Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the New Jersey governor’s race, NBC News projects, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli after a hard-fought contest in which President Donald Trump loomed over voters’ choice.
Sherrill worked to make the race a referendum on the president, casting Ciattarelli as a Trump acolyte who will not stand up to the president.
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“He’ll do whatever Trump tells him to do, and I will fight anybody to work for you,” Sherrill said in their first debate in October.
Trump made gains across the country in 2024, but his second-biggest gain in any state came in New Jersey. The president lost the state by 6 points last year, a 10-point improvement over his margin in the 2020 election. Now, Sherrill's victory sends a signal that Republicans can't expect those improved results from Trump to represent a straight line forward into future elections. Instead, the party is facing headwinds, as voters react to the president's handling of the economy and other issues.
Following Trump's closer-than-expected finish in 2024, the New Jersey governor’s race drew more than $100 million in ad spending from both parties, according to AdImpact. The contest presented an early test, ahead of next year’s midterm elections, of how to appeal to swingy Latino voters and navigate rising costs, especially for electricity. Democrats also looked to energize their party’s core supporters, particularly Black voters, while Republicans confronted the persistent challenge of turning out Trump’s supporters when he is not on the ballot.
A majority of New Jersey voters (54%) disapproved of Trump’s job as president and nearly two-thirds were dissatisfied or angry about the direction of the country, according to the NBC News exit poll.
Trump was also a factor for a slim majority of New Jersey voters, with Sherrill winning virtually all of the 38% of voters who said their vote was to oppose Trump, while Ciattarelli won the 13% of voters who said their vote was to support Trump.
Both Sherrill and Ciattarelli focused much of their campaign on the state’s high cost of living, and voters said taxes, the economy and health care were among the most important issues facing the state. While Ciattarelli won over voters who said taxes were the most important issue, Sherrill won over voters who said the economy and health care were most important.
Sherrill, 53, sharply criticized Trump on the campaign trail, often saying that Trump administration’s policies were “raising costs on everything from a cup of coffee to your groceries,” pledging to join a lawsuit against Trump’s tariff policies on her first day in office.
Ciattarelli, 63, largely praised Trump, who endorsed Ciattarelli in the GOP primary, but he also argued that the president did not have control over the state’s high cost of living and high taxes.
Ciattarelli, meanwhile, sought to make the race a referendum on Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy — who could not run for re-election due to term limits — and the Democrats who control state government. Ciattarelli lost a surprisingly close 3-point race to Murphy in 2021.
“New Jersey, we need change,” Ciattarelli said during his first debate against Sherrill, suggesting the state was facing four major crises in affordability, public education, public safety and overdevelopment.
But it was not enough for Ciattarelli to pull off a win.
While a slim majority of voters (51%) disapproved of Murphy’s job as governor, Sherrill won over 19% of them. And 45% approved of Murphy.
Sherrill also won over voters Ciattarelli was hoping to put in his column, including independents. She handily won Latino voters, despite Trump's gains in heavily Latino parts of the state last year.
New Jersey also continued its historic trend of the party that controls the White House has losing eight of the state’s previous 10 gubernatorial races. Sherrill, meanwhile, bucked a different historic trend, helping her party win three consecutive gubernatorial elections for the first time since 1961.
Sherrill’s climb to the governorship during Trump’s second term comes after she was first elected to Congress in the 2018 blue wave that followed Trump’s first presidential victory. In that race, when she flipped a longtime Republican House seat, Sherrill stressed her background as a Navy pilot, a former prosecutor and a mom of four kids, as she did in her campaign for governor.
She won a hotly contested primary for the Democratic nomination this year, and many of Sherrill’s supporters backed her because they viewed her as most likely to win and most likely to take on Trump.
Sherrill’s main focus on the campaign trail was on the state’s high cost of living. She pledged to declare a state of emergency on utility costs on her first day in office, freezing electricity rates and then working to bring down the costs.
The four-term congresswoman also pledged to fight the Trump administration over federal funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project, a massive project to add rail tunnels between New York and New Jersey. Trump recently said he canceled funding for the project amid the federal government shutdown.
Sherrill was also boosted in the race by Democratic allies, with outside groups spending more than $40 million on ads casting Ciattarelli as beholden to Trump and targeting Ciattarelli’s record in the state Legislature. Big-name Democratic surrogates, including some potential 2028 presidential contenders, also hit the campaign trail to support Sherrill, with former President Barack Obama rallying supporters over the weekend.
