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109th Lineup: 7 D, 6 R
108th Lineup: 7 D, 6 R
District Map: Click here

New Jersey's population rose 9% between the 1990 and 2000 Censuses, and it did not lose a House seat in 2002 as it did in 1992. New Jersey has a 10-member congressional redistricting commission, equally divided between the parties, which is supposed to agree on new lines, with a previously selected arbiter available in case of ties, who can produce a compromise plan and see if it gets a majority of the commission; if not, the tie-breaker picks one of the two parties' plans. In 1991 the tiebreaker picked the Republican plan, with grotesquely shaped districts. But given New Jersey's post-1994 Democratic trend, by 2000 it yielded the Republicans only 6 of the state's 13 seats.

The redistricting commission first met in July 2001, two days after the 13 incumbents had agreed on a bipartisan congressional delegation plan. The biggest changes were in the 12th District, which Democrat Rush Holt had won three times by narrow margins, and by just 651 votes in 2000, and the 7th District, which freshman Republican Mike Ferguson had won by just 52%-46% in 2000. Furious attempts were made to change the plan by Republican Finn Caspersen Jr., who wanted to challenge Holt, and Democrat Susan Bass Levin, who had run unsuccessfully in the 3d in 2000 and wanted to have Cherry Hill, of which she is mayor, placed in the heavily Democratic 1st where she could run if incumbent Rob Andrews should retire. But Camden County Democratic Chairman George Norcross had other candidates in mind, and Ferguson was bound to resist the major changes needed to put Caspersen's very Republican hometown of Bedminster into the 12th. Anyway, tiebreaker Alan Rosenthal, a Rutgers political scientist, liked the idea of an incumbent-protection plan.

So in October 2001 the commission adopted the delegation plan with slight changes. The result is a map with very erose district lines and oddly shaped districts, drawn explicitly to protect incumbents and blessed by a political scientist. The partisan tilt is plain from the presidential election returns. Within these lines, George W. Bush carried only three of these districts in 2000, when he won 40% of the vote in New Jersey. But in 2004, when he won 46%, he carried all six of the districts represented by Republicans.