Dr. Marc Gaswirth, a retired public school administrator, has written extensively for more than 40 years about public sector bargaining and school human resources.

Governor Murphy recently commented on his wife’s Tammy candidacy for a United States Senate seat from New Jersey to replace the state’s embattled and politically vulnerable Robert Menendez. “She’s going to earn this on her own back and not on my back.” It’s tempting to try to discern what the governor actually means. Since pundits and non-pundits alike have already weighed in, here is my contribution to the conversation.

On the face of it, the governor’s stance that he intends to take a “hand-off” approach to his wife’s campaign and operate independently of it will require great discipline, patience, and verbal agility because the media and public will be interested less on his policies than on his wife’s campaign and the role he is playing in it.

To ensure his wife’s election, the governor, despite recent comments to the contrary, will have great difficulty remaining passive or idle. This would be a yeoman’s feat even for a skilled and ambitious public official who typically would speak out on an important race with national implications. Even if his words and actions ordinarily directed at ginning up his political base that elected him twice are restrained, his vast army of political allies will gladly serve as surrogates to back his wife’s election bid.

Several prominent Democratic county organizations, party officials, and sitting members of the state’s Congressional delegation already have announced their support for Ms. Murphy even though the public knows little, if anything, about her views or those of her announced or unannounced opponents.

Her apparent early anointment as Senator Menendez’s presumptive successor will no doubt be tested in the weeks and months ahead as the campaign gears up, but there is plenty of room for criticism as there has been more competition on the Golden Bachelor, a current popular television reality show, than is likely to be in any future Democratic Party primary next year.

What obviously propels Tammy Murphy’s candidacy is that she is not only the wife of a sitting governor completing his second and final term in a very blue Democrat state. No Republican has been elected to a senate seat from the state since the 1970s. If elected, she would be the first woman to serve in the United States Senate from New Jersey.

Ms. Murphy’s detractors could label her attempt at elective office as “Nepotism on Steroids,” or “Business as Usual” in the Garden State, citing as evidence that Rob Menendez, the son of the person Ms. Murphy seeks to replace, is a current member of the House of Representatives, that Thomas Kean, Jr., another congressman, is the son of his namesake, the former New Jersey governor, and that Donald Payne, Jr., another House member, replaced his late father in that position in 2012.

They could further note the undeniable role that the personal wealth of previous candidates has played in past elections or that relatives of other local and state officials have ascended to political office with name recognition but little, if any, prior political experience.

Now that the governor’s wife is an announced candidate, many special interests that previously supported and funded the governor’s two campaigns will seek to curry further favor with him to advance their own agendas by supporting her. This will be particularly true of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), one of the governor’s major and most consistent political and campaign patrons and a powerful and formidable voice in New Jersey politics.

What should be of keen interest to the electorate focused on the governor’s last two years in office is the extent to which his wife’s efforts to unseat a powerful incumbent senator will drive his education agenda.

Ms. Murphy, should she win the primary and then the general election, will be just one of one hundred senators with limited impact on education in the state. Meanwhile, her husband, bestowed with constitutionally enormous power and influence, will continue to drive the state’s education agenda during his remaining time in office, and that means, if the past is a predictor of future behavior, the NJEA’s agenda.

Murphy has been the most pro-teachers’ union governor in New Jersey history. Since 2018, he and a compliant legislature have approved several major union legislative initiatives by largely bypassing and usurping the local collective bargaining process, including:

• ironclad employment protections for school employees during any future health emergency;

• stringent employment protections for tens of thousands of school aides faced with disciplinary actions, or layoffs even for legitimate financial reasons;

• a revised sick law greatly expanding paid leave benefits for school employees;

• other increased paid and unpaid leave provisions;

• limiting school boards from subcontracting services for valid budgetary reasons; and,

• safeguards to sustain or increase union membership levels and dues revenues.

While his wife’s campaign gains momentum and his final term comes to an end, the governor will continue to support the priorities of the special interests that put him in office, including those of the NJEA, which raised millions of dollars for his two campaigns and most recently helped the Democratic Party tighten its grip on the state legislature. In return, the NJEA will press Murphy and the newly-seated and indebted legislature to advance the union’s legislative goals.

One thing is certain: Those goals will have little, if anything, to do with materially improving public education for the state’s children. They will simply be added to a long list of already approved pro-union actions that have clearly exposed the NJEA’s dominance of the state’s political establishment.

The days of the smoke-filled rooms where political candidates were chosen in New Jersey may be long-gone. Now, they are unashamedly and transparently out in the open for the public to see. The chronic problem, however, is that, sadly, the public will probably continue to look the other way.