State Senator Brian P. Stack and his constituency last night produced half the Hudson County vote for Governor Phil Murphy – despite the Bernie Sanders-hugging governor giving the mercurial Stack an 11th reason to dart to the Jack Ciattarelli camp.

Since the death of the legendary Steve Adubato, Sr. of Newark, who built schools and centers for children and seniors, the New Jersey Democratic Party – in almost oxymoronic fashion – has made tribalism and money its central organizing principles.

With one notable and unmistakable exception –  Stack – a manic mayor who has his own Adubato-like model to stick brooms in people’s hands if they don’t have jobs, and have them sweep the streets if that’s what it takes.

Ironically, Democrats this morning find themselves on the Freudian couch itemizing among their failures a lack of the party’s connection with Hispanics as part of the reason Murphy finds himself in a dogfight with Ciattarelli in a state with a million more Democrats than Republicans.

Like the late Adubato, who was also not Hispanic and didn’t speak Spanish, Stack serves a primarily Hispanic population.

And he ginned up 25,ooo votes for Murphy, or half of what Murphy harvested in Hudson.

One third of the county produced half the votes.

Keep in mind, again, that this was the guy Murphy originally dissed in favor of a rally with national star Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Stack initially had his big rally set for the same day Sanders came to town, which meant someone close to the governor had to make that phone call to let the Union City mayor know that Murphy wouldn’t make it.

That person has not surfaced in the days since.

Murphy rectified – kind 0f – the blunder – by pasting together an event with Stack on the eve of the election, but it hardly had the drama and spectacle of what the North Hudson power broker originally planned.

Like Adubato before him, Stack loves political theater.

This year, he was going to produce the Union city equivalent of the science fiction fantasy movie Dune, on the governor’s behalf.

The difference though, is that Stack loves government services, helping people, and actually getting people to the polls as much as theater, while (much!) the rest of his party loves theater, and is all out for itself.

Burned by Murphy and Sanders, Stack still found a way to get up for the election, while much of the rest of his party snoozed through a so-called “non-event” as Ciattarelli ran over them.

In the words of one Democrat this morning, “Time for finger pointing, blaming, chest-thumping. Biden, Dem Congress and the progressives will be the scapegoats. But where is the New Jersey Democratic Party’s soul?”