Tammy Murphy, the wife of Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, announced on Wednesday that she was running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate seat now held by the state’s embattled senior senator, Robert Menendez, who has been charged with accepting bribes.
New Jersey has a unique election system that enables county leaders from the Democratic and Republican parties to anoint candidates to run in a single column or row on primary ballots, an advantage that studies have shown increases their likelihood of victory by as much as 38 percentage points.
“It’s a rigged game,” said Julia Sass Rubin, an associate dean of the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University who has researched the influence of the county line in federal and legislative races.