New Jersey’s race for governor puts Trump to the test

New Jersey elects a new governor Tuesday in a race closely watched to see if President Donald Trump’s shocking gains in the state last year were a sign of conservative strength in deep blue states or an anomaly.

Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a former state assemblymember, is running for governor a third time, and after a closer-than-expected loss four years ago is seeking to capitalize on Trump’s gains in what had been a reliably blue state. Unlike in his last race four years ago, when he kept an arm's-length from Trump, Ciattarelli is going full MAGA.

Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who was New Jersey’s vanguard of the 2018 blue wave, is banking on the anti-Trump sentiment that helped sweep her to Washington to now put her in Trenton.

The tight race — along with Virginia, one of just two contests for governor this year — will be read as an augur for the 2026 midterms, so Democratic elected official surrogates and Trump World social media influencers are practically jamming up the New Jersey Turnpike to get in on the action.

Below the surface, though, is a familiar undercurrent: voter fatigue after years of Democratic control under Gov. Phil Murphy, coupled with frustration over high taxes, energy costs and the sense that affordability never improves no matter who’s in charge.

“This is a New Jersey election, but it's also a national election,” Democratic New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said on a Democratic National Committee get-out-the-vote call ahead of Election Day.

New Jersey Democrats used to be certain they could count on Trump outrage, and Sherrill has focused much of her campaign message on combating Trump.

“The reason that I talk about the Trump administration is because we are seeing an attack on that basic contract — that basic middle-class contract — that you should be able to do well and your kids should be able to do better,” she told reporters on Thursday. “He is attacking our economy. We are seeing it in the jobs numbers. We are seeing it in schools and the innovation economy we run, and Jack Ciattarelli is going right along with him and supporting that plan.”

During Trump’s first term, he helped fuel the flip of many of the state’s upper-middle-class, traditionally-Republican suburbs firmly into Democratic camps. Those places, including Ciattarelli's native Somerset County, remain blue. But the president’s major 2024 inroads among working-class Black and Hispanic voters in urban North Jersey — with him cutting margins close in heavily Democratic towns and even winning urban Passaic to lose the state by only six points — threaten to undermine that Democratic coalition.

And while virtually all polls show Trump’s approval rating underwater in New Jersey, it’s not as low as it was in his first term. And in several, his popularity is roughly the same as Murphy’s (in at least one recent poll the Democratic governor was significantly more unpopular than Trump).

“You’ve seen the Democrats run a campaign that’s happy to talk about ‘Trump, Trump, Trump,’” said Carlos Cruz, a Republican consultant who advises a pro-Ciattarelli super PAC. “But the reality is he’s kind of locked in. He is where he is. He’s underwater, but I wouldn’t say he has bad numbers.”

Now Ciattarelli is working to ensure the shift toward Trump is permanent, winning Democratic endorsements in diverse towns and campaigning in those areas aggressively. Sherrill, who in the closing days of the campaign has taken to speaking Spanish at rallies, is counting on urban Democratic turnout machines and blue-tinted suburbs to carry the election.

Ciattarelli has capitalized on a Democratic feud in Hudson County to win the endorsement of the mayor Nick Sacco of North Bergen — an urban, heavily Hispanic Democratic town Trump lost by just six points. But Sherrill has the strong support of Democratic Union City mayor and state Sen. Brian Stack, a Sacco rival who runs one of the most effective political machines in the state. Sherrill spent part of her Election Day eve campaigning with Stack.

But Democratic operatives believe New Jersey’s rightward shift in 2024 was unique to Trump, noting that he overperformed — though nowhere near as dramatically — with traditional Democratic constituencies in 2016 and 2020, only for Democrats to win them by higher margins when Trump wasn’t on the ballot, while anti-Trump sentiment remained intense.

“If I’m Jack Ciattarelli, I’m very concerned about the numbers the president has right now, how people view the economy and the constant chaos coming out of Washington,” said Dan Bryan, a Democratic operative and former spokesperson for Murphy. “We’ve got no reason to believe that Trump's inroads from ‘16, ‘20 or ‘24 for that matter have ever transferred to anyone else.”

Sherrill has led in almost every poll, though narrowly in some. The race tightened in the fall, but in its closing days every public poll shows Sherrill maintaining a single-digit lead — though in some it is within the margin of error.

Many New Jersey Democrats POLITICO spoke with were confident Sherrill would win, but not by much, with the consensus around three to five points.

“Most Democrats would be thrilled if she won by three,” said Adam Green, co-founder Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “They should celebrate their victory for New Jersey policy purposes. It’s crazy to celebrate underperforming Kamala Harris in a year when Democrats should have the wind at our back.”

If Sherrill’s margin of victory is under Harris’ 2024 margin of 6 points, that is a sign that Democrats “have a long term problem with the working class,” said Jesse Hunt, a former communications director at the Republican Governors Association.

“If you see a smaller margin in New Jersey, you’d see that despite Democrats trying to course correct, they still have a reckoning to do at a 30,000-foot level with the Democratic brand,” he added.

The race has seen a huge infusion of cash from national Democrats and Republicans. With roughly two weeks before Election Day, the Democratic Governors Association had poured $16 million into a super PAC helping Sherrill, while the RGA was not far behind at $12 million.

Former President Barack Obama; Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro; Maryland Gov. Wes Moore; Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg; and former Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords and her husband, Sen. Mark Kelly — a New Jersey native — have all made appearances for Sherrill, among others.

Trump has not come to the state for Ciattarelli, but hosted a tele town hall for him in late October, calling Sherrill “terrible” and saying her “energy policies would send your prices soaring and make New Jersey even more expensive than it already is.” Trump held another tele town hall Monday night.

Ciattarelli has relied on other MAGA surrogates to boost the Republican base — while also attempting not to alienate independent voters who may have a negative perception of the president.

“There’s 300,000 people in the state of New Jersey that feel differently about the president than they did back in 2020,” Ciattarelli said in a recent interview with MAGA influencer Benny Johnson. “I’m so happy to have his active involvement, certainly his endorsement, and it’s created a whole lot of energy around the state. But at the end of the day, the candidate’s got to go out there and win the election.”

Both candidates can find optimism in decades of the state’s voting trends. With Murphy leaving office after two terms, Republicans can take heart in the fact that the state hasn’t elected a governor from the same party three times in a row in 64 years. But Democrats can point to the fact that in eight of the last nine gubernatorial elections, the candidate of the presidential incumbent’s party lost. The exception was Murphy’s win over Ciattarelli in 2021, though his three point margin was far narrower than expected.

Rising energy bills have dominated much of the race after New Jersey faced a 20 percent hike in June, which Ciattarelli blames on Murphy’s priority on renewable energy and a state plan to require all power be generated through such sources through 2035. Sherrill has blamed the PJM, the regional transmission organization, and has vowed to “freeze” electric rates — a proposal of questionable legality.

But Trump handed Sherrill even more fodder when trying to apply pressure to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in the shutdown fight, vaguely stating that he “terminated” the multi-billion Gateway rail project between New Jersey and Manhattan — sorely-needed for New Jersey commuters who rely on increasingly unreliable 120-year-old tunnels to get to work, and a lynchpin for regional economic growth. Ciattarelli has said that he thinks the president is playing “hardball” with the funding and expressed confidence that the project would continue to be worked on.

“Jack Ciattarelli says he agrees with everything Trump has been doing. Gives him an ‘A’ grade. How can you look at an attack on New Jersey like this and give it anything but an ‘F’,” Buttigieg said at a campaign event for Sherrill Thursday at a train station.

Adam Wren contributed to this report.