What Tammy Murphy’s Failed Senate Campaign Says About New Jersey’s Changing Politics

New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy blamed the fear of negative campaigning for her withdrawal Sunday from the state’s closely watched Democratic Senate primary, but far more significant factors led her to such an unenviable fork in the road.

Murphy’s exit makes Rep. Andy Kim the favorite in the Garden State’s June contest to determine who will succeed federally indicted Sen. Bob Menendez, and the instant frontrunner in the Democratic-leaning state’s general election in November. Menendez, initially the target of Kim and Murphy’s campaigns, announced Thursday that he would not seek the Democratic nomination.

“I’ve been genuine and factual throughout, but it is clear to me that continuing in this race will involve waging a very divisive and negative campaign, which I am not willing to do,” Murphy said in a video announcement Sunday on social media.

Murphy is not wrong about what it would have taken to even have a shot at defeating Kim, given his momentum and lead in the polls.

Murphy significantly underestimated how Garden State Democrats would turn against the clubby machine politics that have long determined how power is wielded in the state. She lacked a good response to allegations that her chief selling point was her marriage to Gov. Phil Murphy, a fellow Goldman Sachs alum. And at key moments, Murphy’s campaign-trail performance reinforced the idea that she was leveraging connections to make up for a lack of conventional qualifications.

“She can’t get out from under this perception that it is her proximity to the governor’s office, her proximity to the governor, her proximity to their relationships with other Democratic elected officials that have her in this position,” Micah Rasmussen, director of Rider University’s Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, said last week. “And that’s something that people say, ‘Well, I don’t have to go along with that.’”

Meanwhile, Kim, a suburban South Jersey dad with State Department experience, had a better story to tell. He could credibly run as an underdog who earned his ticket to higher office by flipping a Republican-held House seat in 2018.

“Kim was just the perfect foil,” said a New Jersey Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to protect professional relationships.

From the start, Murphy set out to run an insider-focused campaign that would leverage her husband’s power. Whereas Kim announced his primary campaign against Menendez the day after the Department of Justice indicted the U.S. senator on numerous bribery charges, Murphy spent weeks lining up support from party insiders, labor unions, and major donors before making her bid official in mid-November.

In short order, Murphy had locked up the endorsements of numerous chairs of the state’s most powerful county Democratic parties.

Those endorsements were more than mere adornments on her campaign website: Murphy’s path to victory ran straight through the state’s old-school county party system.

New Jersey is the only state in the country where county parties have the authority to use political criteria when deciding a candidate’s placement on the primary ballot. Candidates who get the county party’s endorsement get the county party ballot line — commonly known as just “the line” — meaning that they are featured on the first column or row of the ballot as part of a county slate, where ordinary voters are more likely to see them.

Those candidates who do not get the county party endorsement are relegated to peripheral areas sometimes described as “ballot Siberia.” Murphy allies dangled the threat of banishment in front of Kim before the first lady entered the race.

But those who live by the ballot line, risk dying by it. And rather than setting up a coronation, Murphy’s focus on the line turned her fight against Kim into a referendum on the controversial New Jersey institution, which became a stand-in for local corruption in the post-Menendez — and perhaps, post-Donald Trump — era.

The Democratic strategist noted that Murphy’s attachment to the instrument of insider power is understandable. Her husband, Gov. Murphy, won the 2017 Democratic primary by donating money to county parties and securing their endorsements.

“There’s just something different now,” the strategist said.

Maybe it was because Kim’s first win in 2018 coincided with a surge in grass-roots liberal energy and scrutiny of the state’s storied machine systems. Maybe it was because he knew Murphy would be the darling of the state’s establishment organs. And maybe it was simply based on principle.

But one way or another, Kim had no trouble seeing what Murphy could not: That the Garden State had indeed evolved since Phil Murphy ran away with the nomination in 2017.

Kim would run for U.S. Senate as a foe of the North and South Jersey machines and the ballot line system that gives them power. In fact, shortly before announcing his campaign in September, Kim came out in favor of abolishing the line.

“I’m really in favor of as many measures as we can to make sure that power resides with the voters,” he told the New Jersey Globe. “I’m a believer that democracy is something that ultimately resides with the citizens.”

Kim would end up casting his fight against the line — and by extension, Murphy — as a way of finishing what the Justice Department started with its indictment of Menendez.

“This is our moment to say enough,” he said at a campaign appearance. “Jersey politics can’t just be the same after this.”

Kim’s case got easier to make every time Murphy’s campaign or its allies used heavy-handed tactics to close ranks against people considering endorsing Kim. In mid-January, for example, a Murphy-aligned college student pressured leaders of the New Jersey College Democrats not to endorse Kim under the implied threat of marginalization.

“This Senate primary is taking place because Senator Menendez was indicted. The credibility/reputation of the Democratic party is at stake,” Kim posted on X (formerly Twitter) in a thread about the College Democrats incident. “People across NJ and the country are watching to see what our next move is and whether we fixed anything.”

Although Kim continued to express his opposition to the line, and Murphy’s endorsement list made clear that she would be the favorite, Kim still campaigned for county party support when the official endorsement processes began in February. He characterized it as an acknowledgment of the system as it was — a decision comparable to many Democrats’ solicitation of big donations in spite of their hopes for a cleaner campaign-finance system.

But while Murphy tried to rebrand herself as a “ticked-off mom” whose statewide maternal mortality initiative equipped her for a life in Congress, the brute-force tactics of her campaign kept becoming the main story.

The endorsement fight in rural Hunterdon County in late February was a telling example. The chair of the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee, a Murphy ally, announced a last-minute rule at the party’s convention that any candidate who gets 30% of the endorsement vote could share the line with the winner. Kim’s supporters, who commanded a strong majority in the room, cried foul and overturned the rule on appeal. The result, in which Murphy received just over 30% of the endorsement vote, appeared to vindicate those who suspected a plot to kneecap Kim.

“Any time you allow regular Democrats to be able to vote, especially secret ballot, we see where the direction of this campaign is going,” Kim told reporters.

Other county party proceedings also appeared to confirm stereotypes about the Democratic machine system. In Camden County earlier this month, the public was treated to footage of several husky white men physically preventing Patricia Campos-Medina, a progressive Latina Senate candidate, from entering the county’s Democratic Party convention.

“There’s been a lot of ham-handedness and a lot of tone-deafness. Kim has them totally befuddled,” Rider University’s Rasmussen said last week. “They’re not used to being challenged.”

Rather than a show of strength, Murphy’s reliance on top-down establishment support became a punchline. In a late January profile of Murphy in New York magazine, one anonymous elected official who endorsed Murphy said they were not actually planning to vote for her.

In the end, Murphy’s campaign may actually deliver the push needed to eliminate the line altogether.

The day after the Hunterdon County dustup, Kim sued in federal court to force the state to undo the line before the June 4 primary. He got a boost from New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin on March 18 when Platkin, an appointee and ally of Gov. Murphy, announced that he would not defend the line in court, and considers it unconstitutional.

Worse still for Murphy, many observers expect Kim to succeed in federal court in the coming weeks, which would have deprived Murphy of a key part of her strategy.

“I don’t see any scenario without lines where she could have had a shot,” said the New Jersey Democratic strategist.

Kim has vowed to press forward with his lawsuit in the wake of Murphy’s withdrawal. His campaign called an end to the favoritism of the line the “right thing for our democracy and the right thing for our state.”

In the final weeks of Murphy’s campaign, the wheels started coming off fast. One particular embarrassment: Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, a candidate for governor, withdrew his endorsement of Murphy in favor of Kim — and specifically cited the two candidates’ conduct during the county party convention season.

The coup de grâce? He also called for Murphy to drop out, arguing that the continuation of her campaign is not in “the state’s best interest.”

The polling numbers were no better than the headlines for Murphy as she plotted her next move this weekend. She had higher name recognition in the state than Kim, but unlike Kim, her favorability rating in the eyes of Democratic voters was underwater, according to a Monmouth University poll earlier this month.

To narrow Kim’s lead when Murphy’s name recognition was already so high would indeed have required tarnishing Kim in the eyes of Democratic primary voters.

In addition, Murphy would almost certainly have needed to pour millions of dollars from her and Gov. Murphy’s family fortune into her campaign to finance TV ads denigrating Kim. Advertising statewide in New Jersey is especially expensive because it includes parts of the New York City and Philadelphia media markets.

“If you’re looking at a scenario where you think the judge is going to throw out the line, and you think that that means that you’re probably going to lose, and in order to even try you have to put $10 million in and run a fiercely negative campaign, it’s understandable” to drop out, the New Jersey Democratic strategist said.

But it’s not entirely clear whether there was enough dirt on Kim to fuel effective campaign ads.

Murphy planned to hit Kim from the left, dinging him for backing some more conservative policies during his first term in Congress. She might have highlighted a 2019 vote for a border enforcement bill drafted by Senate Republicans without better safeguards for the treatment of undocumented children. (Kim’s district was more Republican during his first two terms, which preceded a favorable redistricting.)

Murphy previewed these kinds of jabs when she hit Kim in February for refusing to support Medicare for All, a single-payer health care program favored by the activist left. Kim has instead said that he supports any practical path to universal health coverage, whether through a single payer system or multiple payers.

But Kim simultaneously put Murphy on the defensive over her past involvement in the GOP — she was a registered Republican through 2012 — making it clear that Murphy would have a hard time outflanking him from the left.

Murphy also belied her own progressive policy goals when she told New York magazine that she wasn’t sure whether she supported abolishing the filibuster. “I haven’t given it much thought,” she said at the time.

Getting rid of the filibuster is a prerequisite for low-hanging fruit like restoring President Joe Biden’s expanded Child Tax Credit, let alone loftier ideas like Medicare for All. And here was a political newcomer with a fancy pedigree who didn’t have an opinion on one of the most pressing issues in the Senate.

Murphy walked back the comment shortly after it hit newsstands, embracing the filibuster’s elimination. But the damage was done.

“That was pretty telling to a lot of people,” the New Jersey Democratic strategist said.