In a surprise announcement on Sunday, Tammy Murphy, the wife of New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, said that she was dropping out of the Democratic primary race to replace disgraced (and once again federally indicted) Senator Robert Menendez. The New Jersey Globe reports that Murphy decided to bow out of the race on Saturday after discussing the matter with her family, including the governor, ultimately concluding “she had a limited path to winning the June 4 primary, even if she wrote a large personal check to partly self-fund her race.”
The First Lady, who had never held elected office, announced her departure from the race in a video message on Sunday afternoon:
Murphy’s candidacy appeared unstoppable just months ago in large part because she was leveraging her husband’s political network and influence in the state to lock up public support. Most of the state’s top Democratic leaders had endorsed her and shunned her primary opponent, Congressman Andy Kim, who quickly declared his candidacy after Menendez and his wife were indicted by federal prosecutors. It had seemed as if Kim, best known nationally for being photographed solemnly cleaning up the U.S. Capitol rotunda in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, faced very long odds against New Jersey’s infamous Democratic machine.
But as it turns out, even in New Jersey, rank-and-file Democrats weren’t all that interested in seeing the relative of the sitting governor be de facto installed in a U.S. Senate seat. Tammy Murphy was consistently behind Kim in polling, and Democratic county committee members in the state largely rejected her — in secret ballots — as well. As the Globe explains, “lots of Democrats around the state publicly backed her, but privately voted for Kim instead.”
So it was Kim who seems to have had the nomination on lock all along, bolstered by impressive fundraising and backed by a grassroots coalition of progressive Democrats and a whole lot of incognito party insiders who seem to have rejected nepotism on general principle.
Bob Menendez, meanwhile, still isn’t gone. He has stubbornly refused to resign and seems to believe he can beat what appears to be a pretty strong corruption case against him, and he made noises about running for reelection as an independent after announcing he wouldn’t run in the Democratic primary (where he probably would have been trounced by Kim, too).
This post has been updated.
