And joining me in studio is our senior writer, Colleen O'Dea, and Micah Rasmussen, the director for the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University.

Good to see you both.

Glad to have you on a day like this.

Micah, let me come to you first.

This is a lame duck governor.

With that in mind, what did you make of the speech and this AI moonshot?

Yeah, it was more ambitious than I expected it to be.

Governor Murphy had been settling into a pattern of about five proposals per state of the state.

This is a little bit more.

This is going back into the territory.

He did sort of at the beginning of his tenure.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this moonshot because it's sort of trying to strike out in a direction ahead of other tech friendly states.

California, Massachusetts.

They're talking about cutbacks now in budgets were sort of saying and Governor Murphy saying New Jersey doesn't have to fall into that pattern.

We can be more aggressive and we can be at the forefront.

So we'll have to see where the meat on the bones with this proposal.

But it hearkens back to a few weeks ago when he was at Princeton and talked about this effort with the university, this partnership.

Colleen, to Micah's point, it did feel like a little bit more of an ambitious speech than I was anticipating.

What other new proposals did he unveil?

Yeah, it did.

When you get into the details, though, some of these are things that are legislatively driven that he's going to be supporting.

For instance, he said that he was going to support the affordable housing bill that didn't quite make it through the last legislature.

He wants to get abolish COA and just change the process.

He also is looking for no cost abortions for folks.

No, there would be no upfront costs for for women.

So that's another piece of legislation that is pending.

He's talked about expanding universal pre-K.

He wants pre-K.

He wants to expand the unpaid medical debt program and provide for transparent medical billing phonics.

We've got a clemency program that we really don't know anything about except we think may be tied to the war on drugs.

Here, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So an awful you know, a quite a number of initiatives.

And also voting rights, which was interesting, Micah particularly coming out of this last election cycle where Democrats did pretty well.

But some real progressive items on here.

Did anything else stand out to you and what wasn't in the speech?

That's a great question.

We didn't hear about COVID.

We didn't hear about climate change, things that were mainstays of his speeches in his earlier term.

We didn't hear about the incentive program that we've heard so much about in his first term.

Throughout his first term talked about the problems of incentives, how he was going to fix them, what the new program is going to look like.

So these were he's kind of turning the page here and looking for some new initiatives.

He hasn't talked about this stuff before that other governors, 42 other governors have talked about.

So he is looking for new proposals.

I didn't necessarily see it as a sign of weakness, maybe acknowledging reality when he says he's going to work with the legislature.

Let's face it, he is in that lame duck territory.

He's heading into the homestretch.

This is his sixth.

And I have two more state of the state speeches after this.

So he's got to work with the legislature if he's going to get any of this done.

And so I think it's paying a nod to reality.

He does have bigger margins.

He defied history.

He got bigger legislative margins in the legislature, more Democrats to get these proposals through.

But they're going to have a mind of their own.

Colleen, is there room for the criticism that some of these items are a little short sighted?

I mean, how likely is it for any of the initiatives or most of these initiatives to become a reality?

I mean, we would think that that, yes, given that he does have, as Micah just pointed out, these larger Democratic majorities, that it should be safe to think that most of them would.

But in addition to calling for the the vote for school boards for 16 and 17 year olds, he reiterated his support for same day voter registration.

He's going to have to convince the Senate president to change his mind on that.

So I'm not sure if that one's going anywhere.

But certainly when we talk about the abortions as well, I think some of the new legislators coming in may have replaced even some Democrats who were kind of leery about expanding abortion rights.

So I think the chances are pretty good.

Might be a path there.

All right, Colleen Micah thanks to you both.

Thank you.

Thank you.