(New York) Outgoing New Jersey governor Democrat Phil Murphy was narrowly re-elected on Wednesday with a much shorter lead over his Republican challenger than the polls predicted, allowing Democrats to save face after a loss in Virginia which further weakened Joe Biden.
According to results given by the American media covering about 90% of the ballots counted, Phil Murphy was only re-elected with 50.1% of the votes cast, against 49.1% for Republican Jack Ciattarelli, an advance of about 20,000 votes out of some 2.4 million votes in total.
“The polls gave Phil Murphy between 8 and 12 points, so it’s a surprise,” euphemistically Saladin Ambar, professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden won with 58% of the vote, against 40% for Donald Trump, while Phil Murphy won the state with 56% of the vote in 2017.
The political analyst sees it as the translation of local as well as national issues in this neighboring state of New York, where nearly nine million inhabitants live.
“It is very difficult, in a state where taxes, and in particular property taxes, are a major problem for Democrats, to remain in the post of governor,” he told AFP, noting that the last time a Democratic governor kept his post there was in 1977.
But according to him, Governor Murphy was also “victim” of the unpopularity of Joe Biden and of what the American president, entangled in interminable negotiations to pass two gigantic investment plans, “was not capable of performing in Congress ”.
In Virginia, the Republican Glenn Youngkin won against Terry McAuliffe, yet former governor (2014-2018) of this state won largely a year ago by Joe Biden against Donald Trump.
“The national context remains important and it will also remain so in the mid-term elections” of 2022, adds Mr. Ambar, seeing “a warning and a wake-up call for the Democrats”.
On the east coast of the United States, the local elections held on Tuesday also saw the unsurprising victory for New York mayor of Democrat Eric Adams, a former police officer who would become the 1er January the second black mayor of the economic and cultural megalopolis.
A wind of change has also blown in Boston, capital of the state of Massachusetts, where Democrat Michelle Wu, 36 and daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, was elected mayor.
This lawyer, who presents herself as “a mother, daughter of immigrants”, succeeds Mayor Kim Janey, appointed this year to act as interim after the departure of Marty Walsh to the US federal government.
Michelle Wu is the first woman and the first person from a minority to be elected to this post in this city of more than 600,000 inhabitants, one of the oldest in the United States.