“New Jersey residents are among the nation’s best educated and most affluent voters, but they have appeared content over the years to leave politics to local political bosses,” according to the 1974 American Political Almanac, which remains definitive, said Marc Pfeiffer, an expert in New Jersey government. “And the bosses, it turns out, have been the most venal and corrupt political manipulators outside, perhaps, the 1600 and 1700 blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue.”