Rep. Rush Holt (D) Elected 1998, 3d term
Born:	Oct. 15, 1948, Weston, WV
Home:	Hopewell Township
Education:	Carleton Col., B.S. 1970, N.Y.U., PhD. 1981
Religion:	Protestant
Marital Status:	married (Margaret Lancefield)
Professional Career:	Prof., Swarthmore Col., 1981-89; Asst. Dir., Princeton Plasma Physics Lab., 1989-98.
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It was once the main East Coast arterial highway, carrying the nation's highest volume of truck traffic. Today it is crowded with cars taking high-salaried workers and clerical help to one of the East Coast's thickest concentrations of office buildings in one of the bigger edge cities spawned in the 1980s. This is U.S. 1, which once just connected the industrial cities of Trenton and New Brunswick on its way from Philadelphia to New York; now it is better thought of around here as connecting the university towns around Princeton and Rutgers, and is a locus of telecommunications and pharmaceutical research. This had been empty bucolic country, looked out on by F. Scott Fitzgerald's undergraduates from their Gothic Princeton towers; now it is filled with postmodern office campuses and hotels and restaurants clamoring for attention.

The 12th Congressional District meanders across the breadth of New Jersey, from the Delaware River in the west to the Atlantic Ocean. It extends several dozen miles on either side of U.S. 1 as it slices through Mercer and Middlesex Counties; it is home to both an Englishtown and a Frenchtown. To the west, it takes some of the rolling country of Hunterdon County. On the other side of U.S. 1, the 12th takes in Princeton and then some various modest-income suburbs--Franklin in Somerset County, East Brunswick in Middlesex County and some fast-growing Monmouth County areas such as Rumson, part of Middletown, Holmdel, Marlboro. The 12th is one of the two New Jersey districts--the other is the adjoining 7th--most altered by redistricting. In the process, the 12th lost most of Hunterdon County and much of Somerset, gained the west side of Trenton, added some suburban territory in Middlesex County and lost some of Monmouth County. The overall result was to make the 12th, represented for most of the 1990s by a Republican, less Republican and more Democratic: The Bush 2000 percentage was reduced from 46%--a level that would allow most competitive New Jersey Republicans to carry it--to 40%.

The congressman from the 12th District is Rush Holt, a Democrat first elected in 1998. He has a political pedigree that is, however, of no importance to this district. His father Rush D. Holt, a favorite of United Mine Workers leader John Lewis, was elected as the ''boy senator'' from West Virginia in 1934 when he was 29; he could not take his seat until June 1935 when he turned 30. But he clashed early and often with Franklin Roosevelt and lost the Democratic primary to Harley Kilgore in 1940. Former Senator Holt died when the young Rush Holt was 6, and he grew up in Washington, D.C., where his mother Helen, who had been West Virginia Secretary of State, was an official in the Federal Housing Agency. He went off to Carleton College in Minnesota and to New York University, where he earned advanced degrees in physics, eventually becoming assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, which studies fusion. Holt--the only five-time Jeopardy champion to serve in Congress--also was an arms-control expert for the State Department.

Holt entered politics in 1996, when Republican Congressman Dick Zimmer ran for the Senate against Bob Torricelli and lost. He finished third in the Democratic primary behind Lawrenceville Mayor David Del Vecchio and Princeton Town Committeeman Carl Mayer; cultural conservative Mike Pappas won the Republican primary, then the general election but by only 50%-47%. Pappas immediately became a top Democratic target in 1998. Holt decided early in the year that Bill Clinton's State of the Union message gave him an agenda to appeal to suburban voters. Mayer, a wealthy investment lawyer and former Ralph Nader aide, ran again, but national and local Democrats favored Holt, who won the endorsements of all five county Democratic organizations plus all of Mayer's former colleagues on the Princeton Town Committee; he won the primary 64%-36%. Then, in July, Pappas took to the House floor to recite a poem: ''Twinkle, Twinkle Kenneth Starr, now we see how brave you are. We could not see which way to go, if you did not lead us so.'' New Jersey was pro-Clinton, anti-impeachment territory, and Pappas's absurd ditty--replayed on network newscasts and incorporated into a Holt TV spot--proved a great liability. Holt emphasized gun control, abortion rights, the environment and preserving Social Security; he won in a 50%-47% upset.

Holt immediately became a Republican target, but he was undeterred. He compiled a generally liberal voting record, more liberal on defense than on other issues. As the second research physicist in the House, he worked with the other, Republican Vern Ehlers, to promote science education, trying to give science equal standing with reading and math in Title I. He sponsored an assortment of gun control measures, including one to require licensing and registration of all handguns (it attracted no co-sponsors).

In 2000, the Republican primary was fiercely contested. After flirting with another Senate bid, Zimmer declared for his old House seat; Pappas did too. Zimmer had support from Governor Christine Todd Whitman, former Governor Tom Kean, Speaker Dennis Hastert, Senator John McCain and NRCC Chairman Tom Davis; Pappas was supported by former presidential candidate Steve Forbes, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay. Zimmer won convincingly, 62%-38%, carrying all parts of the district. He immediately became the target of some $2 million of DCCC negative ads. Zimmer acknowledged that the political terrain had changed. "There's a cultural divide between the Northeast and what's become the Republican base," he said during the primary. "The world looks different from suburban New Jersey than it does from Texas." Still, this turned out to be one of the closest races in the nation. At one point on election night, Zimmer was declared the winner. After all the votes were counted, Holt was the actual winner by 653 votes; his lead widened during a recount and Zimmer conceded on November 29.

As a junior member of the minority party, Holt has not played a major role in the House so far. He invoked his authority as a physicist to argue for the importance of embryonic stem cell research. When the Rules Committee blocked his proposal to reestablish the Office of Technology Assessment, which Republicans closed down in 1995, Holt snapped that they had "given up any claim to want to have informed decisions on technical issues here in this Congress." His most important work perhaps was on redistricting. He endorsed the bipartisan congressional delegation redistricting plan, which strengthened all incumbents; in particular, it traded off cities and towns to strengthen him and Republican Mike Ferguson in the adjoining 7th District. He resisted efforts by a potential challenger, Finn Caspersen Jr., son of a prominent Republican contributor, to draw quite different lines that would have kept Caspersen's hometown of Bedminster in the 12th District (it helped that Ferguson very much wanted it put in the 7th). The state redistricting commission made minor changes in the plan, which Holt alone among incumbent attacked fiercely. But the new boundaries suited him fine. The 12th sloughed off most of heavily Republican Hunterdon and Somerset Counties and added the western half of heavily Democratic Trenton. Republican towns in Monmouth County near the Shore were removed; Democratic towns in Middlesex County were added.

Holt's Republican opponent was former New Jersey Secretary of State DeForest "Buster" Soaries, a black minister with a 6,000-member Baptist church; unfortunately for him, many of the members of the congregation lived in New Brunswick, which was located in the 6th District. Soaries argued that he could assemble a coalition of blacks, conservatives, and mainstream Republicans and brought in House Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts to campaign for him; Holt brought in Charles Rangel, the Harlem-based ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee. Soaries attracted little financial support from national Republicans; he was out-spent by more than 3-1. Holt won easily, 61%-37%. He won between 52% and 54% in the two ends of the district--Hunterdon and Somerset in the west, Monmouth in the east--but won 63% in Middlesex County and 68% in Mercer County, which includes Princeton and Trenton. This is taking shape as a safe seat for Holt, unless New Jersey moves as sharply toward Republicans in the mid-2000s as it moved toward Democrats in the mid-1990s.

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DC Office
1019 LHOB 20515, 202-225-5801; Fax: 202-225-6025; Web site: www.house.gov/rholt

State Offices
West Windsor, 609-750-9365.

Committees

• Education & the Workforce (13th of 22 D): 21st Century Competitiveness; Employer-Employee Relations.
• Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (8th of 9 D): Intelligence Policy & National Security; Technical & Tactical Intelligence.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2002	90	87	89	100	92	50	29	40	8	8	17
2001	90	--	100	100	--	--	15	43	0	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2001 LIB	--	2001 CONS		2002 LIB	--	2002 CONS
Economic	70%	--	29%		64%	--	35%
Social	72%	--	27%		67%	--	29%
Foreign	84%	--	16%		90%	--	8%
For National Journal's complete 2002 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 107th Congress (More Info)
1. Approve Bush Tax Cuts N 2. Limit Patients' Bill of Rights N 3. Campaign Finance Reform Y 4. Ban ANWR Development Y 5. Faith-Based Charities N 6. Bar Gays in the Boy Scouts N		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion N  8. Arm Commercial Pilots Y  9. Trade Promotion Authority N 10. Bar Funds for Intl. Court N 11. Authorize Force in Iraq N 12. Deny Home. Sec. Dept. Union N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	Rush Holt (D)	104,806	61%	$1,787,764
	DeForest Soaries (R)	62,938	37%	$624,112
	Other	3,969	2%
2002 primary	Rush Holt (D)	unopposed
2000 general	Rush Holt (D)	146,612	49%	$2,566,080
	Dick Zimmer (R)	145,511	49%	$2,196,588
	Other	8,269	3%
Prior winning percentages: 1998 (50%)

2000 presidential
	Gore (D)	141,568	56%
	Bush (R)	101,145	40%
	Other	9,188	4%
For 1992 and 1996 presidential results in the Twelfth District, please see the Almanac 2000 online. Please note that these older returns reflect district lines as they existed prior to 2002 redistricting.

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: D + 8
• District Size: 642 square miles
• Population in 2000: 647,258; 93.2% urban; 6.8% rural
• Median Household Income: $69,668; 5.2% are below the poverty line
• Occupation: 13.8% blue collar; 75.7% white collar; 10.4% gray collar; 10.6% military veterans
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 72.4% White, 11.4% Black, 9.1% Asian, 0.1% Amer. Indian, 0.0% Hawaiian, 1.4% Two+ races, 0.2% Other, 5.5% Hispanic origin
• Ancestry: 13.7% Italian, 12.1% Irish, 9.3% German
• Click here for statewide demographic data.