Background In 1972, U.S. Senator
Clifford P. Case won re-election to a fourth term in office by a record 780,000 votes. He was the ranking Republican on the
United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. In his political career, which covered over twelve elections in the course of forty years, Case had lost only one race for New Jersey General Assembly in 1941. However, he had a reputation as a liberal internationalist and commonly drew challengers in the Republican primary. Beginning in 1974, Jeff Bell was a top policy advisor to former
Governor of California Ronald Reagan and a leading architect of his
supply-side economics platform during the 1976 Republican primary campaign against
Gerald Ford. He was the only major candidate in either primary who did not use television commercials, and he also generally disfavored telephone banks, direct mailing, and internal polling. He ignored advice from advisors to take the challenge seriously, at least in order to get a running start on the general election. ==Democratic primary==