In January, I asked a member of Tammy Murphy’s inner circle a question: If polls started looking shaky, or fundraising was unexpectedly paltry, or some other weakness befell her campaign, would New Jersey’s First Lady consider dropping out of her U.S. Senate race before the June primary? No chance, the adviser told me. Back then, my premise seemed hard to believe. Murphy’s front-runner status, thanks entirely to her position as wife of Governor Phil Murphy, was the defining aspect of her candidacy. So much so that her identity as an entrenched, anointed Democratic Party insider wound up overshadowing her previous identity as an investment banker and prodigious donor to the Republican Party. Her victory, however ickily achieved, seemed inevitable.
Within a couple of months, though, her supposed advantage turned into a weakness. Tammy Murphy never shed the nepotism narrative that dogged her campaign — an especially damning narrative in a race for a seat occupied by the indicted Bob Menendez, whose own son serves in Congress. (My profile of Murphy, published in late January, was titled “The Nepo State.”) Policy hardly surfaced during the primary. Instead, Murphy’s primary opponent U.S. Representative Andy Kim went from long shot to favorite simply by appearing to be her opposite: a good-government mensch with a sparkling public-service CV and zero support from party bosses.
Kim’s unexpected grassroots potency became evident in February and March, when New Jersey’s 21 counties held endorsing conventions. The winner of almost all these conventions received placement on New Jersey’s almighty sui generis “county line” that grants candidates prime ballot real estate. A pattern emerged: Kim was victorious when delegates voted democratically by secret ballot. Murphy, by contrast, tended to win the conventions in which party chairs who’d already endorsed her did so again behind closed doors or, dubiously, “counted” the audience members’ raised hands. The negative press that followed each convention only underlined her growing weaknesses, and the specter of an embarrassing loss in June was apparently too much for Murphy to bear. On Sunday, in a bombshell video posted to X, she dropped out of the race.
Two things explain the timing of her announcement. The first is that Monday was the official Senate filing deadline. (And now that it has passed, she can’t — ha ha — run as a Republican instead.) The second is Andy Kim’s federal lawsuit against the constitutionality of the ballot “line.” U.S. District Court judge Zahid Quraishi could rule from Trenton as soon as this week, ordering an injunction that would suspend its use in the primary. New Jersey’s own attorney general, close Phil-and-Tammy ally Matt Platkin, said recently that even he couldn’t defend the line in court. If Murphy were to drop out after the line had been killed, it might look like an admission that appearing beneath the name “Joe Biden” on a ballot really was the only thing she had going for her.
Perhaps there were other factors. Maybe she and her allies had trouble making her case to donors. (The Super-PAC supporting her has reported raising only $1 million from just 18 donors. I hear Murphy recently held a fundraiser in California that was notable for its sparse attendance.) Maybe a big negative story was on the way. Maybe her internal polls looked horrible.
There is one ironic aspect to Murphy’s withdrawal. However grassroots-y Kim’s support was compared to hers, the convention battles he won were determined by political diehards. Delegates who voted for Kim in Monmouth or Mercer County were not random voters pulled off the street, but themselves plugged-in activists and insiders. The fact that so many of these types voted overwhelmingly for Kim may, of course, have been a harbinger of Tammy’s doom. But it also leaves open the question of what ordinary, low-to-medium-information voters would have actually done in June.
The only public head-to-head poll in the race, conducted in January by Fairleigh Dickinson University, had Kim up on Murphy by 32 percent to 20 percent with another 9 percent still backing Menendez, and about one third undecided. (Menendez won’t be running as a Democrat, and would have to declare as an independent to appear on the ballot in November.) Kim was up with white and Asian voters; Murphy led with Black and Latino voters. If there was a path to victory, it was this: Win a vast swath of middle-of-the-road minority voters while conceding the progressive vote and the media contest to Kim. Just a few weeks ago, Murphy sacked her first campaign manager and replaced him with Maggie Moran, who ran Andrew Cuomo’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign. Cuomo’s primary victory against Cynthia Nixon followed that basic game plan: Dominate among moderates, riding a Black voter base and the support of the party Establishment. Maybe no volume of TV ads would have won Murphy the necessary margins; she doesn’t appear to have built a robust turnout machine to mobilize voters in Newark or Camden. But she could always have donated millions to herself to blanket the airwaves, as her husband did in his successful 2017 gubernatorial run. And directionally at least, her demographic roadmap made sense.
There’s also the question of whether she might have been able to overcome the bad optics. In a campaign defined on all sides by a pressing need for reform — ballots, cash bribes, you name it — the spouse of the sitting governor was congenitally unable to position herself as a reformer. Could she have pulled off a “Dark Brandon”–style reappropriation? At least one of Murphy’s Wall Street allies suggested — to little effect, apparently — that instead of running away from the nepotism label, she embrace it and position herself and Phil and a dynastic force for good like the Kennedys or the Clintons.
A final what-if: Imagine the line is preserved this primary season, either thanks to a U.S. District Court ruling or an appeal by the defendants (in this case, 19 of the state’s county clerks) that kicks a decision down the road. Despite Kim’s surprise convention strength, Murphy was still awarded the line in New Jersey’s populous urban counties, including Bergen and Essex. In total, she would have appeared there on two-thirds of all primary ballots in the state. Had she stuck it out, Murphy’s campaign would have at least been a fascinating test case for the efficacy of the existing system. How many Democratic voters would have reflexively pulled the lever for an unpopular and underqualified candidate simply because her name showed up next to the names of a bunch of other party-approved candidates?
In the video she released Sunday, Murphy said that in order to compete with Kim she would have had to go negative and that she didn’t want to tear down a fellow Democrat with Donald Trump on the ballot. That noble rationale seems hard to believe; there would be plenty of time between June and November for the winner to rally around the party. Could Murphy have felt some pressure from allies? Before she dropped out on Sunday, she met at a Newark law firm with several of the county chairs who had backed her campaign. Some have theorized that they heartily encouraged Murphy’s decision to withdraw, in an effort to maintain their electoral power a little while longer. Perhaps they worried that her unpopularity would hurt their down-ballot candidates or that she had simply drawn too much attention to the workings of the party machinery. According to various insiders, party leaders now hope that with Murphy off the ballot — and Andy Kim winning her lines instead, which he has, even as he sues to abolish them — Judge Quraishi will have less rationale to strike the system down this year. (Which is exactly what New Jersey’s county clerks will try to argue in court today, in their bid to preserve the line.)
Whether the decision was entirely her own, or influenced by party elites, Murphy ended her bid the way she started it: surrounded by, and with the support of, unelected political bosses.
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What Explains Tammy Murphy’s Curiously Early Exit?
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27.03.2024
In January, I asked a member of Tammy Murphy’s inner circle a question: If polls started looking shaky, or fundraising was unexpectedly paltry, or some other weakness befell her campaign, would New Jersey’s First Lady consider dropping out of her U.S. Senate race before the June primary? No chance, the adviser told me. Back then, my premise seemed hard to believe. Murphy’s front-runner status, thanks entirely to her position as wife of Governor Phil Murphy, was the defining aspect of her candidacy. So much so that her identity as an entrenched, anointed Democratic Party insider wound up overshadowing her previous identity as an investment banker and prodigious donor to the Republican Party. Her victory, however ickily achieved, seemed inevitable.
Within a couple of months, though, her supposed advantage turned into a weakness. Tammy Murphy never shed the nepotism narrative that dogged her campaign — an especially damning narrative in a race for a seat occupied by the indicted Bob Menendez, whose own son serves in Congress. (My profile of Murphy, published in late January, was titled “The Nepo State.”) Policy hardly surfaced during the primary. Instead, Murphy’s primary opponent U.S. Representative Andy Kim went from long shot to favorite simply by appearing to be her opposite: a good-government mensch with a sparkling public-service CV and zero support from party bosses.
Kim’s unexpected grassroots potency became evident in February and March, when New Jersey’s 21 counties held endorsing conventions. The winner of almost all these conventions received placement on New Jersey’s almighty sui generis “county line” that grants candidates prime ballot real estate. A pattern emerged: Kim was victorious when delegates voted democratically by secret ballot. Murphy, by contrast, tended to win the conventions in which party chairs who’d already endorsed her did so again behind closed doors or, dubiously, “counted” the audience members’ raised hands. The negative press that followed each convention only........
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