Democratic New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill easily defeated Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli on Tuesday in the race to be the next governor of New Jersey, multiple outlets project.
Sherrill won by a wider than expected margin with 56.2% of the vote compared to Ciattarelli who garnered 43.2%, with over 95% of the vote in, according to CNN. The congresswoman will succeed term-limited Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, whom Ciattarelli lost to by a narrow margin in 2021.
Despite winning by a double-digit margin, Sherrill was consistently leading in polls by mostly single-digit margins in the final stretch of the race. In a Suffolk University poll conducted Oct. 26-29, she led by four points, in an Emerson College poll taken Oct. 25-28, she led by two points and in a Quinnipiac University poll held Oct. 23-28, she led by eight.
Ciattarelli, unlike unsuccessful Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Winsome Earle-Sears, received the endorsement of President Donald Trump for both the primary and general elections. The president called on New Jersey voters to back Ciattarelli in a tele-rally held on Monday evening.
Meanwhile, Sherrill’s campaign summoned the help of a host of national Democratic figures to stump for her on the campaign trail as polls tightened leading up to Election Day.
Former President Barack Obama made an appearance at a Saturday rally for Sherrill in Newark. Appearing alongside the Democratic candidate, Obama claimed that the U.S. is in “a pretty dark place right now” but Sherrill’s election would “set a glorious example for this nation.”
Similarly, former Biden administration Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg also came to New Jersey to campaignfor Sherrill, in the week before the vote.
Sherrill made headlines in late September when the New Jersey Globe first reported that she was barred from walking in her 1994 graduation ceremony from the United States Naval Academy after failing to report her peers who took part in a large-scale exam cheating scandal. Ciattarelli capitalized on this revelation, writing in a Sept. 25 X post that Sherrill “built her entire political brand around her time at the Naval Academy and in the Navy, all the while concealing her involvement in the scandal and her punishment.”
The Democrat responded to the attack stating, “Jack continues to try and use any avenue he can to execute the MAGA playbook of smearing military service,” and referred to the scandal as a “30-year-old widely reported incident.”
Sherrill also notably declined to endorse Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist, when asked her thoughts on the contest at a gubernatorial forum in early October.
“I am not getting engaged in that race because I’m completely focused on New Jersey. I’m going to let the people of New York decide that race,” Sherrill said, referring to the election in the nation’s largest city, which shares a border with New Jersey and has much of its metropolitan area contained within the Garden State.
Data cited by the Regional Plan Association in late 2024 show that nearly four in 10 workers who commute to New York City come from New Jersey.
Failed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won New Jersey over Trump by just under six points in 2024. This marked a 10-point shift to the right for the Garden State from 2020, when Trump lost it to former President Joe Biden by 16 points. The state last voted for a Republican for president in 1988. Trump’s increase in support in New Jersey was in part due to the significant gains he made among Hispanic and Latino voters between 2020 and 2024.
Ciattarelli, who served in the New Jersey General Assembly from 2011 to 2018, made national headlines when he fell just three points short of unseating Murphy in 2021, a result that most observers at the time viewed as a surprise. A Monmouth University poll released a week before Election Day 2021 showed Murphy with a double-digit lead over the Republican. Ciattarelli sought the New Jersey governor’s mansion in 2017 but lost in the Republican Primary.
The race to lead New Jersey, along with Virginia’s gubernatorial election held the same day — which was won by Democratic nominee Abigail Spanberger — marked the first two gubernatorial races of Trump’s second term.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Nfeld / Wikimedia Commons)
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