New Jersey First Lady Quits Senate Race

New Jersey First Lady Tammy Murphy announced today that she is ending her campaign for Senate.

That almost certainly clears the path for Rep. Andy Kim to become the Democratic nominee for the seat currently held by Sen. Bob Menendez. New Jersey isn’t quite in California sure-thing territory. But this makes it very likely that Kim will be elected to the Senate in November.

What makes this a bigger deal than just another primary in a fairly safe Democratic state is that it managed to bring to the fore an almost comical feature of New Jersey politics – something called ‘the line’, which allows county party chairs the ability to exercise an absurd power over the design of ballots to assist their chosen candidates. Machines have long half-lives. But it seems questionable whether the line will survive this race, whether it goes down in the current court fight or just can’t withstand the new scrutiny the race has brought to it. If it is done that will deal a pretty debilitating blow to the party machines in New Jersey.

The other thing to note here is Andy Kim. The New Jersey party machines have been around forever and the line is a staple of the politics of the state. This isn’t some out of the way rural state with no big media market. The state is cut roughly in half between the New York City and Philadelphia media markets. It gets a lot of attention.

And yet, it’s machine politics is an only lightly modernized version of a Boss Hogg type system.