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.”
Representative Andy Kim speaks to voters in Jersey City, New Jersey, on Feb. 23, 2024.By Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo.
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.
