came in third, 1,029 votes behind Weidel and 6,511 votes ahead of the other Democratic candidate, Glen Gardner. Mayor Stanley Oleniacz did not participate in the election.

After redistricting in 1981, Zimmer’s district – now the 23rd – was redrawn to become more Republican, losing Princeton, and now included parts of Hunterdon, Mercer, Morris, Sussex, and Warren counties.  McConnell did not seek re-election to a third term and instead unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for governor.

Weidel and Zimmer ran for the Assembly again, and this time Zimmer won handily.  He led James Knox, an attorney and Washington Township Democratic municipal chairman who had been a Marine helicopter pilot in Vietnam, by 16,832 votes; Zimmer ran 21,025 votes in front of the second Democrat in the race, Frederick Katz, Jr., a Flanders construction company owner.

Zimmer won landslide re-election victories in 1983 and 1985.

Following the death of State Sen. Walter Foran (R-Flemington) in December 1986 after a battle with lung cancer, Zimmer became a candidate for the open State Senate seat in a March special election.  Under the old law, each party held a convention to select its nominee; Zimmer was unopposed when Republicans met in January.  (Weidel, who resigned from the Assembly to take a job at the state Department of Insurance, briefly considered a Senate run).   In the low-turnout special, Zimmer won 80% of the vote against Democrat Marianne Nelson, a perennial candidate.

In November 1987, Zimmer was unopposed in his bid for a full four-year term in the Senate.

As a state legislator, Zimmer was a staunch advocate of Initiative & Referendum, which would allow the public to gather petition signatures to place an issue on the ballot.  Republicans were generally for this as a campaign issue, but when they finally took control of state government in 1994, after Zimmer had been elected to Congress, the matter was never approved.

After losing a bid for governor in 1989, Courter declined to seek a seventh term in Congress. Zimmer quickly entered the race in the sprawling 12th district, which included Hunterdon and parts of Mercer, Middlesex, Morris, Somerset, Sussex, and Warren counties.

Zimmer faced two substantial Republican primary opponents: Assemblyman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-Harding) and Phil McConkey, a former New York Giants wide receiver and U.S. Naval Academy graduate.  Zimmer edged out McConkey by 2,909 votes, 38%-31%, with 29% for Frelinghuysen in a four-way contest.

In that primary, Somerset made up 26% of the congressional district, followed by Hunterdon (24%), Morris (23%), Warren (13%), Middlesex (8%), Mercer (3%), and Sussex (2%).

Zimmer won four counties: Hunterdon, 54%-35%, over McConkey, with 8% for Frelinghuysen; Warren, 43%-34% against McConkey, with 19% for Frelinghuysen; Mercer, 58%-26% against Frelinghuysen, with 13% for McConkey; and Sussex, 38%-35%.   McConkey carried Middlesex, 42%-41%, over Zimmer, with 14% for Frelinghuysen; and Frelinghuysen won Morris, 52%-24%, over Zimmer, with 22% for McConkey, and Somerset, 39%-31%, over Zimmer with 28%.

The general election was easy.  Zimmer defeated Democrat Marguerite Chandler, a Somerset County industrial park owner who put about $450,000 into her campaign – and raised another $1.25 million on top of that — by a 64%-31% margin.

(The 1990 congressional race triggered two more special elections: Schluter, who had returned to the Assembly after Zimmer succeeded Foran in the Senate, took Zimmer’s seat in the upper house; Leonard Lance, a young attorney who had been an assistant counsel to Kean, succeeded Schluter in the Assembly.)

As a congressman, Zimmer initially served on the House Government Operations and Science, Space and Technology committees, and the Select Committee on Aging.  He later secured a coveted seat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.  He assembled a record of fighting to reduce wasteful government spending.  He helped pass the Safe Drinking Water Act, which mandated water quality standards for state, local, and private water suppliers.

Zimmer pushed for legislation to reform that nation’s welfare system, supported the decriminalization of some drugs, backed the creation of personal savings plans for health insurance, and favored a single-payer national health program similar to one used in Canada.  Zimmer advocated for urban enterprise zones and opposed funding for the space station due to overspending.   He opposed offshore drilling.

A prodigious fundraiser, Zimmer backed public financing of races for U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives.

He easily won re-election twice: he defeated former Marlboro Council President Frank Abate in 1992 with 64% (his district was redrawn that year to include part of Monmouth County); and Joseph Youssof, an attorney, in 1994 with 68%.  He spent his final two years as a member of the first Republican majority in the House since 1947.

Zimmer seriously considered challenging two-term U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg in 1994, Clinton’s mid-term election year.  (Lautenberg took the race seriously and had raised nearly a million dollars by the end of 1992; among the attendees at a Christmas-week fundraiser in Aspen was Donald Trump.)

Several Republicans mulled Senate runs that year, including Kean, then a popular two-term former governor, who ultimately declined; Zimmer had said publicly that if Kean ran, he would not.  Christine Todd Whitman, the newly elected Republican governor, cleared the field when she signaled her support for Assembly Speaker Chuck Haytaian.

But in August 1995, when Democrat Bill Bradley announced that he would not seek re-election to a fourth term in the U.S. Senate the following year, Zimmer jumped into the race. He quickly secured support from Whitman and Republican establishment leaders, winning a Republican primary with 68% against two other candidates named Dick: Passaic County Freeholder Dick Duhaime (20%) and Dick LaRossa, a state senator from Mercer County (12%).

On the Democratic side, seven-term Rep. Robert Torricelli (D-Englewood) easily locked up his party’s nomination and was unopposed in the primary.

The Star-Ledger’s David Wald, viewed as the state’s premier political reporter at the time, called the battle between Zimmer and Torricelli “noisy, vitriolic, and expensive,” estimating the race at over $25 million – quite expensive for the time.

“The money has fueled non-stop television commercials with a heavy accent on the negative,” he said.   Zimmer called Torricelli “foolishly liberal,” and Torricelli labeled Zimmer as a Newt Gingrich extremist.

Torricelli was boosted by endorsements from James Brady, who had served as Ronald Reagan’s press secretary before he was shot during a 1981 assassination attempt on the president, and by Bill Clinton, ultimately winning New Jersey by a 54%-36% margin.

A Rutgers-Eagleton poll in September 1995 showed Zimmer with a five-point lead, 34%-29%, but Torricelli ahead in every Rutgers-Eagleton general election poll after that.  Still, those polls showed a tight race: six points in September, five points in October, and a dead heat just before Election Day in a poll that was foolishly wrong.

Torricelli won the race by ten points and a margin of 291,511 votes, 53%-30%.  He won big margins in Essex, Camden, Hudson, Middlesex, Mercer, and Union, and easily won his home county of Bergen.   Torricelli won Ocean and Monmouth by about 1,000 votes each; he also won Atlantic, Burlington, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Passaic counties.  That left Zimmer with wins in Cape May, Hunterdon, Morris, Salem, Somerset, Sussex, and Warren.

Comeback candidate

Zimmer had an opportunity for a comeback in 2000 when Lautenberg opted not to seek re-election, but he opted instead to run for his old House seat.

The incumbent was a Democrat, Rush D. Holt, Jr. (D-Hopewell), a Princeton University physicist who had unseated Zimmer’s successor, Republican Michael Pappas (R-Rocky Hill), in 1998.  Pappas wanted a rematch, and Zimmer defeated him in the Republican primary with 62% of the vote.  The race turned nasty toward the end when an independent expenditure group backing Zimmer ran a radio ad suggesting a connection between Pappas and the Ku Klux Klan because of a historic connection between the group and Pillar of Fire International Christian Church, the church Pappas worked for.  Kean, a Zimmer supporter, was so incensed by the ad that he offered to defend Pappas.  Zimmer denounced the ads, but not until after they damaged Pappas’ campaign.

There was also some bitterness during the general election after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out a mailer attacking Zimmer for opposing a bill they said would reduce instances of breast cancer.  The accusation wounded Zimmer, whose mother died of cancer just after his high school graduation, and whose three sisters were breast cancer survivors.   As a Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, Zimmer voted with his party against an amendment that would make mammograms available to Medicare-eligible women over age 49 without a co-payment.

The 12th district, once staunchly Republican, was now purple: in the 2000 presidential race, Democrat Al Gore won it by five percentage points and over 16,000 votes, against Republican George W. Bush.  George H.W. Bush had won in 1992, and Bill Clinton in 1996.

In the closest New Jersey House race since 1956, defeating Zimmer by just 651 votes, 48.7%-48.5%.  Zimmer won Hunterdon by 14,658, Monmouth by 2,084, and Somerset by 5,411; Holt carried Mercer by 14,159 and Middlesex by 8,645.  Zimmer conceded his loss in late November after a recount dropped Zimmer’s vote total by 123 and Holt’s by 21; he declined to challenge the outcome of the election.

“I do not intend to go down the path that Al Gore has taken,” Zimmer said.

Eight years later, Zimmer again ran for the U.S. Senate, joining the race just before the filing deadline after Republicans suffered a series of mishaps in their bid to recruit a challenger against Lautenberg, the 84-year-old incumbent facing a Democratic primary against Rep. Rob Andrews (D-Bellmawr).

Initially, the New Jersey Republican establishment favored Ann Evans Estabrook, a self-funding real estate developer who dropped out in March after suffering a mini-stroke.  Two weeks later, the GOP recruited another newcomer who could finance his own campaign: Andy Unanue, an executive at Goya Foods until a feud with his family members led to his ouster.

In a bizarre campaign, Unanue joined the race by issuing a press release on Easter Sunday from a vacation in Colorado that he refused to cut short.  He quickly received endorsements from several county Republican organizations.

But his campaign fell apart after Politicker NJ.com reporter Matt Friedman discovered that Unanue, a New York City resident, had bought a Central Park West condo and was running a Manhattan nightclub.  He dropped out of the race a week later, without ever returning from his vacation.

Instead of backing one of the other GOP contenders – State Sen. Joseph Pennacchio (R-Montville) or Ramapo College Professor Murray Sarbin – party leaders convinced Zimmer to run. Dr. Mehmet Oz and State Sen. Christopher Bateman (R-Branchburg) had already turned down Republican officials.

After a short campaign, Zimmer carried Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Essex, Hudson, Hunterdon, Mercer, Monmouth, Ocean, Salem, Somerset, and Warren counties, while Pennacchio won Bergen, Gloucester, Middlesex, Morris, Passaic, Sussex, and Union.   That gave him a 10,117-vote, 46%-40% victory over Pennacchio.

Against Lautenberg, who won the Democratic primary by a 59%-35% margin over Andrews, post-primary polls showed the race as reasonably competitive: Quinnipiac University started with Lautenberg up by nine points in June; Monmouth University had the race at eight points in July, and Quinnipiac showed a seven-point race in August; and a Bergen Record poll in September put the Senate race at 49%-41%.

Lautenberg raised over $7.2 million, including a $750,000 personal loan, while Zimmer was only able to bring in a little more than $1.5 million.  By mid-October, a Monmouth poll had Lautenberg up by sixteen points, and a Quinnipiac poll a couple of days later showed Lautenberg leading Zimmer by 22 points, 55%-33%.  Lautenberg pushed debates off until the last minute: he faced Zimmer on NJ 101.5 on October 29 and on New Jersey Network on November 1, three days before the election.

On Election Day, Lautenberg beat Zimmer by 490,193 votes, 56%-42%.  Barack Obama carried New Jersey by 539,556 votes, 57%-42%, against John McCain.  Zimmer carried Cape May, Hunterdon, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Somerset, Sussex, and Warren counties.

Zimmer had been a consistent opponent of Trump: he endorsed Ohio Gov. John Kasich for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and ran on a statewide slate of delegates that included former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman; he endorsed Libertarian Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, in the subsequent general election, and was part of a group of Republican former Members of Congress who endorsed Joe Biden in 2020.

In 2021, Zimmer, then 76-years-old, sent a letter to party leaders saying that he would seek the open 16th district Senate seat of Bateman, who was retiring after fourteen years in the Senate and fourteen years as an assemblyman.  Zimmer also said he’d be willing to run for an Assembly seat.

With Pappas also running, it potentially created a rematch of the 2000 congressional primary.

Several Republican leaders said at the time that Zimmer’s endorsement of Biden made him a non-starter.

In 1965, while attending Yale University on a full academic scholarship, Zimmer spent his summer in Washington as an intern in the office of U.S. Senator Clifford Case.  He earned his undergraduate degrees at Yale and was editor of the Yale Law Journal.  He joined the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore out of law school and then became an in-house counsel for Johnson & Johnson.

He is survived by his wife, Marfy Goodpeed, his two sons, Benjamin, a prominent linguist, and Carl, a well-known science writer, and his grandchildren.

Calling hours will be on Saturday, January 17 from Noon to 12 PM at the Holcombe-Fisher Funeral Home in Flemington, followed by a eulogy service.  Burial will be private.  In lieu of flowers, the Zimmer family has asked that donations be made to the Hunterdon County Land Trust or Common Cause