SOUTH JERSEY (KYW Newsradio) — Tuesday night’s New Jersey governor debate at Rowan University was just as prickly as the first and featured plenty of audience interruption.
Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy and his Republican challenger, Jack Ciattarelli, debated for the second and final time before Election Day.
It had a familiar feel to the first, with both men reiterating many of the points they made and cementing their positions on taxes, school funding, affordable housing and COVID-19 mitigation.
Ciattarelli said that while he has promoted vaccinations, residents should have the choice whether to wear masks or get the COVID-19 vaccine. Murphy has instituted mandates for schools to require masks and ordered that health care workers and teachers get the vaccine or face regular testing.
“The tragedy today is there is a playbook,” Murphy said. “We know vaccines work. We know masking works. For folks to ignore that and disregard that playbook is putting lives needlessly at risk. It feels like an answer you’d see in a debate in Texas or Florida.”
“I just heard the governor talk about mask mandates but as the news reported today, he participated in a very large indoor conference over the last three to four days in which nobody was wearing masks,” Ciattarelli countered. “I do think our leadership needs to be consistent.”
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During the hourlong debate, Murphy cast his rival as the second coming of Chris Christie and Donald Trump, while Ciattarelli hammered Murphy over the state’s high costs.
Whether the debate will change the direction of the contest is unclear: Murphy has led in public polls as well as in fundraising. The Democrats also have 1 million more registered voters than Republicans. Ciattarelli faces the twin hurdles of having to get conservative Republican voters out for him while persuading the state’s sizable independent bloc to back him.
The rowdy audience interrupted the candidates with applause, boos and cheers throughout despite requests from moderators to limit distractions.
On the state budget, which Murphy has steadily increased since he took office in 2018, culminating in the current fiscal year’s record $46 billion spending plan, Ciattarelli called for pairing it back. He didn’t specify what he would cut.
Murphy said the increased spending hasn’t grown the state’s public workforce and instead means the state is meeting its K-12 spending and public pension obligations.
The governor, a former Obama administration ambassador and Wall Street executive, argues that state education funding takes pressure off property taxes, which are levied at the local level.
Ciattarelli criticized the idea that Murphy focused on lowering property taxes, which average about $10,000 a year in the state — among the highest in the country.
“If he had cut everybody’s property taxes in half I wouldn’t have run for governor. I would have endorsed him,” he said.
Murphy attacked Ciattarelli’s plan to flatten state aid to schools, saying it would hurt majority-Black cities.
“If you’re in a Black or brown community, you’re going to get the rug pulled out from under you,” he said.
One area of common ground seemed to be on abortion. Both say New Jersey is committed to a woman’s right to choose, even though they may not have the exact same plans or ideas on how to go about that.
Ciattarelli said that if the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade that the state would have to enact a law to protect a woman’s right to get the procedure. He said he didn’t think it would happen, however.
Murphy instead called for lawmakers to pass the Reproductive Freedom Act so he could sign it into law.
Early in-person voting starts Oct. 23 and runs through Halloween. Mail-in ballots have already begun coming into county offices. Election Day is Nov. 2.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.