Kornacki: Alvarez investigations may become national news

Veteran political reporter Steve Kornacki thinks the political circumstances of the national news cycle have been kind to Gov. Phil Murphy, keeping coverage of the investigations into the administration’s hiring of Al Alvarez off of cable broadcasts.

“I think, politically, Murphy has gotten lucky that there’s just so much else going on right now. I think in a different atmosphere this is the kind of thing that gets a lot more national attention right now,” Kornacki said. “It connects with a lot of issues that are very prominent right now, and I can see it getting a lot more attention going forward.”

Katie Brennan, chief of staff at New Jersey’s Housing and Mortgage Financing Agency, has accused Alvarez of sexually assaulting her in April 2017, when they were both involved in Murphy’s gubernatorial campaign.

She testified during the Select Committee’s first full hearing Tuesday, when news of former President George H. W. Bush’s death had a grip on the airwaves.

Loath as Murphy might be to admit it, President Donald Trump’s proclivity for generating headlines has also likely diverted attention from the Alvarez investigations.

If there’s a period of relative peace in national politics, Brennan’s alleged assault may garner the national attention reached by many incidents of the #MeToo movement.

Kornacki, who started his career covering New Jersey Politics and is now a national political correspondent for NBC News, was in the state Thursday for a talk at Rowan University, in part to plug his new book “The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism.”

The book recounts the rise of era politicians like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former President Bill Clinton, whose tenures laid the groundwork for the increasingly-hostile political climate of the present day.

The event focused less on that history and more on an examination of the year’s midterms, which saw Democrats retake the House after swinging 40 seats. Many of those wins came from districts former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton carried in 2016.

Though, that was only the case for one New Jersey congressional district. Rep.-elect Tom Malinowski won in the seventh, as did Hillary Clinton. Reps.-elect Mikie Sherrill, Jeff Van Drew and Andy Kim won districts that broke for Trump.

Kornacki said he doesn’t expect Sherrill to have much trouble winning in 2020 should she decide to run again, but that wasn’t the case for the other freshmen.

He expects the third and seventh to be competitive, the latter more than the former because of Trump’s performance there in 2016, but he said Republicans may end up eyeing New Jersey’s second congressional district above the others.

“Van Drew is interesting to me just because it told you how, even when everything seems to collapse for Republicans, there’s still a lot of resistance to Democrats there, more than I think anybody expected,” Kornacki said. “So, put Trump on the ballot and they can get a real candidate in two, that starts looking like a real Republican target.”

Full disclosure: the New Jersey Globe is an unabashed, enthusiastic, devoted fan of Steve Kornacki.  He worked for Globe editor David Wildstein at PoliticsNJ.com from 2002 to 2006, and reporter Nikita Biryukov worked as a production intern at MSNBC Live with Steve Kornacki during the 2016 general election, and then as a digital reporting intern at NBC News in 2017.