On September 22, federal prosecutors filed an indictment against New Jersey senator Robert Menendez and his wife, Nadine, that read like a caricature of graft. The two were accused of accepting bribes from a stupefying cast of characters, including a halal-meat exporter and a Bergen County condo magnate, in exchange for political favors. According to the government, the scheme involved envelopes stuffed with cash, a no-show job for Nadine, and a sitting U.S. senator Googling “How much is one kilo of gold worth.”
The day after the indictment, Andy Kim, a Democratic congressman from the state, announced he was running for Menendez’s seat. Aaron Sorkin and the writers of The West Wing could not have crafted a character as menschy and public-service oriented. Kim is a Rhodes scholar who ran point on ISIS counterterrorism in the Obama White House and flipped a pro-Trump congressional district in 2018. After the January 6 riots, he literally cleaned up the Capitol Rotunda, garbage bag in hand. And yet in the weeks following his announcement, Kim wasn’t endorsed by a single major Democrat in New Jersey. This wasn’t out of loyalty to Menendez, who has pleaded not guilty and is refusing to step down. Rather, everyone was waiting for a different candidate to declare, someone whose interest in the seat was an open secret: the First Lady of New Jersey.
Tammy Murphy has never held elected office. Until 2015, she was a registered Republican. She lacks populist bona fides: Like her husband, Governor Phil Murphy, she began her career at Goldman Sachs, and the two are said to have a net worth in the nine figures, with a mansion in beachy Middletown and a 23.5-room villa in Umbria. Yet immediately after she announced her candidacy on November 15, New Jersey’s entire Democratic Establishment — mayors, legislators, party chairs — coalesced behind her. Of the state’s nine Democratic representatives in Washington, six endorsed her. Among the remaining three, one is staying neutral, one is Menendez’s son, and one is Andy Kim.
A Murphy win would create a virtually unprecedented scenario: a spouse of a sitting governor elected to the U.S. Senate. Yet it would be reckless for anyone in New Jersey politics to antagonize the Murphys. They’re excellent fundraisers, and it is hard to find a local Democrat who couldn’t use the help of Governor Murphy and a future Senator Murphy — and maybe down the line a Murphy in the Cabinet or even the White House. Tammy Murphy should have a monstrous advantage in the June primary thanks to money and name recognition — the kind of edge last glimpsed in 2000, when Hillary Clinton ran for Senate in New York in the waning months of her husband’s presidency. She stands to get an even greater boost from New Jersey’s powerful county bosses, who design ballots and therefore can sway elections and who in turn profit from the goodwill of the governor.
Local press coverage of Tammy Murphy’s candidacy has been jaundiced, and Democrats across the state have been moaning about her undeserved advantages. But only anonymously. One elected official tells me, “Do I think she’s the best candidate? No. Do I think it’s a good look for New Jersey? No. If you’re asking me am I going to vote for her? The answer is no.” This is a person who has publicly endorsed her.
For someone who has never run for office, Murphy gives a perfectly competent diner interview. It’s late December and she’s sitting in a booth at Tops, a once-blue-collar eatery in East Newark that was recently gussied up in Art Deco style. She orders a salad and an iced tea and studiously avoids reacting to the prominent tattoo of an AR-15 on the arm of our waitress, who seems to have recognized the First Lady and starts to check in so often the ink has become impossible to ignore. “Welcome to New Jersey,” Murphy says, shrugging.
Murphy, 58, is easy to talk to, businesslike but engaging. Where Phil is a lanky backslapper prone to corny sports metaphors, she is a more controlled presence and droll in a practiced, country-club kind of way. She jokes, deadpan, that her purple Theory suit is a gift from her “first husband.” (Phil is her only husband.) The Murphys and their four adult children will soon travel to Costa Rica for Christmas. Tammy says she bought Phil, once the president of Harvard’s Hasty Pudding theater society, My Name Is Barbra, Barbra Streisand’s 992-page autobiography. (Phil would give her Desk 88: Eight Progressive Senators Who Changed America, by Ohio senator Sherrod Brown.)
Given her lack of a political record, Murphy’s beliefs on many issues are unknown. I ask her to name some ideological disagreements she has with Phil, who ran for office in 2017 as an arch-liberal, while she once gave $50,000 to the Republican National Committee. “It’s a lot easier to tell you what we agree on,” she says. “He was raised as a Catholic; I was not. He would call his family working poor, and mine was not. But we both really feel strongly about the promise of the American Dream and how that’s really been lost. And that, I think, is probably the reason why I’m sitting across the table from you: because I fear for the next generation and all those who come after.” Essentially in the middle of a stump speech now, she continues, “Most people in the next generation worry about where they can go to college, worry about if they can get health care, worry about if they can find housing.”
The further Murphy gets from domestic topics, the more specific and sometimes surprising her answers become. What’s her position on the Ukraine-border deal that’s lurching through Congress? She advocates for dollars to flow to Kiev immediately and then something middle of the road on immigration, perhaps involving the toughening of asylum laws but citizenship for Dreamers. Would she opine on the war in Gaza? Here too she follows the main Democratic line, expressing staunch support for Israel and a two-state solution with reservations about extreme elements of the Israeli right. (Murphy, whose late father was Jewish, says she has visited the country nine times.) She also floats a theory about the war, drawing on the years she lived abroad when Phil served as President Obama’s ambassador to Germany: “In my opinion, there’s about four really bad actors in the world” — Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea — “and this whole thing was instigated as a proxy war in order to distract the West, in order to make sure we weren’t able to focus on Ukraine.”
Murphy is a vocal environmentalist, but she parries a question about whether she supports her husband’s lawsuit against New York City’s congestion-pricing scheme, saying the plan will just move existing traffic around. Would she abolish the Senate filibuster? “I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t given it a lot of thought other than I hate it when I watch it.” Should Democratic voters be concerned about her GOP past? She says she inherited the moderate Republicanism of her parents and has long been passionate about liberal priorities such as reproductive freedom, gun safety, and education. “I have given more money to Democrats than I ever have to Republicans,” she says, “and I have not voted for a Republican in a general election in two decades.”
Bad answer, good answer — it probably doesn’t matter. Murphy’s most telling response isn’t about the issues at all. As we wrap up lunch, I ask what the rest of her day looks like. “Bunch of Zooms, fundraising,” she says. Because she delayed her entry into the race until after New Jersey’s off-year elections in November, she says, she had less time to rack up big fundraising numbers before a December 31 deadline. “Once I figured out I was going to be a declared candidate, I had to have a perfect launch. Perfect rolling endorsements. I had to have great fundraising. And all that had to happen after the last election,” she says. “Which gave me less than six weeks to raise for an entire quarter — including Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve.”
There, laid out with admirable frankness, is what this race is about: cash, optics, the unusually exposed guts of one state’s party machinery. If Tammy Murphy faces trouble with voters, it will not be over policy — there’s not much daylight between her and Kim — but over the specter of nepotism, especially in a battle to replace a man widely viewed as corrupt. In a hypernationalized and, lately, internationalized political environment (see your local council’s cease-fire resolution), there is something perversely refreshing about a high-stakes election defined instead by family ambition and parochial power plays. This is insider politics at its most brazen. Murphy will probably be New Jersey’s next senator because she is married to its current governor.
Tammy and Phil Murphy have long billed themselves as a tandem. She was raised in Virginia Beach, where her father and mother (a British expat and former model) ran a car-dealership empire. She graduated from the University of Virginia in 1987, spent a few years at Goldman Sachs in New York, then moved to London to work at Smith Barney and Investcorp. Murphy was at that last firm, a Bahraini leveraged-buyout specialist, when it acquired Gucci. Murphy says she became friendly with chairman Maurizio Gucci — “Which leathers do you like best?” he would ask her — before his ex-wife had him killed in a murder-for-hire plot. Murphy also got to know Tom Ford, then the creative director of Gucci, who she says confided in her about almost leaving the fashion house before what would be a legendary runway show in Milan. “I woke up in December to a fax from Tom, who said he’d just seen his astrologer the night before,” Murphy recalls. “And the astrologer told him he couldn’t leave Gucci — that something big was going to happen if he stayed.”
In 1994, she began dating Phil, a loose acquaintance who was running Goldman’s Frankfurt office and would next lead its Asia operations out of Hong Kong. They got engaged after just 18 days and were married within six months. Eventually, they moved to New Jersey, settling down in a riverside estate not far from Jon Bon Jovi’s, where Tammy raised the children and embarked on a second career as a prolific supporter of political and philanthropic causes. She sat on the boards of Rumson Country Day School, which her children attended; Phillips Academy, which they also attended; UVA; and an Al Gore nonprofit called the Climate Reality Project, all of which the Murphys furnished with six-figure donations. She also began cutting checks to politicians in and outside New Jersey: Republicans at first, then mostly Democrats — including Andy Kim, twice. Since 2000, she has contributed to some 300 candidates and committees, according to state and federal records.
In 2006, Phil retired from Goldman and became the finance chair of the Democratic National Committee. The gobs of money he raised paved the way for his ambassadorship to Germany in 2009. The Murphys returned from Berlin in 2013, not intending to stay idle. “They had a company even before they got back from Germany called Murphy Endeavors,” says an early ally, describing an LLC the couple sometimes listed when making donations. “Nobody really understood what Murphy Endeavors was, except the endeavor of the Murphys.”
That fall, they scheduled a meeting at the Ritz-Carlton in lower Manhattan with a veteran New Jersey political operative named Julie Roginsky to lay the groundwork for a gubernatorial run. Roginsky had worked for Jon Corzine in the Senate and was wary of taking on another politically inexperienced Goldmanite. But Phil — a deal guy, not a trader — blew her away with his pitch. Phil said that he and Tammy would do everything together, running their campaign as an extension of their tight-knit family unit. “He always referred to himself as ‘we,’” Roginsky recalls. (She would later break from the Murphys in bitter fashion.)
The next election wasn’t for another four years, but the Murphys thought Chris Christie might leave office early to run for president and didn’t want to be caught unprepared. In the spring of 2014, Phil sent an email to White House counselor John Podesta. “We are likely to establish a policy-oriented c4 aimed at growing the NJ economy from $500 to $600 billion in 5 years,” he wrote. “We are hoping that a platform like this will give us visibility, credentials, etc.” This would become a tax-exempt dark-money “issue advocacy” group called New Start New Jersey, chaired by Tammy, whom Phil would call his “de facto finance chair.”
At the end of 2014, the Murphys mass-mailed a family Christmas card announcing their keen interest in the governorship. “We say ‘we’ because for us, leadership and public service are team sports,” they wrote. “When we are in, we are all in.” The card disclosed a staggering range of plutocratic exploits, such as traveling to “Berlin, Italy, England, Lisbon, the Caribbean, Utah, Florida, and to Virginia and Massachusetts” as well as watching the World Cup “from New Jersey and Europe” — a level of jet-setting that offended a number of minivan-driving New Jersey commentators.
Phil spent more than $20 million of the family’s money in the course of winning the 2017 governor’s race. After the election, for a function at their home, the Murphys sent legislators invitations that mislabeled Tammy as “the First Lady–elect,” even though she had not been on the ballot. That set the tone for the years to follow, in which Tammy made good on the Murphy Christmas card’s promise of an administration in the first-person plural.
There’s nothing prohibiting the First Lady, who doesn’t take a salary, from getting neck deep in state politics. It just hadn’t really been done before. Tammy secured an office next to Phil’s and, in the administration’s first pseudo-scandal, incurred a $13,000 bill by installing a door for it. At least among their nemeses, the impression stuck that the Murphys operated via aristocratic fiat. “He thinks he’s the king of England, and Mrs. thinks she’s the queen of England,” South Jersey political boss George Norcross complained in 2019 after the Murphy administration began investigating lucrative tax breaks flowing his way.
A political adviser in Trenton tells me that early on, during a negotiation on an energy bill that would subsidize a nuclear plant, he was told that one of the Murphys wanted to tack on provisions for solar energy, while the other was pushing for wind. “Like, What?” the adviser says. “You didn’t hear shit like that. The House, the Senate, the governor, and the First Lady are independent bargaining entities on a piece of legislation?”
Still, this was New Jersey, which from Abscam to Bridgegate has hardly been the land of good government, and Tammy’s extraconstitutional activities didn’t qualify as particularly outrageous. If anything, given that she was pushing for liberal priorities, they earned her some respect. And if a cursory impression of Murphy’s Senate race suggests she’s a lightweight riding her husband’s coattails, many in Trenton would flip the image, portraying Phil as the happy-go-lucky charmer and Murphy as the disciplined grinder. “He’s feckless but a glad-hander,” says one veteran Democratic political operative. “She’s the opposite of a glad-hander but not feckless.”
Tammy has carved out legislative priorities, largely around improving the state’s abysmal record on infant and maternal health and implementing climate-change curricula in public schools — something New Jersey has become the first state to mandate. But her centrality to the Murphy political apparatus has also made her a useful asset for those who need something from the governor. State Senator Raj Mukherji, who represents Hudson County, says Tammy was crucial in pressing the administration to appropriate a $10 million lifeline last summer for New Jersey City University, a public institution in fiscal crisis. “She gets involved in brokering better language than perhaps agencies in the executive branch are willing to agree with,” Mukherji says. “I deal with staff, I deal with Cabinet members, but when I don’t want to risk it falling through the cracks, when I don’t have time to explain it to seven different people, I go to Tammy.”
Two years ago, as rumors floated that Phil Murphy might run for president if Joe Biden passed on a second term, Tammy became chair of a new dark-money group called Stronger Fairer Forward, created to tout aspects of Phil’s record, such as his millionaire surtax and his increase of school funding. The Murphys have refused to release the names of its benefactors, but last year the Bergen Record figured out via IRS filings that large donors to the group included the International Longshoremen’s Association and the New Jersey Education Association, the latter of which had already given millions to Phil Murphy through other channels. Both unions have benefited under the Murphy administration. The state, for instance, recently pulled out of a 70-year watchdog entity called the Waterfront Commission, originally designed to root out Mafia influence at the ports, calling its oversight burdensome to dockworkers.
After Stronger Fairer Forward’s formation, Politico created a tracker counting the days since the Murphys refused to reveal its donors, while New Jersey’s Star-Ledger speculated about the potential it created for influence peddling. “If they’re going to hide these secrets,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote, “then it’s fair to ask: Does money from the state’s powerful teachers union, the NJEA, explain the Murphy administration blocking the expansion of popular charter schools that were rated as top performers by his own Department of Education?” When I ask Tammy if the group will reconsider making its contributors public, she says, “We said to the donors that we were not going to release their names,” adding, “We agreed up front how we were going to operate. It was within the law. And if the law was different, we would operate differently.”
Tammy stepped down from Stronger Fairer Forward before running for Senate, but Murphy, Inc., remains a joint enterprise. Tammy’s communications director, Alexandra Altman, moved over from the statehouse, where she worked as the governor’s deputy communications director. Tammy’s campaign manager, Max Glass, is the husband of Phil’s 2021 campaign manager, Mollie Binotto. The super-PAC supporting Tammy’s campaign, Garden State Integrity, is run by Phil’s former deputy chief of staff Joe Kelley, a Murphy-appointed Port Authority commissioner who recently ran a consulting shop with Phil’s former press secretary Dan Bryan, who is now Tammy’s lead campaign strategist and the executive director of Stronger Fairer Forward, which remains active.
One Friday in January, I join Murphy in the back seat of a government Chevy Suburban. Her laptop is propped up on a portable desk, and she is mid-Zoom with her chief of staff and two lawyers, one of whom represents an A-list, Jersey-born star. Murphy wants to rename a rest stop on the Garden State Parkway in the star’s honor, part of a celebrity-tourism initiative, but the lawyer is inexplicably resistant. Murphy speaks calmly but impatiently: “Phil and I, I can tell you, are huge fans, as is our entire family, and we would wear it as a badge of honor if this did happen. Saying that — we are at the bottom of the ninth.”
She briefly pauses to take a call from one of her sons, then resumes. “Jon Bon Jovi, you know, Judy Blume — all of these celebrities have agreed to the terms that the state has put forward,” she says before delivering an ultimatum. “This is the last chance. If we get off this phone call and we do not have a deal, then, heartbreakingly, we’re going to have to move on.” Murphy closes her computer, and the Zoom continues without her. “I’ve been going back and forth with this lawyer for six months now,” she says. “Not happy with him.”
Murphy had invited me to observe her for a day of various appointments involving her core initiatives as First Lady, including a visit to a high-school art class incorporating climate change and a briefing on a program guaranteeing new mothers free home-nurse visitation that she shepherded into law. She also makes a campaign stop at a diner in Bordentown to meet with a pastor named Keith Davis and his brother-in-law, Amir Khan, an activist and political gadfly. Both work in Camden, the impoverished South Jersey city, and Murphy wants their help meeting voters.
Murphy makes her pitch, discussing the racial prejudices that underscore New Jersey’s elevated maternal-mortality rates and her efforts to reverse the trend. Khan says he’s with her “1,000 percent.” Why wouldn’t he be? There is only upside in helping the campaign of the wife of the governor. Khan notes that Davis runs a nonprofit providing incarcerated people with technology training. “Keith is able to do all this grassroots, bare budget,” Khan says. “Imagine if we had somebody representing us down in Washington, bringing true dollars in.” Murphy says she’d like to connect Davis with the head of the state’s Economic Development Authority. Davis says he’d love to have a relationship with the AI hub the state is building with Princeton University, which Phil announced two weeks earlier.
“If you know anyone on that, that would be fantastic,” he says.
“I do,” she replies. He concludes the meeting with a prayer for Murphy.
None of this is scandalous; the bar for rank transactionalism in New Jersey has been set much higher by Menendez, whom the government has accused of acting for the benefit of Egypt and Qatar. But the exchange captures a crucial dynamic in the race to replace him: Despite the fact that no New Jerseyan has ever cast a vote for her, Murphy can win by behaving like an incumbent, leveraging the possibility of access to officials, programs, and funds.
Consider the support she has drawn from the state’s county-party chairs. They are unusually important because they control where candidates show up on the ballot. This year, for example, whichever candidate gets the so-called line in a given county will appear in a row or column next to President Biden, while the candidates who don’t will appear off in ballot Siberia, perhaps out of view of the average low-information voter. A study published last year in a Seton Hall University journal found that the line alone confers a 38-point advantage among candidates for the U.S. Congress.
It is hard to disentangle the chairs’ endorsements of Murphy from the business they conduct before her husband, who will preside over two more state budgets. LeRoy J. Jones, the chair of the state Democratic Party, as well as Essex County’s party chair, is a lobbyist. Paul Juliano, Democratic chair of Bergen County, has a six-figure state job with the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, the entity that runs the Meadowlands. Tammy is all but certain to have the line in those counties and more, including Camden, despite the administration’s old feud with Norcross, who chairs a hospital that receives tens of millions a year in state funds. The line is so powerful it can subvert ordinary political hierarchies, such that veteran lawmakers become slavishly indebted to little-known county hacks. When the Daily Beast asked Bill Pascrell why he endorsed Murphy, the 87-year-old U.S. congressman replied, “Do I fight my county chairman?”
The mood in Trenton is largely one of resignation. “I’m not pretending to be in touch with real-life people, but in terms of political people, there is no enthusiasm for her,” says a Democratic consultant not working for Murphy or Kim. And yet political cynicism is so entrenched in New Jersey that one of the Murphy side’s main knocks against Kim is that he hasn’t mastered the game, that he isn’t a committed schmoozer. Her backers portray him as preferring to remain in Washington or cloistered in his district, while Murphy traverses the Turnpike. “She’s hauled up and down the state,” says Congressman Josh Gottheimer. “Last year, we were in Englewood, packing food for those in need in the community at a Baptist church. I saw her last week — she was in Glen Rock helping swear in an all-female mayor and council.” (Many assume Gottheimer will run for governor next year, along with fellow U.S. representative Mikie Sherrill, who has also endorsed Murphy.)
It’s an assessment I heard across the state, including from critics of the First Lady. “To her credit, she has actually built some relationships. Andy Kim has not at all,” says one Murphy-skeptical Democratic insider. Another Democratic campaign operative says, “Andy plays at 35,000 feet. Tammy hustles. She gets out there. She goes out to local beef-and-beers.” Richard J. Codey, the former governor and an outgoing state senator, says of Kim, “I can’t say one word negative against him. I just don’t know the gentleman.”
Murphy may even benefit from portrayals of her as a member of the Democratic machine because they rebut the idea that she is a crypto-Republican. Phil has twice chaired the Democratic Governors Association, whose executive director, Meghan Meehan-Draper, gushes about Tammy’s fundraising prowess and love for the party. When Phil took office, one of Tammy’s aides points out, the state party was fractured and considered weak, symbolized by a crumbling headquarters. Tammy helped shore the organization up. “I’m honored by the fact that people who’ve spent decades building up the Democratic Party in New Jersey are leaning in to help me and support me,” she says. “But it didn’t happen by coincidence. I had been working with the state party for years.” She adds, “This is my third statewide campaign. It’s Andy’s first. I would say he’s been very focused on a small sliver and he doesn’t know the state like I do.” To be clear, it’s the first statewide campaign for each.
In any case, New Jersey voters may have simply become inured to the concept of nepotism. The state’s congressional delegation already features four such cases, including Menendez fils; Donald Payne Jr., whose father served 12 terms in the House; Tom Kean Jr., whose father was governor; and Donald Norcross, George’s brother. Still, given the gold-ingot tier of alleged corruption that enabled her run, I ask Murphy if she is really the right candidate for the moment.
“Yes, I am, on so many levels,” she says. “I would also say to you that Rob Menendez, his son, is somebody I like. I went out and supported him when he was running. He’s a really earnest, hardworking, smart person.” She continues, “Dynasties, whatever you want to call them — I don’t view us as a dynasty. I view us as people who really, genuinely want to help.”
The general election in November is expected to be a cakewalk for Democrats. New Jersey hasn’t sent a Republican to the Senate since 1972, and Menendez won his last election by 11 points — after getting indicted for the first time (there was a mistrial) and formally reprimanded by an ethics committee. A high-profile conservative could always enter the race, but for now, the presumed Republican front-runner is Mendham Township mayor Christine Serrano Glassner, who calls Murphy “Bougie Tammy.” U.S. representative Jeff Van Drew is also said to be considering a bid.
The line notwithstanding, it’s possible that Murphy could lose the primary. On January 18, Kim scored a major coup when Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania endorsed him. Fetterman has been Menendez’s harshest critic in Washington, and he isn’t much gentler on Murphy. “New Jersey has the luxury of a choice between what kind of Democratic senator we want,” he tells me. “You have someone like Representative Kim, or you have the nepo candidate with a history of being a registered Republican.” Murphy, he adds, is running because of “who she happens to be married to and is hoping that she will leverage those connections to achieve a special position on the ballot. I still can’t believe how that even exists.”
When I meet with Kim — first at a fundraiser at a supporter’s home, then at a greasy spoon — he’s more understated than Fetterman in his critique, his tone closer to mild incredulity. “The idea that two of New Jersey’s three statewide positions would be husband and wife — that’s something never before seen in American politics,” he says. “I think it makes a lot of people in the state uncomfortable. Especially in the aftermath of Menendez. There’s this question of ‘What lesson is New Jersey going to learn from this?’” Kim also presses the contrast between his years of Democratic service and Murphy’s past support for the GOP. “As someone who worked in the Obama White House in 2013 and 2014, around the time that she was still a Republican, it’s a concern to me,” he says. “I don’t actually know what her positions are.” Before running Iraq policy at the National Security Council, Kim worked as a civilian military adviser in Afghanistan. “With all the craziness happening in the world right now — the war in Europe, the war in the Middle East — I think people recognize it’s important to have some experience.”
There is no independent polling of the contest so far, only internal surveys from Kim’s campaign. They were conducted last year and have him in front, 45 to 22, with about half of respondents saying they didn’t have an opinion on either candidate. (Bob Menendez clocked in at 4 percent.) Still, few are predicting a Kim victory, and Murphy’s inner circle is projecting confidence. “The campaign’s paid-communications effort will be far more focused on a proactive, positive message” than on Kim, says one of her advisers. Murphy’s first campaign video highlights her role as a woman on Wall Street in a male-dominated era; she frequently cites her work on maternal health and points out she would become the state’s first female senator.
Her campaign may also be vulnerable on women’s issues. Last January, a state trooper named Claire Krauchuk was assigned to the governor’s detail, monitoring security footage from a trailer on the Murphys’ property. Krauchuk had recently given birth and was pumping breast milk in the trailer, whose bathroom she called fetid. Krauchuk says she asked her superior to ask Tammy Murphy if she could pump in the property’s carriage house. According to a lawsuit she and three other female troopers filed against the state police, Krauchuk’s supervisor reported back that Murphy denied the request “because of optics” involving “guests who may be on the premises.”
When I ask Murphy about the suit, she says she can’t comment fully on the litigation, even though it was not filed against her or her husband. But she does say, “Anybody who should imply that I would be in any way, shape, or form discriminatory or not allow a woman to have all the benefits she needs after having delivered a baby or during pregnancy — it’s flat-out wrong.”
A number of other local controversies have dogged the Murphys. In 2018, the soccer website the Equalizer reported that a professional women’s team the couple co-owned with the former CEO of Bed Bath & Beyond lived and trained in squalor. The practice facility had no locker room or running water, and players were put up in horrific rental apartments, some of which had plastic sheets in lieu of windows. A subsequent report found that the team had once fired its coach for infractions including “verbal and emotional abuse” and kept it quiet, writing instead in a press release that the reasons for the departure were “mutual.”
Phil has told reporters Tammy is a “big passionate soccer fan” and that “we poured our hearts and resources into this.” Tammy tells me, “I was never involved in the team.” She says she was unaware of the players’ conditions and the allegations of abuse, framing her and her husband’s ownership as a kind of passive investment. After the Equalizer’s report, Tammy took a more active role in the team, renaming it Gotham FC and moving the players to Red Bull Arena in Harrison, commencing a turnaround that culminated in last season’s National Women’s Soccer League championship.
Arguably the biggest scandal of the Murphy era dates to the 2017 campaign, which faced allegations of sexist behavior and abuse. Roginsky, Murphy’s early campaign consultant, says she was fired after complaining about a colleague who referred to her by a sexual epithet, among other allegations of fratty inappropriateness. (Other Murphy staffers say she left because she lost an internal power struggle.) At the same time, a Murphy campaign volunteer named Katie Brennan alleged that a campaign staffer had sexually assaulted her in her Jersey City apartment. Prosecutors declined to press charges. Brennan raised the matter with members of the Murphy administration and emailed Phil and Tammy, asking to meet about a “sensitive matter.” She didn’t get into specifics, and the meeting took place with a lawyer, not the Murphys.
Eventually, after Brennan took her story to The Wall Street Journal, the man was fired and the legislature conducted hearings. Brennan, who would later work in New York governor Kathy Hochul’s administration, settled out of court with the State of New Jersey and the Murphy campaign for $1 million, which she donated. The Murphys have said they did not know of Brennan’s allegations until they were contacted by the Journal. “I apologize to her,” Tammy says. “I feel badly for her because yours truly was sexually assaulted. I had to go to court, and I know exactly how that feels. I get it. Again, though, we are forward-looking, and we pick up the pieces and figure out how to make 1,000 percent certain that we never are replicating something that’s hurtful or in any way disrespectful. And it’s one of the many reasons why our campaigns are best in class.”
Whatever Murphy’s vulnerabilities on women’s issues, she says her own gender has colored the criticism of her candidacy. At a recent event, Murphy argued that if her name were “Tommy” Murphy, people wouldn’t be questioning her credentials. It’s a tough hypothetical to test since New Jersey has only ever had one First Gentleman and he didn’t run for Senate while his spouse was governor. But there’s something to the Tommy argument. New Jersey has a rich history of male nepotism cases and underqualified men in office in general. Bill Bradley won his Senate seat at the age of 35, having not held a job besides basketball player. Frank Lautenberg was the CEO of a data-processing company and an appointed Port Authority commissioner. Corzine and Phil Murphy effectively bought their seats with Goldman money. Tammy Murphy is arguably more qualified than Phil was when he ran for governor, given her six years as a shadow macher to his zero.
“She wasn’t just this woman elevated by her husband,” says a prominent consultant. “She put herself in that position.” As a matter of Realpolitik, there is an argument that if Tammy shrewdly grabbed the inside track, the fault wasn’t hers but that of the system she was working within. In any event, she is nothing like a Lurleen Wallace, the apolitical homemaker whom George Wallace, the term-limited governor of Alabama, famously propped up to run as his surrogate in 1966; or Elaine Edwards, briefly appointed to the Senate by her husband, Edwin, the governor of Louisiana, in 1972; or the eight widows who have been appointed to or otherwise filled their dead husbands’ Senate seats over the years. The possibility of a governor-senator power couple on the Acela corridor has come up so suddenly, and so unprecedentedly, that national Democrats are still searching for ways to put it in context — or to predict what the Murphys might do with their combined heft.
The high-dollar consultant set is not troubled by the prospect. “So what?” is the assessment of Joel Benenson, who worked as a strategist for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. “Precedents are meant to be broken. Before Barack Obama, no Black person had ever been elected president before. Don’t get locked into the past.” Veteran Democratic hand Bob Shrum thinks back to his time working for Edward Kennedy. “In some ways, the most obvious comparison would be JFK as president with Teddy getting elected to the Senate in 1962,” he says. Robert Kennedy was also serving as attorney general. “You know, for Massachusetts and the country, I would argue, that worked out rather well,” he adds.
With respect to previous husband-and-wife tandems, the Clintons make an inexact comparison: Hillary moved to a new state to run for Senate and was sworn in just a short time before Bill left the White House. (In that 2000 race, Murphy contributed to Hillary’s GOP opponent, Rick Lazio.) Olympia Snowe’s situation is closer to the mark. She ran for Senate in Maine during the last year of her husband’s governorship, but they overlapped for only two days in 1995, and she had been a U.S. congresswoman since before they married.
The dynamic of a possible Murphy mini-dynasty may also shift based on the outcome of the presidential election. In a second Biden term, Phil would make a natural pick for Cabinet secretary. There is some precedent there: Elizabeth Dole served as secretary of Transportation and secretary of Labor while her husband, Bob, was a senator. Donald Trump’s secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao, was confirmed by a Senate led by her husband, Mitch McConnell. “I feel a little bit like Nathan Hale,” McConnell said during her hearing, repeating a Dole joke. “‘I regret that I have but one wife to give for my country.’”
Phil’s national aspirations have been well publicized, but Tammy demurs when I ask how her potential senatorship might play in a 2028 Phil Murphy presidential run. She prefers to focus on her own priorities for the Senate. “I’m going to stand up for what’s right. I’m going to take on the extremists who are trying to deny abortion rights and voting rights, but abortion rights specifically. It’s appalling to me that my daughter, your daughter, should have fewer rights than I had,” she says. “I really would like the chance to continue to work on the environment. I want to work on gun safety. I just don’t think we’re attacking in the right way. I think we need to shift the conversation. It’s a health epidemic.”
In New Jersey, Democrats have controlled all branches of government since the conclusion of the Christie administration. I ask how she would tackle gridlock in Washington. “I’m pretty tenacious,” she says. “At the end of the day, I will figure out a way to win that person over.” She adds, “I get shit done. I go into the houses that are on fire. Gotham FC was on fire, if you want to put it that way.”
Still, she says, there are some lines she’s not willing to cross in order to get results. At one point, I ask if she would consider self-funding her candidacy, as her husband did in 2017. “That is absolutely not my intention, and I intend to get every single vote that I win by bringing people together and by showing leadership,” she says. “Given what happened with Senator Menendez, I think we really need a democratic election.”
Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 29, 2024, issue of New York Magazine.
Want more stories like this one? Subscribe now to support our journalism and get unlimited access to our coverage. If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 29, 2024, issue of New York Magazine.
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