By James J. Devine
Governor Phil Murphy stood before the state this month and declared, “We were who we said we’d be — and we did what we said we’d do.” It was a fitting epitaph for an administration adept at crafting a narrative of progressive triumph.
Yet for New Jerseyans living the reality of the state’s most entrenched failures, this farewell rings hollow.
On the fundamental issues of racial justice, the will of the voters and accountable governance, the Murphy administration’s record is not one of promises kept, but of profound opportunities missed and responsibilities denied.
Nowhere is this failure more stark than in the enduring scourge of school segregation.
New Jersey’s classrooms remain among the most starkly divided in the nation by race and wealth. A coalition of civil rights groups sued the state in 2018, arguing this system violates New Jersey’s own constitution.
After seven years of litigation, what has been the administration’s response? Not a bold plan for integration, but a legal strategy of delay and denial. In court, the state argued that fixing the problem would require “obliterating the state’s entire public school system”. When ordered to mediate a solution, the state stalled until talks collapsed.
Plaintiffs have accused the administration of a transparent goal: “to continue to stall its resolution so that the issue becomes the responsibility of the next administration”. They are correct. While the governor’s official list of accomplishments touts record school funding — a worthy achievement — it is silent on integration.
Funding separate schools more fully is not a remedy for segregation; it is an endorsement of it. The state can build gleaming new facilities, but if a child’s educational destiny is still determined by their zip code and the color of their skin, the foundation is rotten.
A similar pattern of promised change, followed by punitive delay, defines the saga of marijuana legalization.
Murphy campaigned on legalization in 2017, yet it took more than three years and a voter-led constitutional amendment to force the issue. Even then, the administration fumbled the people’s mandate.
Voters approved legalization in November 2020, with the amendment set to take effect on January 1, 2021. Instead of preparing a seamless transition, Murphy and the legislature deadlocked over minor penalties for underage use.
The consequence was a betrayal of public trust.
During this political squabble, which stretched into February 2021, police across New Jersey continued to arrest and charge people for possessing a substance two-thirds of the electorate had just voted to legalize.
The governor finally signed the enabling laws on February 22, 2021, but the message was sent: the political calculus of “how” mattered more than the immediate cessation of harm demanded by the voters’ clear “yes.”
The marketplace then lumbered to life a full year later, a sluggish rollout that favored bureaucratic process over the social justice ideals once championed.
Murphy leaves Trenton with a legacy of fiscal imprudence masked by a robust national economy, using one-time windfalls and nonrecurring revenue gimmicks to paper over a deepening structural deficit.
Each of his record-high budgets relied heavily on unsustainable “one-shot” revenues—including redirecting dedicated clean energy funds and borrowing against future settlements—to fund permanent spending increases, creating a fiscal cliff his successor must now face.
Despite touting nine credit rating upgrades, his administration’s final budget for fiscal year 2026 projects a $3.5 billion structural shortfall, a direct result of prioritizing expansive government programs without securing the broad-based, recurring tax revenue required to sustain them, effectively mortgaging the state’s future stability for present-day political achievements.
Murphy’s political identity was forged not in opposition to the Democratic Party establishment, but as a product and financier of its most powerful machinery. His path to power was a classic case of working within the system.
His eventual, historic re-election in 2021, making him the first Democratic governor to win a second term in 44 years, was a victory for a party apparatchik who had cleared the primary ballot of opposition, then prosecuted his political adversary for a careless mistake.
These are not unrelated failures.
They spring from a common source: an administration that mastered the language of progressive change but too often succumbed to the state’s old political machinery.
The governor could boast of clean energy targets and a strengthened minimum wage, yet these victories coexisted with a government that grew less transparent and an entrenched political culture that remained largely undisturbed.
A governor’s legacy is not written in press releases or final addresses.
It is written in the opportunities afforded to a child in a segregated classroom, in the trust of voters who expected their decision to be respected and in the integrity of a government that puts people before process.
On this measure, the Murphy administration leaves behind a state of contradictions: forward-looking in its aspirations, yet stubbornly anchored to the failures of its past. The work of building a truly stronger and fairer New Jersey remains, as ever, unfinished.
Governor Phil Murphy’s tenure was tainted by a deeply embedded culture of disrespect and abuse toward women that ran directly counter to his administration’s professed progressive values on gender equity. His 2017 gubernatorial campaign was a notorious cesspool of misogyny, where a senior female strategist was fired after the male campaign manager crudely called her “a c**t,” and this toxic environment was not an aberration but a precursor to his governance. Within his official administration, Murphy illegally hired multiple convicted criminals into patronage positions, including at least one man credibly accused of sexual assault, actively placing women in the workplace at risk and demonstrating a conscious prioritization of political loyalty over basic safety and decency. This pattern of contempt, from the campaign trail to the halls of power, reveals a fundamental hypocrisy, where public advocacy for women’s rights served as a thin veneer for the private exploitation and endangerment of the women who worked for him.