New Jersey Republicans had high hopes on Election Day thanks to Trump’s gains. Now they’re deeper in the wilderness.

Going into Election Day, New Jersey Republicans were as confident as a perennial minority party could be about reclaiming the governor’s office.

They believed the stars had finally aligned, pointing to Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli’s narrow loss in 2021, Donald Trump’s surprising gains with urban Hispanic voters in 2024 and a summer spike in energy rates that angered voters.

The result, though, was a sharp rejection of Trump-style politics in a state that has long flirted with Republican governors yet recoiled from national extremism. It underscored how the former president’s grip on the GOP — and Ciattarelli’s decision to embrace it — drowned out the local issues that once defined New Jersey campaigns.

“The bottom line is Jack went 100 percent in for the MAGA brand as opposed to being the Jersey brand,” said GOP state Sen. Jon Bramnick, New Jersey’s most outspoken Republican Trump critic, who finished a distant third in the primary for governor and saw his two Assembly running mates lose Tuesday as Democrats grew their majority in the lower house by at least three seats.

New Jerseyans have for decades voted Democratic in federal elections but kept an open mind when electing governors. The state hasn’t elected a Republican U.S. senator since 1972, but in that time has elected and reelected three Republican governors.

That was by design. New Jersey’s constitutional framers nearly 80 years ago set elections for governor and state Legislature in odd years so that campaigns would revolve around local issues and not be swept up by presidential campaigns.

But between Trump’s high-profile political provocations and the decline in local media, there’s been less oxygen for state issues. And both Ciattarelli and Sherrill leaned into that.

“I have seen congressional republicans across the country find an area they carve out and say ‘Mr. President, respectfully, I’m not with you on this one,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “Why couldn’t Jack do that?”

While Ciattarelli late in the campaign kept some distance from Trump, he graded the president’s performance with an “A” during the gubernatorial debate, at one point declined to name a policy they disagree on and wouldn’t even criticize Trump when he announced that New Jersey’s biggest infrastructure project — the Gateway Tunnel to Manhattan — was “terminated.”

“People really can feel the increase in the utility prices, but the most overwhelming issue when you get together with people at dinner is Trump vs. non-Trump. So that won the day,” Bramnick said.

That’s not to say Sherrill and Ciattarelli didn’t campaign on state issues. Ciattarelli made rising utility rates a huge part of his campaign, blaming Democrats’ clean energy policies for a nearly 20 percent rate hike in the summer, while Sherrill sought to blunt that message by pledging to freeze utility rates and to declare a state of emergency on utility costs.

But Sherrill relentlessly tied Ciattarelli to Trump and his party, even as Ciattarelli sought to amp up the Trump base by attending a rally with far-right influencers who peddled conspiracy theories. She also faced some criticism for her campaign being too heavy on staffers with a background in Washington instead of New Jersey.

“We’re not going to give in to our darker impulses. Here in New Jersey, we know this nation has not ever been, nor will it ever be ruled by kings,” Sherrill said at her victory party.

New Jersey Democratic State Chair LeRoy Jones said Trump was his party’s “single biggest motivating tool.”

“The SNAP benefits, the whole government shutdown. And people were kind of blaming that on the [federal] majority party for the most part,” Jones said. “ We just kept hammering that home and tying Ciattarelli to Trump.”

Jones said Ciattarelli’s close loss in 2021 was largely a reaction to the growing unpopularity of then-Democratic President Joe Biden.

“Fast forward to 2025, after 10 months of Trump and some of the extreme policies he initiated, people responded to what they were seeing on the national stage,” said Jones.

Jones said urban voters, the cornerstone of Democratic turnout who showed up so poorly for Kamala Harris in 2024, weren’t just motivated by rhetoric. The uncertainty over SNAP benefits, the “weaponization” of the Justice Department, sending the military into cities and aggressive immigration raids that hit their friends and relatives made them feel threatened.

“It’s just a perfect storm of stuff that people are tired of,” Jones said.