Title: Ask Governor Murphy: June 2025 Recap

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As New York hits the peak of its mayoral primary season, New Jersey is now in general election season after last week's primary, with Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli competing to be the next governor. Let's talk New Jersey with WNYC's Nancy Solomon. Her Ask Governor Murphy series has just these few more months to run. We'll see if the next governor signs on to continue it. Of course, the Phil Murphy administration has just a few more months to run. The latest episode was last night.

We'll talk about that and about the race, which Nancy has stressed in her recent appearances here, could go either way, if history is a guide. By the way, Nancy is out with a new three-part podcast that we highly recommend, separate from Ask Governor Murphy. It's called Dead End: The Rise and Fall of Gold Bar Bob Menendez. As many of you know, the former disgraced senator began his prison sentence earlier this week. On the gubernatorial race, New Jersey has a history of electing both Democratic and Republican governors over the last 50 years, and they tend to go back and forth. We will start there and then continue into some Ask Governor Murphy clips from last night. Hey, Nancy.

Nancy: Hi, Brian.

Brian: As you know, the gubernatorial race came up in last night's discussion. It also came up on Morning Joe this morning on MSNBC as I was making my cable rounds. Mikie Sherrill, in particular, was being described as a candidate who was avoiding the temptation to talk Trump, Trump, Trump, and tying Ciattarelli to Trump, but rather focus on kitchen table issues, especially affordability. I wonder if that's also your impression. NJ.com has an article today about both of them addressing a meeting of business leaders.

It says both Sherrill and Ciattarelli have staked out affordability and jobs as top campaign talking points. It says they offered very different visions on how they would approach those issues. "Ciattarelli spoke of cutting the corporate tax rate and taxes for business income. He received rounds of applause for his tax cut plans from the business leaders and attendants," it says. The article says he also focused on energy policy, calling for a rational transition to possible energy sources of the future, which, by the way, did not include wind or solar power on his list of new technologies.

It says when Sherrill took the stage, she kept her focus on reducing red tape, housing costs, and making childcare more affordable. Do you have anything on their competing visions for affordability? We're going to play a clip of each in a minute. Is it the classic competition between Republican tax cuts versus Democratic subsidy programs, like on childcare?

Nancy: I guess I would say yes and no because I think, yes, it's the traditional dichotomy, because Ciattarelli is talking a lot about cutting taxes, and Mikie Sherrill isn't. I would say no, it's not like the past in that-- I think, especially from this talk that you just brought up, I think we're seeing Ciattarelli talk about cutting taxes in a different way than we've heard from Republicans before. They always talk about the only way to cut taxes is to cut the budget and cut services and reduce spending.

What he's saying is that we can't reduce our spending out of the high taxes, that that's not going to work. He talked about growing the economy to raise revenue. He talked about investing in New Jersey cities, because suburbs are never going to be a revenue-generating item for the state, but growth in the cities, economic growth would be. To me, that struck me as a different position. Yes, you're right, Mikie Sherrill is really sticking to her talking points around affordability. She's not talking about cutting taxes, which is pretty classic Democratic fare. I think it's at her peril. I really do. I feel like you have to address the high taxes in the state, or she's going to run into problems in November.

Brian: Although that might compete with the premise of the headline of that NJ.com article about their appearances before the business group. The headline was, "State faces a huge budget crisis in two years," which means their government would have a shortfall of tax revenue. Is that a prospect you're familiar with or widely seen as a threat?

Nancy: I can't say I'm super dug into the budget, but I can say that there was this federal infusion of dollars during COVID, and that has lasted a few years beyond COVID. There is concern about New Jersey hitting a fiscal cliff when all of that is gone. The governor says that he's leaving the budget in much better condition than he found it, that he funded the public employee pension fund, which was in crisis, and he created a rainy day emergency fund, basically a savings account. I don't feel written enough to weigh in on who's right, but I think that's the debate going on about the budget.

Brian: With Nancy Solomon after her Ask Governor Murphy call in last night, and talking about the gubernatorial race. Listeners, if you want to call and ask Nancy a question, we'll have time for some calls in this segment. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692, call or send a text. Everything we've discussed so far gives the impression of a locally focused race. Their victory speeches on primary night also included charges of each other's national parties becoming too extreme. Here's Jack Ciattarelli first.

Jack Ciattarelli: Let us unite.

[applause]

Jack Ciattarelli: As a party, it's time for us to now speak directly to the people of New Jersey, to independents and unaffiliated voters who may have lost faith in both political parties and wonder whether their vote even matters anymore to moderate Democrats who feel abandoned, alienated and ignored by an extreme and out of touch, ultra liberal Democratic Party in Trenton and Washington, DC, a Democratic Party more focused on pronouns than property taxes.

Brian: Explicitly trying to appeal there to independents and unaffiliated voters, who he named. He also said moderate Democrats who feel abandoned and alienated, but he also said this.

Jack Ciattarelli: To our most well-known part-time New Jersey resident, who honored me with his endorsement and strong support, thank you, President Donald J. Trump.

Brian: Here's Mikie Sherrill.

Mikie Sherrill: Why do we stand here in New Jersey, with the weight of the nation on our shoulders, with every eye in the country looking to us to lead? I think it's because we have a certain reputation.

[laughter]

Mikie Sherrill: We may have a chip on our shoulder. We built a nation, and people say the scars we have are ugly. We fund this nation, and yet Trump and MAGA Republicans in DC want to raise your taxes and take away your health care and education dollars. The president comes here nonstop to his golf course, and he calls our state a horror show.

Brian: Nancy, how much of a repeat of the national themes from 2024, anti-trans or DEI or mass deportation on the one side, or MAGA as an ideology of hate and a threat to democracy, maybe also abortion rights, on the other, those sort of things, do you see this campaign becoming about?

Nancy: Yes, definitely. I think we're going to see it flip back and forth between a focus on either Donald Trump from the Sherrill side, or Democratic ideals and ideas and progressive values from the Republican side that they oppose. I think Ciattarelli is going to have a tougher time than Sherrill in the sense that he's going to have a tough time making her out to be an extremist. She's pretty clearly a moderate. She has had a lot of appeal with moderate voters. There are a lot of them, as we've talked about many times in New Jersey, and that's what makes her a strong candidate.

That's a big reason why she won the primary, which was a very competitive primary. A lot of people, I believe, voted on the electability issue. They feel that Mikie Sherrill is the candidate who can beat Ciattarelli. I think he's going to have trouble painting her into that corner. I don't think she has taken stands that they're going to be able to exploit as much as the Democrats are going to be able to exploit things that Jack Ciattarelli has said that would strike some voters as too extreme.

At the same time, we're clearly going to see Ciattarelli do the general election pivot more to the center. He's going to calm down his language, but at the same time, he's been on record and at events, they've got recordings of him saying things appealing to primary voters. I'm sure the Sherrill campaign plans to advertise heavily and try to paint him as the extremist and too close to Trump.

Brian: Pivoting back to your Ask Governor Murphy call in last night, he did weigh in on the primary results. Let's take a listen to about a minute of the governor's political analysis. Obviously, he's a Democrat. He starts by talking about the Republican nominee, former state assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli.

Governor Murphy: He's a formidable candidate. There's just no two ways about it. He's going to present himself as a former legislator, as a small businessman, somebody who's got name recognition has been on the scene. Without question, formidable. This will be a very close, tight race. I'm a huge Mikie fan. At the end of the day, I think she wins this, but it won't be a lay-down hand.

Some X factors in there will be, among other things, good news for Democrats and Mikie. 300,000 more Democrats voted in the primary than Republicans. That's a pretty big number. That tells me with five opponents, one of her big jobs will be to consolidate support among the field. I think President Trump will play in this race, probably for good and for bad, both depending on where you stand.

Brian: Nancy, on that clip, he cited that number 300,000 more Democrats voted in the primary than Republicans. Did you look into those numbers? Seems like a really high turnout for a primary election. Maybe it's just because the Democratic race was considered more competitive, and Ciattarelli, by the time we came to primary day, was considered a shoo-in for the most part. What about that number?

Nancy: There was high turnout overall for a primary historically. There was high turnout. I agree with you that the Democratic side of the primary was much more competitive, very competitive, and that pulled out a lot more votes. There's been a big change since COVID in that New Jersey now has vote-by-mail, and that's just a game changer in terms of how many people can vote so easily and not wait until election day. We are seeing higher turnout since we got vote-by-mail.

The one thing I'll take issue with the governor on is the 300,000 more Democrats who voted. Come on. First, I don't put a lot of stock in that. There are more registered Democrats than there are registered Republicans by more than 300,000, the difference. Like we just commented on, it was a more competitive primary. We've talked about this, Brian, many times. There are as many registered independent voters in New Jersey as there are Democrats, and there are more Democrats than there are Republicans. I don't think that number really holds a whole lot of meaning.

Brian: Listener texts, "Please ask how the business owners feel about Trump deporting their workers and tariffing the goods they need to run their businesses." Do you think either of those things become issues in the gubernatorial race?

Nancy: Oh, sure. I think everything going on with President Trump and the changes that people are going to experience here in this state is going to affect the gubernatorial election. I also think there's two forces that are like the magnets. One force is Trump, but the other force is Phil Murphy. He's been in office for eight years. To what extent is this election going to be a referendum on him? To what extent is it going to be a pushback that the Democrats had total power with the legislature and the governor's office for eight years? They didn't fix my problems. I think some people are going to feel that way. I think you have these very major forces that are going to clash over the next months in the lead up to November.

Brian: That text there mentioned immigration and deportation. You brought this up with the governor last night. I'm not sure how it came out. Maybe he brought it up. The Trump administration's raids at workplaces and immigration courts in New Jersey is obviously a huge national issue, not just in LA. Detainees are being held at Newark's Delaney Hall. That, to remind listeners, is where Mayor Ras Baraka got arrested. Congresswoman LaMonica McIver got arrested and charged. The conditions are reportedly so bad that it caused a riot among detainees. You asked the governor what kind of oversight he has at the facility. Let's take a listen to his response to you on that from last night.

Governor Murphy: We don't have the oversight we'd like, to be frank with you. I signed a law, I believe, in 2022, which prohibited private ownership of these facilities, and we've been battling in court these past three years. The answer is not what we'd like. Federal officeholders do have the oversight right, and they have the ability to show up. I'm not sure on a moment's notice, but certainly with whatever regularity they choose.

Brian: What's he saying there, Nancy? Basically, only state legislators can even visit the detention center?

Nancy: It's not state legislators. It's federal, so it's members of Congress.

Brian: Oh, federal. I'm sorry. Members of Congress.

Nancy: Yes. He's probably right in the sense that legally, he doesn't have a lot of oversight power over this facility. There's a big problem right now with what we're seeing in terms of the militarization of ICE and the federal government's intrusion, as an example, because it's happening all over. We're seeing the pushback in LA and what's going on there, and in Newark, where Delaney Hall, the privately run detention center, where it was contracted, they rent this building, and the city has no oversight over it or the state.

In fact, he brought up a law that he signed that went into effect-- I think it was signed in 2021. He said 2022, but I think it was 2021, saying that private companies could not contract with state and local agencies to provide immigrant detention facilities. This had been a long fight that activists and even our former colleague, Matt Katz, covered this a lot and brought a lot of attention to it, that county governments were making money off of renting space to ICE, and local folks don't want that in their town.

That law is now being contested by the private companies that run these detention facilities, and we don't know how that's going to go. At the moment, I think he's right in that he doesn't have any real legal recourse for what's going on at Delaney Hall. The place where I would push back on him and try to a bit last night is he's not using his bully pulpit. Congress members, the mayor of Newark, they're going out to Delaney Hall and making this a public issue, and I think that's important. I think it has value.

Brian: Why not? He certainly did not sound passionate in that clip we played.

Nancy: I can't answer why not. He brushed off when I said, "Why aren't you out there?" He was like, "I haven't been there, but I care about this, and I've made statements." Then he went on to talk about the bill and the fact that he doesn't have oversight. I do think that this is something where he is disappointing at least his Democratic constituency, the people who voted him into office. He used to be very proud of the fact that he was called the most progressive governor in the country back during his first term. We've really seen him back off of a lot of those things that got him that moniker, and I think this one definitely is hurting him publicly among his core constituents.

Brian: Let me sneak one more call in here. Laura in Madison, New Jersey, you're on WNYC with Nancy Solomon. Hi, Laura.

Laura: Hi there. Thank you for taking my call. Thank you to both you and Nancy for your coverage on issues.

Brian: Nancy is grateful. Go ahead. [chuckles]

Laura: My concern when we're talking about the issues that the gubernatorial candidates are addressing and the reference to Mikie Sherrill not making a commitment on tax cuts and that that might be to her detriment, what I'm hoping is that this is really Mikie's anticipation of exactly what the governor was talking about last night, where we are facing huge loss of revenue for Medicaid, possibly Medicare and hospital care in the state because of the cuts coming from the big, beautiful bill. There's no way we're going to be able to accommodate health care, mental health care, fiscal health care without--

Brian: And tax cuts, is what you're saying?

Laura: Yes, we can't do it. We can't do it.

Brian: Laura, I have to leave it there because we're running out of time in the segment. Nancy, interesting thought about where a fault line may well develop.

Nancy: Yes, absolutely. The governor's been saying it on the show quite a bit, and I think it's quite clear that the state really doesn't have resources to make up the loss in federal aid that is coming. It now is coming much more certainly than it was last month because Congress and the three congressmen who were Republicans from New Jersey voted for it. It's on the Senate side now, and there are senators saying they want to see more Medicaid cuts. This is going to take away health care coverage for 360,000 New Jerseyans. It's going to put enormous pressure on hospitals.

The governor said last night many hospitals are going to fail economically and be shuttered. I think to what extent this becomes an issue in the governor's race? We're going to have to wait and see, but issues that affect poor people and not the middle class, sadly, are not often the issues that determine a political campaign and a political race. Not that I endorse that, but I think that is a reality that it is the middle class that is the largest block of voters, and a diverse middle class. I'm not talking about just white suburbanites, but there is a diverse middle class in New Jersey. To what extent Medicaid cuts are going to affect them, which it could very much so. We'll see. We'll see [inaudible 00:22:52] November.

Brian: All right. Trump is trying to get the so-called big, beautiful bill passed by the 4th of July, so if all of this actually becomes law, I'm sure it will shake up the race or at least become a factor in the race to some degree. That's our Post-Ask Governor Murphy segment with Nancy Solomon for this month. Nancy, by the time you come on next month, I want to hear that the governor listened to your podcast, Dead End: The Rise and Fall of Gold Bar Bob Menendez, which he told you last night that he hasn't listened to yet. I think we need to put on a pressure campaign for him to listen to Dead End and give you a comment next month. We'll see.

Nancy: Thank you. Thank you very much. It was a funny little exchange because I've been trying to get him to listen to the first season of Dead End since 2022, and he hasn't. I personally feel that he would have a better understanding of New Jersey machine politics if he listened to my podcast. [laughs]

Brian: For his last six months in office. All right. Listeners, Nancy was on previously to talk specifically about the podcast, so I got to hear some of it, and listening anyway. It is a really good listen, Dead End: The Rise and Fall of Gold Bar Bob Menendez. Nancy, thank you for this month.

Nancy: Thanks so much, Brian, and for the plug. I do appreciate it.

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