No reason for Murphy to not get 2nd term, Pou says

State Sen. Nellie Pou said she had no reason to think she wouldn’t want to see Gov. Phil Murphy win a second term, though she stopped short of endorsing him for the same.

“I think it’s always important for us to finish a first term before we even start talking about a second term, first and foremost,” Pou said. “That being said, I think there are more things that I agree with Gov. Murphy than I disagree, so I have no reason to think that I would not want to see him do a second term, so he’s my governor. He’s doing the job that he’s been elected to do even though there are a number of different differences that we all have.”

Murphy’s been in office for about a year and a half, so he still has more than two years before his seat comes up for a vote.

It’s not clear where Murphy will stand among legislators so far in the future.

Yesterday, his long-standing feud with legislative leaders took a downward turn.

Senate President Steve Sweeney attacked Murphy over what he called the governor’s budget “tantrums.”

Murphy has held a press conference every day since Monday. His tone has varied at those events, and while it has mostly been soft compared to the tone he adopted during last year’s budget negotiations, yesterday he said legislators were siding with millionaires, opioid manufacturers and the gun lobby over the state’s residents.

The conflict, though more than a spat, doesn’t quite rise to the level of New Jersey’s most notable feuds — no one has yet publicly pined to inflict violence on anyone else, something that wasn’t always true in the past.