NJ-SEN 2024: Draggin' The Line (3/24: Murphy OUT)

[S019]

None during a Presidential year

Not even if DeSantis holds Biden to 10 points in NJ and makes inroads in Bergen/Passaic/South Jersey?

Nope.

Don't forget in certain states voters expect their elected representatives to be crooks and are fine with it.

Torricelli was ethically smart to retire, Doug Forrester was beating him all summer 2002.....Menendez is too egotistical to step down, Torricelli had more class.

Of course the so-called New Jersey expert totally ignores that NJ had actually had a competitive Senate race in 2000 and the path for a Republican victory existed in 2002. It doesn't really anymore, now I suppose if Menendez ran for re-election while being on trial or something it could move to Lean D, but that'd be it, and also good luck convincing all those Biden voters to split their tickets with things like abortion rights at stake. What Republicans actually need is for 2024 to be a red tsunami (like 2014 style), otherwise it just is not happening. Also closer to home, Democrats lost the popular vote here in Morris County by literally 40 votes. Republicans need to much better in places like here to win this state and frankly I'm not convinced they've actually done anything to indicate they want to win our votes or intend on doing so. I'm starting this at Likely D out of an abundance of caution, but actually putting together the coalition to win here is going to be very hard for Republicans.

[S019]

Well that ended quickly. I wonder what made Norcross jump ship given it was heavily implied Kim was running with the backing of Southern machines.

Just absolutely ridiculous. Kim has actually put in the work to be elevated to senator. Murphy hasn't done any of the actual work to deserve this.

This isn’t true, he declared assuming he had the support of southern machines, he wouldn’t have run otherwise. Anyways I think Murphy will be a good Senator for us and I look forward to voting for her next fall.

[S019]

Is this where I say “I told you so”?

Likely Murphy. Welcome to New Jersey.

I am surprised Norcross flipped but I thought Kim was going to have an uphill battle anyways because North Jersey opposed him and is the more populous part of the state. As for Murphy, I don’t care if she’s coronated because she’s the Governor’s wife, I just want good governance in Congress and I have seen good governance thus far from the Governor. The main factor in my support is foreign policy though, Kim has notoriously been soft on Iran, and that’s not acceptable for me.

[S019]

Lisa McCormick got 38% and no county lines. Kim is a much better candidate and will get at least a couple.

Bob Menendez was incredibly controversial in the way that Murphy isn't. It's not even like the Governor is unpopular. I think people's hatred of political machines or maybe just of New Jersey is clouding their analysis here. Murphy can lose sure, but she has an endorsements advantage, an infrastructure advantage, and as a result, a likely funding advantage. In a state as expensive as New Jersey, I think it is going to be hard for Kim to make the argument about why he should receive millions of dollars in donations in a safe state race. (You already see this in CA where other than Schiff (who has the type of national press a national Rep can only dream of) and Porter (who has already had to raise lots of money from being in a swing seat race for many years in an expensive district and also appears quite a lot on media), candidates have struggled to fundraise. Sure Kim has been in a swing seat before, but he is not on national media a lot, and this is going to hurt him among the type of donor base he needs to even get the funds to be viable. Even then, I'm not sure it'll be enough because there's almost no way I see him making inroads in the ethnic machine counties in the Northeast which are heavily populated (even more so in a Democratic primary). If Kim somehow wins it'll only be after wasting millions of dollars in a safe seat that could've gone elsewhere. If, as I expect, he loses, we will have wasted all this energy on a primary that didn't matter. The fact that Kim's only endorsements are from his own CD says a lot about both how people expect this to go and also that time is running out for him to drop down.

[S019]

It sounds too good to be true, but he's doing very well so far. Here's hoping

Well this was one of the easier endorsements for him to win. The big urban counties are still against him and they cast the most votes. Anyway, I do find it bizarre the level of emotion this primary has attracted, particularly some of the rhetoric towards Tammy Murphy, for instance some people just think she got where she was because she’s the Governor’s wife, ignoring that she had a very successful private sector career before that. I think people need to be careful about what attacks they exactly parrot because it’s at first glance easy to miss the insinuations in comments like that. The above post gets me in this regard because it seems to imply it’s wrong or at least abnormal to support Murphy, which isn’t really respectful to her voters.

[S019]

https://twitter.com/pocryphal/status/1768009372607676822?s=46

This is quite an immature position to take, and given none of the arguments provided for it have been all that good, I am going to choose to believe that Kim is just naive.

[S019]

It’s a bit rich to hear about bad faith attacks, when that’s frankly what this entire campaign has been. I have grown sick of it already, and also grown sick at the implicit assumptions that anyone who supports Murphy is a fake Democrat or whatever. I will be voting for her, and I wish people would actually listen to what she’s saying instead of just talking about her in the context of being The Line candidate.

[S019]

I don't think this needs to be said, but obviously conflating the county line with Donald Trump is both dangerous and a false-equivalency.