Staggering through swamplands and toward eastern border mountains the rest of the world laughs at from their Olympian perches, New Jersey will play a critical role this year in the presidential contest, trying to augment itself beyond merely piggy bank status and blue state security blanket in the grand scheme of events.

Certainly, the Garden State wants to do more than merely furnish a laugh track for late night comics and private redemption on public time. If you’re reading this, you’ll know that former Governor Chris Christie failed in his presidential bid, but perhaps succeeded in his penitential bid, as he tried to undo in 2024 everything he tried to do in 2016, essentially the existential equivalent of nothingness. Only God – or Jean Paul Sartre – can say whether he forgives Christie for backing Donald Trump and then frantically trying to shovel his way out of the endorsement. Meanwhile, businessman Hirsh Singh (who previously ran unsuccessfully for governor, congress, and senate) likewise rode back to his home state of New Jersey post New Hampshire, hauled by the same Shooting of Dan McGrew sled dogs that delivered a politically DOA Christie. When he thaws out, at least Singh can say he didn’t hit for the cycle.

Having run around the country in search of his own magical presidential portal, sitting New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy appears to have accepted the consolation prize of forklifting his wife into the U.S. Senate, at last returning the favor for her forklifting him into the governorship. It’s not Oval Office level stuff, but it gets the Murphys into contemporary D.C. ballrooms, a Costco Camelot envisioned – but never attained – by the Murphys in the dreary COVID era of New Jersey politics…

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