Tammy Murphy will announce today that she is dropping out of the race for United States Senate, abruptly ending her campaign after four months, the New Jersey Globe has confirmed. That clears the way for insurgent Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) to likely win the Democratic nomination and become the strong favorite to replace indicted Senator Bob Menendez.
Murphy made the decision on Saturday evening after a discussion with her family – including her husband, Gov. Phil Murphy – and political advisors. The conclusion was that she had a bloody path to winning the June 4 primary, even if she wrote a large personal check to partly self-fund her race.
Last night, her campaign set up a meeting with some Democratic county chairs that took place today at the law offices of Genova Burns in Newark. It will be up to party chairs in pro-Murphy counties to decide if they will replace Murphy on the party line with Kim.
Kim, on the phone with party leaders, committed to running on the line in the Murphy counties, according to sources that were in the room.
Murphy will not endorse Kim today but will call for party unity.
Murphy had trouble overcoming the optics of a sitting governor attempting to put his wife in the United States Senate. She was able to secure endorsements from top-tier party leaders, including six House members, legislative leaders, and organization lines in some of the biggest Democratic vote-producing counties. But polling showed her at a substantial disadvantage, and in secret ballot county conventions, where county committee members – the lowest level of the state’s party hierarchy – make the decisions, Kim scored a series of stunning victories.
In the first-in-the state convention convention in Monmouth County on February 10, Kim won a 57%-39% victory. Murphy lives in Monmouth, but Kim represents part of the county in Congress.
Monmouth is only one small part of a statewide coalition, but the symbolic implications of Kim’s win far outstripped the practical ones. Murphy’s inability to win the county, where longtime Rep. Frank Pallone (D-Long Branch) ran her campaign, superpowered Kim’s trajectory and gave other counties around the state leeway to buck Murphy as well.
Murphy’s internal count showed her substantially ahead in Monmouth prior to the vote, a harbinger of a larger problem: lots of Democrats around the state publicly backed her, but privately voted for Kim instead.
Ultimately, Murphy was unable to halt the insurmountable “Kim-mentum” that grew exponentially across New Jersey beginning on September 23, the day Kim joined the race – and one day after the Justice Department unsealed its indictment of Menendez on federal corruption charges.
Following Monmouth, Kim scored county convention wins in Burlington, Hunterdon, Sussex, Warren, Ocean, Mercer, Atlantic, and Morris. Murphy scored a significant 64% victory at the secret-ballot Democratic convention in Bergen, where the county chairman, Paul Juliano, worked triple-time to help deliver rank-and-file county committee votes, and in Somerset, where the vote was conducted by a public show of hands (a controversial process that led to additional resentment and boosted Kim).
Murphy also had the county line in Middlesex, Essex, Camden, Hudson, Union, Passaic and Gloucester Counties, all counties with more top-down endorsement processes that don’t hold proper county conventions which Kim could hope to win.
A three-term congressman and former Obama White House aide, Kim raised $2.7 million during his first three months as a Senate candidate. He became the favorite of grassroots Democrats and progressives, a space once occupied by Phil Murphy during his first term as governor.
Tammy Murphy, for her part, raised more than $3.2 million during her first six weeks as a candidate; it’s not clear how much money she brought in for the fourth quarter.
But despite her huge fundraising haul and her many party endorsements in the state’s largest counties, Murphy concluded that Kim’s advantages – his sizable share of county lines, his superior polling results, and her challenges to build an urban voter turnout operation before vote-by-mail ballots begin going out next month – left her with an uphill battle.
Murphy’s withdrawal comes one day before New Jersey’s filing deadline, and before U.S. District Court Judge Zahid Quraishi rules in a lawsuit filed by Kim and others to abolish organization lines, the unique New Jersey system that gives party-endorsed candidates preferential ballot placement.
One week ago, Attorney General Matt Platkin, who had been close to the Murphy family, refused to intervene in Kim’s lawsuit. He viewed the organization line as unconstitutional and said he could not defend it in court.
With Murphy out, there are three other Democrats left in the Senate race, all considered long-shots on a good day: former Newark school board member Lawrence Hamm, activist Patricia Campos-Medina, and newcomer Patrick Merrill. Republicans are hosting a competitive primary of their own for the seat, with hotelier Curtis Bashaw, Mendham Borough Mayor Christine Serrano Glassner and former News 12 New Jersey reporter Alex Zdan looking like the top candidates.
Menendez, the three-term incumbent, said last week that he would not run in the Democratic primary, but that he might seek re-election as an independent in the fall if he’s able to dispense with the indictments that have ruined his political career.