New Jersey governor Phil Murphy has been racing for months to stay ahead of national trends that have bedeviled his party’s state-level leaders around the country. gdebenedetti reports on how he did it
Photo: Seth Wenig/AP New Jersey governor Phil Murphy had just returned to his hospital bed after surgery to remove a malignant tumor from his left kidney on March 4, 2020, when he checked his BlackBerry. He saw a message from his chief of staff: The state had its first case of COVID-19. New Jersey’s next few months were as dark as almost any in its history: nearly 28,000 deaths, including around 8,000 in nursing homes, with hospitals overflowing and running low on ventilators.
But if Murphy’s race has been less interesting than Newsom’s and McAuliffe’s, that’s only because it never seemed quite as competitive until now.
This was all useful material for the frequently wrong national pundits who started the year with predictions of suburban rage, knowing full well they would have three clear test cases in 2021. If they were right and a broader revolt was brewing, it would probably first play out in the California recall election, in which they thought Newsom might struggle in the burbs after a year of lockdowns.
Instead, it might have been the rest of his early message that set the tone for the fall in the state’s Trump-loathing burbs and cities. Just like Biden, Newsom, and McAuliffe, Murphy spent the summer making the second half of his argument a case that his GOP opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, is in thrall to Trump.
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