It’s really just a matter of math, folks.
On Wednesday night, the NJGOP and the Ciattarelli campaign issued the following joint statement after the AP called the race for Phil Murphy:
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“Phil Murphy and Jack Ciattarelli are separated by a fraction of a percent out of 2.4 million ballots cast. It’s irresponsible of the media to make this call when the New Jersey Secretary of State doesn’t even know how many ballots are left to be counted.”
It’s believed tens of thousands (or more) of provisional ballots could still be uncounted at this hour in addition to vote-by-mail ballots which will continue arriving through the beginning of next week. Murphy’s unofficial edge stood at 19,000 on Wednesday at 9:00 p.m.
At this hour, many key counties (including Ocean) haven’t finalized what if anything is still outstanding.
Might Murpht prevail? Yeah. It’s possible. But to call it at this juncture with so little concrete information about what’s still out there – votes which could be many, many times greater than the margin separating the candidates – is reckless, folks. We’d nevertheless expect nothing less from the same crowd that told us just 48 hours ago that Murphy would win by 11 points.
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