Murphy not giving much focus to high approval rating

Gov. Phil Murphy said he isn’t lending much attention to his skyrocketing approval rating.

“I’ve said this before: Good bad or otherwise, we don’t run things based on polls,” he said. “It just isn’t what we do. We’re spending every second of our lives trying to save lives, keep people healthy.”

A new Monmouth University poll released Tuesday gave Murphy a 71%-21% approval rating, his highest ever, and 79% of New Jersey residents polled gave the governor high marks for his response to the COVID-19 crisis.

The poll also showed that the vast majority of residents support various restrictions imposed by Murphy and his administration in response to the pandemic.

“It’s gratifying, I think, that folks — It looks like; again, I’ve only seen highlights — that they agree generally with what we’re doing to save lives, because that allows us to have the moralsuasion that we need to continue to, please god people, stay at home,” he said.

Murphy declined to say whether he believed his administration’s actions pushed New Jerseyans to support the restrictions or whether they had done so from the start.

“I have no insight as to whether or not we drove people to that or not, but I do think people believe when you make decisions based on science, fact, data, those are always going to be better decisions,” the governor said.