Whoever becomes New Jersey’s governor next year will oversee a state business climate fraught with high taxes, rising unemployment , lagging gross domestic product and the fallout from President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which have triggered a sluggish job market and the prospect of a recession — not to mention the fears of an artificial intelligence bubble burst.

Some of those issues — like Trump’s tariffs and the rise of AI displacing portions of the labor market — “certainly pose challenges that would be hard to combat via state policy alone,” said Will Irving, a professor at the New Jersey State Policy Lab at Rutgers University.

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