South Jersey does not exist.
It is not in the realm of states.
There is no South Jersey on the map, like South Dakota or South Carolina.
Some believe it doesn’t exist at all in the minds of politicians controlling the state Legislature, except as a concept around the territory of Senate President Steven Sweeney who is based in Camden County. (Atlantic City is a city known throughout the nation, and although it is in south Jersey it is literally and figuratively an island unto itself.)
Deep South Jersey means Cape May and Cumberland counties, and perhaps Salem County.
If you were looking to split the state in half, the rough midpoint geographically would be the tops of Burlington and Ocean counties.
In recent weeks I have interviewed the freshman legislators who represent deep south Jersey – Sen. Michael L. Testa Jr. of Vineland and Assemblymen Erik Simonsen of Lower Township and Antwan McClellan of Ocean City. Talking to them is a reminder that they have to speak up to remind the majority of the Legislature deep south Jersey does indeed exist.
When I tell people who aren’t from the greater Philadelphia region – and who know better – that I live in south Jersey, they comprehend geographically but not in reality. They know of Atlantic City. Beyond that, all of New Jersey is I-95 traffic and petrochemical plants.
I explain that when they look at a map of the state and go all the way to the bottom, they will see a part of the state that is mostly green, with plenty of farms, a major fishing industry and an economy based on shore tourism, and that we’re not reliant on Tony Soprano and his friends. (The show ended years ago but the image of New Jersey hasn’t changed.)
I had the same experience spending seven years working at a daily newspaper in the northwest corner of Massachusetts that I left more than 23 years ago to come here.
When I told people I was from Massachusetts, I had to point them to Boston, then tell them to look at the opposite end of the state in the rural Berkshires. (To those east of Route 495, the Berkshires only mattered as the summer home of the Boston Pops and the Williamstown Theatre Festival.)
There was that same sentiment about legislators in the capital not caring about what was happening in the far western part of the state, even though it was only about a two and a quarter hour drive from Boston to the Berkshires. They thought it was so far away.
They also thought Massachusetts was a big state; their perspective was skewed because they compared it to tiny Rhode Island.
There was also the feeling among the locals that they would have been better served by the New York Legislature because Albany was an hour and a half closer than Beacon Hill.
When the Associated Press would write about a story happening in North Adams, the small town where I worked and lived, it would always include a description of the community with some variant on “decaying little mill city.” New England was filled with decaying little mill cities so North Adams was relegated to that designation and not much more. Because the majority of the state’s population was east of Route 495, they didn’t know better.
Far away from the capital and the population center, that was all the description the area needed.
During interviews with McClellan, Simonsen and Testa, they all talked about being Republicans in a Legislature and state controlled by Democrats. Those three are in the political minority, which they acknowledge makes it harder to get things done, but it seems their real lower status, if you want to call it that, comes from representing a part of south Jersey that most of the legislators can’t relate to and may have never visited.
They don’t understand what it’s all about down here. Well, that’s not true. They do know this is the place to vacation at the shore.
If only they’d remember that our tourism revenue funds programs where they are too.
David Nahan is editor and publisher of the Ocean City Sentinel, Cape May Star and Wave, Upper Township Sentinel and The Sentinel of Somers Point, Linwood and Northfield.