If Bob Menendez’s son has designs on succeeding his ethically-challenged dad? He may have to write off Ocean County.
On Tuesday, Michael Zhadanovsky (an ex-deputy press secretary for Phil Murphy who currently serves as Communications Director for Congressman Rob Menendez (D, NJ-08)) appeared to employ a derogatory slang term for a man – and possibly all male residents? – hailing from the county seat and second largest municipality of Ocean County, New Jersey.
“Toms River Man= NJ version of Florida Man,” Zhadanovsky tweeted along with a NJ.com story of a Toms River man who allegedly “who led police on a chase through Secaucus before driving his vehicle into the Hackensack River was taken into custody after a two-hour standoff Tuesday afternoon.”
The “Florida Man” trope dates back a decade (at least); Wikipedia explains that the “Florida Man is an Internet meme first popularized in 2013, referring to an alleged prevalence of men performing irrational, maniacal, or absurd actions in the U.S. state of Florida.”
Urban Dictionary is characteristically more explicit:
“A key word used a lot to describe all the weird news stories about random Floridians committing weird and dumb crimes, due to the state law regarding freedom of press about the fact that every police or court case must be public. Most of these weird stories, however, are related to white Florida men, the police and drugs. Due to this, this is why people outside Florida hate Florida.”
It’s pretty clear that New Jersey Democrats outside of Ocean County hate Ocean County, the red behemoth which powered Chris Christie’s 2009 victory over Jon Corzine and keeps Republicans in the ballgame for statewide non-federal races.
Ocean isn’t alone. New Jersey Democrats have increasingly looked down their noses at South Jersey which, unlike the Northern counties, have trended rightward over the last few cycles and hobbled the once seemingly-invincible Camden-based machine. In an early 2022 interview, Democrat State Chairman Leroy Jones stopped just short of writing off the southern counties as a “Trump worshipping” backwater.
“That was a once in a lifetime phenomenon that ocurred during this past election,” said Jones, referring to NJGOP gains in 2021. “That was a lot of the disruption that came out of Washington, and I think you know. That area of the state is a Trump worshipping area of the state, and all of that culminated into the wins that the Republican Party enjoyed.”
