Mikie Sherrill is not prone to hyperbole. The Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey is measured and mainstream—even milquetoast, in the words of one progressive activist. But when I asked Sherrill what message a victory for her this November would send nationally, she made a rather bold declaration.

“As New Jersey goes, so goes the nation,” she told me.

This is a stretch. But maybe not by all that much.

New Jersey is no one’s idea of a swing state; it hasn’t voted Republican for president in nearly four decades, and it last elected a GOP senator during the Nixon administration. But the Garden State has been moving rightward these past few years—Donald Trump came within six points of winning its electoral votes last year—and the governor’s office has historically toggled between the parties.

This fall’s election holds outsize importance for Democrats, who want both to keep a Trump ally out of a key state office and to give their base some hope heading into the 2026 midterm elections. A win, Sherrill said, would represent the party’s shot across the bow against Trump’s second term.

The off-year governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia are closely scrutinized for signs of voter backlash to whichever party controls Washington. Usually Virginia, until recently a presidential battleground, provides the best clues about the national mood. This year, however, operatives in both parties believe that New Jersey might be the closer race and the more accurate barometer of how voters are reacting to Trump’s return tour in the White House.

In a shift from previous elections, national Democrats have spent far more money trying to hold the governorship of New Jersey than they have in the Virginia governor’s race. They’ve placed their hopes in Sherrill, a 53-year-old former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor, who in 2018 captured a House seat long held by Republicans. In June, she won a crowded party primary by defeating candidates to her left and to her right.

Sherrill is now facing the former Republican state legislator Jack Ciattarelli, a self-proclaimed Jersey guy running a loose and energetic campaign built around lowering property taxes, combatting crime, and making a crowd-pleasing appeal to bring plastic bags back to grocery stores. He has run for governor twice before and came within three points of upsetting the heavily favored Democratic incumbent Phil Murphy’s reelection bid in 2021.

Although Sherrill has leaned on her military service, Ciattarelli has mocked her as a predictable and occasionally ham-fisted Democrat; one of his most frequently aired ads shows her fumbling the answer to a seemingly straightforward question about what her first piece of legislation would be.

Sherrill and I spoke shortly after she addressed some 200 mostly nonwhite supporters at a restaurant in Newark, in an area where she wants to run up Democratic margins that have shrunk in recent elections as some Black and Hispanic voters either stayed home or voted Republican. The crowd was filled with local party officials and volunteers who were about to spend the afternoon knocking on doors for Sherrill and the rest of the Democratic ticket.

Nearly everyone I spoke with, however, said they had friends or neighbors who cast their ballot for Trump last year. “Some minorities believe they were taken for granted by Democrats,” Carlos Gonzalez, an at-large member of Newark’s city council, told me. “Trump won their votes by promising to lower their cost of living,” he said, “but the president hasn’t delivered. I am certain that they are going to come back to the Democratic Party because they feel that they were cheated.”

Sherrill was one of the only speakers who did not switch between English and Spanish, but in either language, the themes were the same: affordability and Trump.

“We have an out-of-control president who’s attacking the people we care about, and he’s attacking the economy of our state,” Sherrill said, presenting herself as a bulwark against threats to New Jersey from the Trump administration. She painted Ciattarelli, who secured the president’s endorsement in the GOP primary, as a Trump lackey. Her local surrogates made the same connection in more colorful terms.

“He is going to support the agenda of the orange man, and we don’t want the orange man to control the politics of New Jersey,” Gonzalez told them, and the audience cheered.

Ciattarelli’s actual history with Trump is more complicated than Democrats like to let on. A decade ago, while supporting then-Governor Chris Christie’s presidential bid, Ciattarelli called Trump a charlatan who was not fit to be president of the United States. He did not seek Trump’s endorsement during either of his first two runs for governor—a snub the president remembered when Ciattarelli finally sought Trump’s support earlier this year to fend off a more MAGA-friendly GOP competitor.

On the stump, Ciattarelli is neither obsequious nor critical toward the president. Instead, he plays Sherrill’s frequent criticism of Trump for laughs. He tells audiences that if they took a drink every time the Democrat blamed something on the president, they’d be “drunk off their ass.”

At a packed bar in Fair Lawn, a Democratic-leaning suburb about 20 miles northwest of New York City, Ciattarelli joked: “On your way home tonight, if you get a flat tire, she’s going to blame President Trump.” The line went over well with a crowd that, judging by its large number of MAGA hats and Trump shirts, would have been fine with more effusive praise of the president.

Several people cited Ciattarelli’s better-than-expected showing in 2021 and Trump’s relatively narrow loss in the state last year as reasons for optimism, as they did with the strong turnout for a Monday-evening campaign rally. Well over 100 people stood shoulder to shoulder to hear Ciattarelli deliver a brief speech.

“This is the best chance we’re going to have to turn New Jersey red,” Mike Messina, a 60-year-old retired police officer, told me.

Ciattarelli is a 63-year-old accountant with a deep tan that makes him look like he’s just come from the golf course or the beach. He’s had more freedom to barnstorm the state than Sherrill, whose day job as a House Democrat in the closely divided Congress has occasionally kept her off the campaign trail.

Some of Ciattarelli’s biggest applause lines—keeping wind farms off our Jersey Shore and bringing plastic bags back to the grocery stores—sit at the very edge of the culture wars.

“I could say I’m going to lower taxes, and I get a nice round of applause,” he observed in Fair Lawn. “I say I’m bringing back the plastic bags, and it brings down the house.”

On the topic of Trump, he’s a bit more careful and conventional. When I asked him after the event whether he’d like the president to campaign for him, Ciattarelli replied:

“I appreciate the president’s willingness to do whatever we think he can do to help us win this election, but at the end of the day, the candidate has to win the election.”

He predicted that the Democrats would bring in the party’s biggest stars, including former President Barack Obama, to help Sherrill in the campaign’s closing weeks.

“I’m going to bring in Jack Ciattarelli.”

Trump, himself a New Jersey property owner with a golf club in Bedminster, is keeping a close watch. A Quinnipiac University poll in mid-September showed Sherrill leading Ciattarelli by nine points. But when an Emerson College survey had the race tied last week, Trump seized on the finding to tout Ciattarelli and attack Sherrill.

Later that same day, the Sherrill campaign accused Trump’s administration of aiding Ciattarelli in a far more nefarious way: by releasing Sherrill’s full military records to an ally of the Republican in order to plant a negative story about her.

CBS News discovered the breach while investigating claims pushed by Republicans that Sherrill was barred from walking in her 1994 Naval Academy commencement because she had been implicated in a cheating scandal that involved more than 130 students. (Sherrill has said that she was punished for not reporting on her classmates.)

A branch of the National Archives acknowledged that a technician released too many of her records, including documents that contained her Social Security number and other sensitive information. Sherrill’s campaign claimed that the disclosure violated federal law.

“This is an illegal and dangerous weaponization of the federal government,” Sherrill wrote on X.

Republicans and Democrats can each draw hope from history. The New Jersey governor’s race typically swings away from whichever party won the presidency in the year before—a trend that would favor Sherrill. (Christie won the governorship during Obama’s first year in the White House, and Murphy grabbed it back for Democrats after Trump’s victory in 2016.)

Ciattarelli is banking on voters’ tendency to get tired of the Democrats holding power in Trenton, the state capital: “For more than half a century, neither party has won three governor’s races in a row.”

Sherrill and Ciattarelli both see an electorate that’s frustrated with the status quo and rising prices—particularly a spike in electricity bills. Sherrill has vowed to declare a state of emergency to freeze utility rates on her first day in office if she wins.

Ciattarelli is trying to localize the race, calling Sherrill “Murphy 2.0” and, though she has never served in state government, accusing her of backing policies that have contributed to high energy costs and property taxes.

“It’s a smart strategy,” Mike DuHaime, a New Jersey-based former top aide to Christie, told me. The challenge for Ciattarelli, and a reason both parties believe that Sherrill retains a small edge, is that Republicans have struggled over the past decade to win elections when Trump isn’t on the ballot. (The dynamic was the same for Democrats when Obama was in the White House.)

Democrats cleaned up in lower-turnout elections during Trump’s first term, and they have done the same so far this year.

“Can somebody who’s not Donald Trump turn out Donald Trump’s voters?” DuHaime asked. “It didn’t happen in 2017 or 2018. Is there something different in 2025? That’s what this election is a test of.”

The outcome in November could also help determine whether Democrats desperate for a path back to federal power gravitate toward candidates such as Sherrill and her House colleague Abigail Spanberger, the party’s nominee in Virginia.

Both women have a background in national security—Spanberger was a CIA agent—and moderate voting records. They’re both waging campaigns devoted to kitchen-table economic issues such as affordability.

(Another amusing biographical twist: Sherrill grew up in Virginia, and Spanberger was born in New Jersey.)

Victories this fall could put one or both women in the conversation for a spot on the Democrats’ national ticket in 2028.

Polls have given Spanberger a wider edge in Virginia than Sherrill in New Jersey, a dynamic that political strategists attribute to a weaker GOP opponent, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, and the disproportionate impact that the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal workforce have had on the state.

Democratic leaders in New Jersey, however, are confident about Sherrill’s chances. Senator Cory Booker, who is up for reelection next year, told me that the Trump administration’s cuts to health-care programs and its aggressive deportation raids have turned the Latino community against him—a shift that polling has also captured.

The president’s low approval, Booker argued, would drag Ciattarelli down.

“It is stunning to me that he’s not trying to distance himself from somebody who’s wildly unpopular in New Jersey,” Booker said.

Sherrill made clear that she was aware that, as much as voters might disapprove of Trump right now, they’re not falling back in love with Democrats, either.

“What I’m largely hearing from people is that they’re disappointed with both parties. They’re sort of in a nonpartisan place,” Sherrill told me. “They felt unheard by the Democratic Party, and now they feel swindled by the Republican Party.”

Sherrill had not served in elected office before winning her House seat in the Democrats’ 2018 wave. Her military and law-enforcement background helps her appeal to voters who pay little attention to politics, Senator Andy Kim told me.

“She’s not somebody that looks and sounds like somebody who came up through politics their entire life,” he said.

Kim, who served alongside Sherrill in the House before winning a Senate seat last year, told me that the two bonded over their shared experiences as parents of young children—Sherrill has four kids—in Congress. After Sherrill won the primary for governor in June, they talked at length about the state and pored over data gleaned from his 2024 campaign.

“She’s a general-election juggernaut,” Kim said.

Not all Democrats find Sherrill that impressive or exciting.

Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and a former spokesperson for New Jersey’s Democratic Party, is the one who called Sherrill milquetoast, and he endorsed two of her opponents during the primary.

He’s warning Democrats not to see her as a model for 2026 and beyond, urging the party instead to embrace candidates willing to campaign more boldly and aggressively against corporate greed.

“Mikie Sherrill will likely win because of the blue color of her team jersey,” Green told me, “but it will not be because of anything new or inspiring [she offered], or because she tapped into an outsider economic-populist zeitgeist that this moment calls for nationally.”

What Sherrill does have that some Democrats do not, however, is a record of electoral success: She has prevailed in every campaign she’s entered so far.

When I asked her about Green’s critique, she pointed to that winning record.

“I’m presenting a vision of New Jersey that the people of New Jersey want to see, for their kids, for their costs,” Sherrill said. “That’s been pretty compelling so far, and I think it will be in November as well.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/the-democrats-first-must-win-test-of-trumps-second-term/684360/