Tammy Murphy, NJ’s First Lady, is in a crowded race for Menendez’s seat
Tammy Murphy, the wife of New Jersey Gov. Philip D. Murphy, announced Wednesday that she was running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate seat now occupied by the state’s embattled senior senator, Robert Menendez, who is accused of taking bribes. .
Ms. Murphy, 58, is running for public office for the first time and describes herself on tax forms as a homemaker.
During her husband’s six years as governor, she was an active first lady who worked to improve the state’s high maternal and infant mortality rates and expand climate change education in public schools. Before she and Mr. Murphy married thirty years ago, Ms. Murphy worked as a financial analyst, and since then she has volunteered on the boards of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations.
Ms. Murphy has been preparing for her Senate bid for more than a month, and she announced her candidacy on Wednesday with the release of a nearly four-minute campaign video. video.
“We owe it to our children to do better,” she says, speaking directly to the camera and presenting herself primarily as a mother of four who, when given the opportunity, used her platform as first lady to to advocate for better pregnancy outcomes.
“Right now, Washington is filled with too many people who are more interested in getting rich or getting on screen,” she says, as a photo of Mr. Menendez flashes in the background, “than in getting things done for you.”
Ms. Murphy already has at least two Democratic primary opponents: Rep. Andy Kim, who has represented South Jersey in Congress since 2019, and Larry Hamm, a political activist and second-term Senate candidate who heads the People’s Organization for Progress. Patricia Campos-Medina, a left-wing labor leader who heads the Worker Institute at Cornell University, said Tuesday that she was also preparing to enter the race.
Mr. Menendez has pleaded not guilty to federal charges of bribery and scheming to become an agent of Egypt, and he has said he will not resign from the Senate. He has not ruled out seeking re-election, but if he runs for the Democratic nomination he will face several practical challenges. A federal judge has scheduled his trial to begin a month before the June primary, and he has been abandoned by nearly every leading Democrat in the state, including Mr. Murphy, leaving him with an extremely difficult path to victory.
Mr. Menendez said Ms. Murphy’s entry into the race proved that the governor, who was one of the first officials to call for his resignation, had a “personal, vested interest” in doing so.
“They believe they are not accountable to anyone,” Mr. Menendez said in a written statement about the Murphys. “But I am confident that the people of New Jersey will resist this blatant disenfranchisement maneuver.”
Ms. Murphy called her role as New Jersey’s first lady the “honor of my life” in Wednesday’s video. But she has also built a reputation as an aggressive campaign fundraiser and now has seven months to introduce herself to voters as a full-fledged candidate.
She is running as a Democrat for one of the country’s most coveted political awards, but is still a relative newcomer to the party. Voting records show she voted regularly in Republican primaries until 2014, three years before her husband was elected governor of a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by nearly a million voters. Ms. Murphy continued to vote in the Republican primaries even though Mr. Murphy was finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee and ambassador to Germany, appointed by former President Barack Obama.
She has declined an interview request and her aides have refused to discuss her reasons for switching sides as a 49-year-old.
But Mr. Kim said Ms. Murphy’s voting history raised valid questions, especially in a Democratic primary.
“I think she needs to explain that,” Mr. Kim, 41, said in an interview on Monday.
Mr. Menendez also took a swipe at the first lady’s changed party affiliation.
“While Tammy Murphy was a ticket-holding Republican for years,” he said, “I worked to elect Democrats up and down the ballot.”
Mr. Kim, a national security adviser during the Obama administration, entered the Senate race a day after Mr. Menendez and his wife, Nadine Menendez, were accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in exchange for the senator’s efforts to to send help. and weapons to Egypt and allies help avoid criminal prosecution.
Mr. Kim also has one campaign video this week, in which he is shown talking to a group of disenchanted voters.
“I believe the opposite of democracy is apathy,” said Mr. Kim, the father of 6- and 8-year-old boys, to explain his motivation for running.
“I look at all the craziness in the world,” he said, adding, “I don’t want my kids to grow up in a broken America.”
Mr. Kim, who rose to national fame after his existence photographed cleaning up rubble from the floor of the Capitol after the Jan. 6 attack, raised nearly $1 million in one week after announcing his candidacy, and he said he continued to raise money at a rapid pace. To win, he will most likely have to capture voters’ imaginations without significant help from New Jersey’s Democratic Party leaders, who control the so-called county line — vote placement that is often considered a victory.
New Jersey has a unique election system that allows district leaders from the Democratic and Republican parties to anoint candidates to run in one column or row for the primary, a benefit that research has shown increases the odds of victory by as much as 38 percentage points . .
“It’s a rigged game,” said Julia Sass Rubin, associate dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Public Policy at Rutgers University, who investigated the influence from the county line in federal and legislative races. “There is no democracy in New Jersey.”
The Working Families Alliance of New Jersey and several former candidates have filed a federal lawsuit that they hope will lead a court to overturn the practice. “The election is almost over before it starts,” Brett Pugach, an attorney who filed the federal lawsuit, said of the voting system, which he said is fundamentally unconstitutional.
But in the meantime, the governor and Ms. Murphy have been busy courting Democratic leaders in the state’s populous counties closest to New York City and Philadelphia, according to three people familiar with the conversations who were not wanted to be identified and say something that might be possible. considered critical of the governor. Several of these chairmen work as lobbyists with significant state business or hold lucrative state jobs, making it less likely that they will openly oppose a governor who has two years left in his term — and control of the next two multi-billion dollar state budgets.
That is one reason why Ms. Campos-Medina, who emigrated from El Salvador as a 14-year-old, said she planned to flee.
“This line disenfranchises women and specifically women of color and does not encourage voter participation,” Ms. Campos-Medina, 50, said.
Whoever wins the Democratic primary will face a Republican in November next year who hopes to break the Democrats’ 40-year winning streak in the Senate. There are at least two Republicans interested in competing for the nomination: Christine Serrano Glassnerthe Mayor of Mendham Borough, and Shirley Maia-Cusicka member of the Federated Republican Women of Hunterdon County.
If either woman is successful, she would make history as the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate from New Jersey.
Mrs. Murphy would also be the first spouse of a sitting governor to be elected to the United States Senate. And she would also likely become the fifth member of New Jersey’s congressional delegation, with family members who have held prominent political positions, joining Reps. Tom Kean Jr., Rob Menendez Jr., Donald Norcross and Donald M. Payne Jr., all of whom are Democrats.
Ross K. Baker, a professor at Rutgers University who has studied Congress for 50 years, said New Jersey’s county-line system has contributed to what he called “political dynasties.”
“It is fundamentally undemocratic,” Professor Baker said. “Politics should not be a family affair.”