lies, lies and calumny, most of it isn’t even an island!
and what the hell, New England geography is crazy; Massachusetts is tiny, Maine is huge, then New York is giant but barely contains the city of New York, with Long Island sticking out taunting Connecticut, why isn’t New York City part of New Jersey??
Really if you were dividing the states based on economic regions, you’d split New Jersey in two (as it was during colonial times), with the southwestern portion now attached to Philadelphia (which would be split off from much of the rest of Pennsylvania, naturally), and the northeastern portion attached to a newly independent Greater New York City plus western Connecticut. This map of NFL fandoms shows a lot of the cultural variation. The portion of Connecticut filled with Giants fans is very similar to the border of New Haven colony, btw:
This is one of the reasons New Jersey politics are so famously corrupt - the state’s split between two of the most expensive media markets in the country, Philadelphia and New York, so statewide campaigns require you to splash big money into ads most of which will be seen by people ineligible to vote for you
Well that plus two other things: first, an astounding number of independent municipalities – what would be villages with no administrative autonomy in most states – are independent towns with their own governments
(in part cause because of the proximity to two major cities, New Jersey developed in pre-railroad days with arable land dedicated to truck farming supplying fresh fruits and vegetables to the urbanites, this is why it’s “The Garden State”)
Second, it’s legal and common for people to be elected to local and state government simultaneously
So you have a situation where there’s a superfluity of local government positions too numerous for intense oversight where everyone is tied into political machines that span several levels of government with the apex requiring an obscene amount of money to capture
