TRENTON -- Phil who? Kim who? Jack who? Jim who?

This is not a Dr. Seuss rhyme. It's the grim political reality confronting campaign managers of the 11 candidates seeking to become their party's nominee for governor of New Jersey.

Last month, a Stockton University poll found about a third of Garden State voters said they haven't heard enough about the front-runners, Democrat Phil Murphy and Republican Kim Guadagno, to form an opinion of them.

And that's after Murphy spent the last year and some $16 million of his own fortune plastering his name on virtually every TV screen, radio station, newspaper and website in the state, and with Guadagno serving as lieutenant governor for seven years.

Why aren't voters tuning in? And what is the bumper crop of governor candidates doing to drive voter turnout?

"It's going to be close to or a record low," said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. "You have to be a hardcore partisan to have any faith in politics."

Over the last 90 years, primary voter turnout for New Jersey governor's races has never cracked 40 percent and went as low as 9 percent four years ago. Murray says New Jersey would be lucky to hit 12 percent in next week's election.

"Between the national political situation and most New Jerseyans feeling we've had a governor who's turned his back on the state for the last few years, it's turned off a lot of people to politics," he said.

Part of the problem, of course, is that New Jersey sits nestled between the New York and Philadelphia media markets, with few ways to speak directly to most residents.

"We still live in a media desert," said Brad Lawrence, the head of the New Brunswick marketing firm 4CM&M, and the ad guru behind Murphy's campaign.

Still, it's a desert that's seen plenty of green poured into it, thanks largely to Murphy.

In all, the 11 major-party gubernatorial candidates have raised more than $28.1 million, but two thirds of that has been Phil Murphy donations, and most of those have come from the candidate himself.

In total, Murphy's raised more than $19 million, with about half a million from donations of $300 or less. Murphy took in more than $7.7 million in the reporting period of 2017 ending May 5, but $5.5 million was a loan he made to the campaign.

By comparison, Guadagno, the Republican front-runner, has raised $2.2 million and spent just over $700,000 according to state Election Law Enforcement Commission data.

"It is a difficult place to get your message across," Lawrence said. "There are very few places where you can get reliable New Jersey information, so it is very, very hard to reach critical mass. It's like throwing a pebble into the ocean."

But there have been plenty of pebbles thrown, too.

Murphy's currently fielding two different TV ads in the home-stretch. The first poses him as a bulwark against the Trump agenda. The second ad tries to inoculate him against criticism from Democratic rivals tying him to the unpopular Goldman Sachs. These spots stress his humble, lower-middle class origins and promise a tough stance against Wall Street.

"I'll close corporate tax breaks and end hedge funds ripping off taxpayers," Murphy says in the spot.

Guadagno, facing stiff competition from state Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, has two ads running on broadcast, cable and radio, too: Her original "Better" ad, running since she declared her candidacy, and an attack ad against "High Tax Jack" Ciattarelli.

As the primary draws to a close, victory will hinge on candidates leveraging the most local and most small-fry of networks, regardless of which party they belong to.

Dave Huguenel, Guadagno's campaign manager, acknowledged that "there may be fatigue" from the relentless drumbeat of controversy emanating out of the Trump White House, but that his candidate is subscribing to the all-politics-is-local maxim.

Huguenel noted that while most garden variety Garden State voters might not recognize Guadagno, she's "a known and well-liked commodity" among the 400 odd local mayors, freeholders, and legislators who've endorsed her because she's spent the last seven years visiting them as Christie's jobs and employment chief.



"This is the time when those things start to matter," he said. "Folks like that have their own miniature infrastructure on a local or county level, so having 400 of those across all 21 counties, that's the type of infrastructure that you need in a primary climate like the one we're going into on Tuesday."

Meanwhile, even though "The End is Near" signs may not be the most uplifting or cheerful messages for voters, it's nonetheless been appropriated by Ciattarelli.

Ciattarelli's spokesman, Rick Rosenberg, emailed this response to the question of how his campaign hoped to break through to voters who seem nonplussed at best and checked out at worst.

"After seven-plus years as the second in command to an incredibly unpopular governor, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno will lose badly in November," Rosenberg warned. "Worse, if she is the nominee, it threatens to wipe out good, hardworking Republicans down ballot. We can't allow that."

Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.