A Ballot Blowup Is Roiling New Jersey’s Senate Race

There’s a whole lot of yelling in American politics these days. Yet what erupted Sunday night at a Democratic Party convention in central New Jersey was extraordinary, even by Trump-era noise standards.

“No! No! No!” came the shouts from the audience.

“This is bullshit!”

The visceral reaction was jolting but understandable. Tammy Murphy, the wife of New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, is battling Andy Kim, a New Jersey congressman, to become the Democratic nominee for US senator and displace the incumbent, Bob Menendez, who is facing multiple, wildly colorful federal corruption charges and who goes on trial May 6 (Menendez has pleaded not guilty). In the room, the chair of the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee—a Murphy ally—was pushing a last-minute proposal to change the ballot-listing rules in a way that could benefit Murphy.

And prosaic local factors like the state’s arcane ballot-design process carry outsize weight in New Jersey Senate races. The political leaders of all 21 counties award “the line”—which is essentially far more prominent positioning on the ballot—to their favored candidate. Everyone else appears in the margins. It sounds absurdly crude and biased, but it is highly effective: A study published last year in the Seton Hall Journal of Legislation and Public Policy found that congressional candidates appearing on the line had a 38-point advantage.

Kim had recently won the endorsement of two other county committees. So it was no wonder Kim’s supporters in Hunterdon howled when the county chair floated “sharing” the crucial line. A (loud) voice vote rejected the ballot-changing proposal. And then Kim won a third straight endorsement, decisively. “It made me hopeful,” Kim tells me. “People don’t want to be told who to vote for.”

The 41-year-old Kim is the relative outsider and the underdog, starting the Senate race with far less name recognition around the state than Murphy. The son of Korean immigrants and a Rhodes scholar (and friend of fellow Oxfordian Pete Buttigieg), he worked as a national security adviser in the Obama Administration—a job that included counseling American generals in Afghanistan. In 2018, Kim narrowly defeated a Republican incumbent to become the first Asian American to represent New Jersey in Congress. His claim to national fame came when he was photographed on his hands and knees on the floor of the US Capitol rotunda late on the night of January 6, cleaning up debris in the aftermath of the insurrection.

The 58-year-old Murphy grew up wealthy, worked for investment banks, and married the even wealthier Phil Murphy. The couple rose through the national Democratic Party ranks by becoming prodigious fundraisers. After Phil retired from Goldman Sachs, he became finance chair for the Democratic National Committee, which earned him an appointment as Obama’s ambassador to Germany in 2009. The Murphys own a mansion in Middletown, New Jersey, and a villa in Umbria, Italy. In 2017, Phil Murphy spent more than $20 million of the couple’s money on a successful bid for governor; Tammy Murphy, a lifelong Republican, switched her registration to Democratic in advance of the race. Murphy has been an active first lady and, in some ways, more of an old-school pol than her husband, traveling the state to win the passage of maternal health legislation and the addition of climate change curriculum in New Jersey’s public schools. Now, in her first run for public office, she’s trying to leverage those connections and her husband’s power to become New Jersey’s first female senator.

The David vs. (Mrs.) Goliath narrative will generate plenty of media attention, which should play in Kim’s favor. “It’s an easy storyline for people to get: the soft-spoken congressman against the governor’s wife,” a veteran state political insider tells me. “He seems like the perfect antidote for the moment. That’s the first lady’s biggest challenge.” Murphy’s team argues that results are what ultimately matter most. “You can point to plenty of other people with privilege and access to power who could be making change and don’t,” a Murphy adviser says. “Tammy was in a position to help people, and she did that. She has worked her ass off, substantively and for the Democratic Party.”

The Hunterdon uproar occurred in the state’s fourth-smallest county by population. The contest now enters a stretch of more densely populated counties. On Saturday Murphy should take Union County, where the county Democratic Party chairman is also the state senate president, which means he does plenty of business with Governor Murphy; he has endorsed senate candidate Tammy Murphy. “New Jersey has more layers of government per person than any state in the country, and all those people have political ties,” a Democratic operative told me. “The people in those jobs care about who is elected, and that’s the kind of thing that can give you a ground operation.” Monday brings a pivotal contest in Bergen County, just west of New York City, where the playing field is more level. Should Murphy lose, it would call into question the rationale for her campaign, that she will be strongest in the state’s more urban regions.

Julie Roginsky was the strategist for Phil Murphy’s 2017 gubernatorial run; she has since had a bitter falling out with both Murphys. But Roginsky remains a shrewd observer of New Jersey politics. “She’s going to be dragged over the finish line by people who care very much about the governorship because there’s patronage to give out,” Roginsky says. “As one of them said to me, ‘The next time I call a US senator for something, will be the first time I call a senator.’ They just don’t care about who is senator.”

Murphy’s camp gives Kim credit for taking advantage of the ballot-line issue—but it also accuses him of hypocrisy, pointing out that Kim happily ran on the line in his three congressional campaigns. His chances of pulling off an upset this time, though, may turn on whether he can make the ballot machinations part of a larger contrast. “The same politics that protected Senator Menendez for so many years is trying to put its thumb on the scale for the coronation of the first lady. And I think people are done with that,” Kim says. “We shouldn’t just have musical chairs of the most powerful families in our state.”