This Sunday at 8 p.m., Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown) and First Lady Tammy Murphy will meet for the very first debate of the 2024 Democratic U.S. Senate primary in New Jersey.
The pressure on Kim and Murphy, the only two candidates for indicted Senator Bob Menendez’s seat who met the debate requirements, is high. With county convention season revving up and many voters starting to tune into the race, it will be the first chance for both candidates to make the case to New Jerseyans as to why they should be elected to the Senate – and perhaps why their opponent shouldn’t be.
Here are five things to watch for at the debate, which will be hosted by the New Jersey Globe, On New Jersey, and Rider University; it will be streamed live on the New Jersey Globe, On New Jersey, Facebook Live, Twitter, and YouTube.
Can the Kim-mentum be stopped?
That may sound like a loaded question, but given how the last few weeks of the Senate campaign have gone, it really isn’t.
Since the start of the new year, Kim posted a double-digit lead in the first independent poll of the contest and convincingly won the race’s first Democratic county convention in Monmouth County. Murphy has a number of structural advantages that Kim doesn’t, including guaranteed party support in many of the state’s largest counties, but all the recent momentum has seemed to be in Kim’s favor.
The upcoming debate represents a chance for Murphy to flip the script. If she can articulate a clear message about why she should be a senator and Andy Kim should not – something she hasn’t really been able to do thus far – that could turn the narrative of the race around and help put her back in the driver’s seat.
On the other hand, if Murphy stumbles or if Kim far outshines her, then the current narrative might get even more entrenched. And the longer it takes Murphy to put a damper on Kim’s momentum, the harder it will be to eventually overtake him.
It’s worth noting that there’s a significant experience gap between the candidates when it comes to debating. While Murphy has long been a major player in New Jersey politics, this will be her first-ever political debate; Kim, meanwhile, is an experienced debater thanks to his three campaigns for a competitive congressional district.
How scorched-earth does Kim go?
Andy Kim’s a pretty nice guy; that’s common knowledge in New Jersey politics by now. But his campaign has nevertheless been perfectly willing to go on the attack against Murphy and the broader New Jersey Democratic establishment when it wants to.
Murphy, Kim argues, is being propped up by a “broken” political system that takes power away from the voters and leads to (alleged) corruption like Bob Menendez’s. And when Murphy’s campaign has made missteps – like when it tried to pressure the College Democrats into remaining neutral in the race, or when it announced an endorsement list featuring people who said they hadn’t endorsed anyone – Kim has pounced.
Now that Kim and Murphy are going to face each other directly on Sunday, we’ll see how much of that same heat Kim is willing to bring. Does he take Murphy directly to task for being so heavily aided by her connections to Gov. Phil Murphy and other “party elites”? Can he do so without harming his own nice-guy image?
It’s a tough needle to thread, because while Kim’s message about rigged politics might be resonating with the New Jersey electorate, he still wants to appeal to the local Democratic faithful who have a big say in deciding party endorsements in many counties. Those low-level party leaders may find Kim’s candidacy appealing, but many of them also quite like Phil and Tammy Murphy and their local Democratic organizations, so an overly negative messaging strategy could be risky.
As last Saturday’s convention vote in Monmouth County showed, Kim can indeed thread that needle successfully, but the upcoming debate will be his biggest stage yet – one potentially viewed by both a local and national audience.
Can Murphy land a hit on Kim?
In contrast to Kim’s consistent messaging against Murphy’s establishment support and the New Jersey political system, Murphy has not yet found a clear avenue of attack on Kim, who has been broadly well-liked and uncontroversial among Democrats during his three terms in Congress.
At various points during the campaign, Murphy and her allies have hit Kim on immigration, via a few unfavorable House votes Kim cast in 2019 and 2020; on abortion, arguing that a male politician can’t be trusted on the issue to the same extent that a female politician can; and on some mild resume inflation Kim did during his initial 2018 House race. All of those messages could be effective in certain circumstances, but none have seemed to really stick.
Sunday’s debate will be Murphy’s most high-profile opportunity yet to go on the offense against Kim and tarnish his currently very high favorability ratings among New Jersey Democrats. But will she find an anti-Kim message that actually lands? How harsh will she be?
And as with any attack line, there’s also the danger of going too far. When former Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-Ringoes) endorsed Kim last month, Murphy’s campaign responded by dredging up Malinowski’s stock-trading issues from his time in Congress – a move that mainly served to tick off Democrats in Malinowski’s old congressional district without conferring any obvious benefits for Murphy.
Do any clear policy differences emerge between the candidates?
So far, the race between Kim and Murphy has been a thoroughly non-ideological one. Both are relatively mainstream Democrats with liberal stances on most major issues: abortion rights must be safeguarded, climate change must be combated, democracy must be protected, and Donald Trump must be defeated.
When given the opportunity, neither has spelled out particularly clear policy differences they have with their opponent; the campaign has instead focused largely on process issues related to Menendez, county party endorsements, and so on. (In fact, three months after Murphy launched her campaign, her website still does not have an issues section.)
Sunday’s debate will give both candidates a chance to change that, and tell voters how – if at all – they might vote differently than one another if elected. There are a few issues in particular that seem primed to become potential flashpoints between the two.
One is the war between Israel and Hamas. Neither Kim nor Murphy have called for a ceasefire in Gaza – unlike Larry Hamm and Patricia Campos-Medina, two other Democratic candidates running on more unabashedly progressive platforms – but on such a nuanced issue, important differences of opinion may still emerge.
Another is health care. Murphy said at the Monmouth convention that she supports Medicare for All, while Kim has not signed on to the Medicare for All Act during his time in the House, a potentially important distinction for more progressive voters.
How large does Menendez loom?
Menendez will not be a participant in Sunday’s debate; he could have been if he had formally declared his candidacy for re-election before February 11, but he chose not to do so.
Even in absentia, though, the three-term senator is likely to loom large. Kim launched his campaign explicitly in response to Menendez’s alleged crimes, and polling shows that New Jersey voters are heavily invested in the charges against him.
It will be interesting to see how Kim and Murphy handle the issue of Menendez, who until recently was one of the most powerful Democrats in the state (and, on certain issues, in the entire country.) Do they use the platform of the debate stage to attack Menendez, who has dismal approval ratings?
Or do they simply acknowledge that Menendez has very little chance of winning regardless, and instead move on to engaging with their real opponent: one another?
