Education: PA St. U., B.S. 1984; Philadelphia Col. of Osteopathic Medicine, D.O. 1988; U.S. Army War Col., M.S.S. 2006.
Professional Career: Emergency physician, Southwest Emergency Associates, 1992-98; medical dir., Uniformed Services U. of Health Sciences, 1998-2003; emergency physician, U. Medical Center, 2002-10; president, Specialized Medical Operations Inc., 2002-10.
Political Career: NV Senate, 2004-08.
Ethnicity: White/Caucasian
Religion: Catholic
Family: Married (Lisa); 3 children
The new congressman from the 3rd District is Joe Heck, a Republican who defeated freshman Democratic Rep. Dina Titus in 2010. Heck was born in Queens, N.Y., and raised in Pennsylvania in a tight-knit family where he says he learned the values of service and giving back. As a young man, he became a volunteer firefighter and ambulance attendant. After graduating from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in health education, he got a doctorate of osteopathy from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, and went on to complete a residency in emergency medicine at the Albert Einstein Medical Center. In 1992, his work took him to southern Nevada. Heck said that his career in emergency medicine put him on the “front lines of health care.…I get to see what works and what doesn’t work,” he told National Journal. Read More
The new congressman from the 3rd District is Joe Heck, a Republican who defeated freshman Democratic Rep. Dina Titus in 2010. Heck was born in Queens, N.Y., and raised in Pennsylvania in a tight-knit family where he says he learned the values of service and giving back. As a young man, he became a volunteer firefighter and ambulance attendant. After graduating from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in health education, he got a doctorate of osteopathy from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, and went on to complete a residency in emergency medicine at the Albert Einstein Medical Center. In 1992, his work took him to southern Nevada. Heck said that his career in emergency medicine put him on the “front lines of health care.…I get to see what works and what doesn’t work,” he told National Journal.
A member of the Army Reserve, Heck was called to active duty in 1996 during the Bosnian war and was deployed again in Iraq, where he ran an Army hospital in 2010. “I was militarily inclined as a kid,” he said. “I thought about going into the service earlier, but I had decided I wanted to go into medicine and didn’t want the military to dictate what my specialty would be.” From 1998 to 2003, Heck was the medical director of the casualty care research center of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. He provided medical support for federal law enforcement agencies, and the experience sparked his interest in the political process. Returning to Nevada, he won a state Senate seat in 2004, and also started a medical consulting business.
Heck considered running for the governorship in Nevada, but decided instead to challenge Titus, a former state Senate colleague, in 2010. With the tea party gaining strength in Nevada, and excited by Sharron Angle’s challenge to Senate Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, Heck tacked to the right during the campaign. He took more conservative, tea party-style positions than he had in the legislature, where he was known as a moderate. He called for the abolition of the U.S. Education Department and the addition of optional private accounts to Social Security. On the stump, Heck described himself as conservative but “a very pragmatic lawmaker, unafraid to cross party lines.”
Titus accused him of using “the Republican talking points” and ran an ad calling Heck and Angle “two peas in a pod with the same bad ideas.” She also characterized him as dangerous to women for voting against a bill that would have required insurance companies to cover a vaccine for the HPV virus, a precursor to cervical cancer. Her ads featured testimonials from homeowners thanking her for saving their houses from foreclosure.
Heck had substantial help from outside Republican groups, including Americans for Tax Reform, which ran a $600,000 ad for him. But Titus got help from AFSCME and the SEIU unions representing government workers and service industry employees. Heck raised $1.5 million, while Titus raised and spent much more, $2.6 million. Still, Heck won, although only narrowly, 48% to 47.5%, with three minor candidates splitting the rest. Heck’s victory margin was 1,748 votes out of about 268,000 cast.
National Journal’s rating system is an objective method of analyzing voting. The liberal score means that the lawmaker’s votes were more liberal than that percentage of his colleagues’ votes. The conservative score means his votes were more conservative than that percentage of his colleagues’ votes. The composite score is an average of a lawmaker’s six issue-based scores. See all NJ Voting
More Liberal
More Conservative
2012
2011
Economic
38
(L) : 60 (C)
50
(L) : 50 (C)
Social
47
(L) : 52 (C)
47
(L) : 52 (C)
Foreign
20
(L) : 73 (C)
41
(L) : 57 (C)
Composite
36.7
(L) : 63.3 (C)
46.5
(L) : 53.5 (C)
Interest Group Ratings
The vote ratings by 10 special interest groups provide insight into a lawmaker’s general ideology and the degree to which he or she agrees with the group’s point of view. Some organizations provide just one combined rating for 2009 and 2010, the two sessions of the 111th Congress. About the interest groups.
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the governors and the states is published in print form after the national elections every two years by the National Journal Group in Washington D.C. Read More
The first Almanac of American Politics was published in 1971, and it hasn’t missed an election since.
The nation’s most authoritative source of information about members of Congress, their districts,
the governors and the states is published in print form after the national elections every two years by the National Journal Group in Washington D.C.
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Chris Christie Bombastic Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J. sometimes goes looking for controversy, but this week controversy found him. Following the death of New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Christie was tasked with appointing a replacement and calling for a special Senate election. His decision to schedule the special election in October 2013—two weeks before Christie’s own gubernatorial reelection—has left both Republicans and Democrats unhappy.
Chris Christie Bombastic Gov. Chris Christie, R-N.J. sometimes goes looking for controversy, but this week controversy found him. Following the death of New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg, Christie was tasked with appointing a replacement and calling for a special Senate election. His decision to schedule the special election in October 2013—two weeks before Christie’s own gubernatorial reelection—has left both Republicans and Democrats unhappy.
