Democrat Phil Murphy, the former U.S. ambassador to Germany, won the New Jersey gubernatorial election Tuesday, defeating Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno in the contest to replace Gov. Chris Christie after his two-term roller coaster in office.
Murphy led in the polls and never looked back after winning the Democratic nomination in early June. A former Goldman Sachs executive, Murphy ran on a liberal agenda, pledging to increase spending for public schools and to fund teacher pensions in the state despite fiscal woes across the board.
Heading into Election Day, Murphy led by 14.4 points, according to the final RealClearPolitics average of polls. The race really heated up in the final weeks when Murphy brought out many of the big guns in the Democratic Party to the Garden State to stump for him, including former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, former Vice President Joe Biden, and former Attorney General Eric Holder.
Meanwhile, Guadagno had difficulty breaking through with the electorate, largely due to Christie, who has seen his approval rating plummet to around 15 percent. His image in New Jersey was tarnished by the Bridgegate scandal, in which he is said to have punished a political opponent by closing down lanes of traffic, and his 2016 Republican presidential campaign, which caused him to spend most of his time out of the state. The final straw may have been images that surfaced of him sitting on a public beach that was closed to everyone else over the July 4th weekend.
Nevertheless, Guadagno tried consistently to distance herself from the two-term governor and even tried to tie Murphy to Christie’s decision to raise the gas tax in October 2016. Guadagno opposed the tax increase.
“Anybody who knows me knows I’m not Chris Christie,” Guadagno said during the second gubernatorial debate last month.
While Christie supported Guadagno, he was largely invisible during the campaign and didn’t appear with her at any events. She also did not have the outside support that Murphy received, as she was not endorsed by either President Trump or Vice President Pence. Their public support probably would not have helped her much in the blue state.
Throughout the final months, Guadagno made two issues the hallmark of her campaign: a promise to lower sky-high property taxes and to crack down on illegal immigration and ban sanctuary cities (jurisdictions that don’t fully cooperate with federal immigration enforcement). Murphy had vowed to make New Jersey a sanctuary state.
Christie was always an obstacle, however. Even on Election Day, Guadagno was overshadowed by Christie after he got into a minute-long back-and-forth with a voter while leaving his polling location and speaking with the media.
