New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy has won reelection, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli in a closer-than-expected race in which the Democrat actually trailed during most of the early vote count
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy won reelection Tuesday, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli in a closer-than-expected race that stunned unprepared Democrats and took more than a day to decide.
Murphy, 64, a progressive who ran on his record of handling the pandemic, gradually raising the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour and increasing taxes on millionaires, defeated a former three-term member of the state Legislature. Much of Murphy’s campaign focused on tying Ciattarelli, the 59-year-old founder of a medical publishing company, to Trump.
In New Jersey, Democrats had benefited from the unpopularity of former Republican Gov. Chris Christie and former President Donald Trump to turn once-solid GOP suburbs blue, saw their voter registration advantage over Republicans soar to more than a million and grew their state legislative majorities.
Ciattarelli largely eschewed campaigning with his party’s national notables. Instead, he focused on hitting Murphy on New Jersey’s consistently highest-in-the-nation property taxes, a spike in gun violence and a high death toll in nursing homes early in the pandemic. Voters have been willing to cast their lot with Republicans in New Jersey’s odd-year elections, which were designed specifically to separate state and national politics. But national issues, which had already been creeping into the races, came to the fore in the Trump era.