Copyright vanityfair
In Red Bank, the Republican candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, is making the third of today’s five stops, part of his “Diner Tour,” though this location is more of an upscale bar and restaurant. The place is packed with a surprisingly boozy crowd for a midweek afternoon. Ciattarelli largely owes his status as the nominee to his loyalty to Trump. Yet the president’s approval rating in New Jersey is just 36%. So does Ciattarelli want Trump to come to the state and campaign in the final days of the general election? “He’s helping us,” Ciattarelli tells me noncommittally as he starts to edge away. I try again: Do you want him here in New Jersey? “We’re working in partnership with the White House to do whatever works for the campaign,” Ciattarelli says, turning his back and heading out the door. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, started the day in Atlantic City. Now the four-term congresswoman is up north, in Belleville, at a county Democratic dinner, with the standing ovation from the crowd echoing behind her as she ducks into an empty room. Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor, is a disciplined person, and at first she doggedly sticks to her talking points—until I ask about Trump. Then Sherrill leans back from the waist, grimaces, and makes a pained, guttural sound, something like, “Unnhhhh.” It’s spontaneous, funny, and evocative of how viscerally Sherrill feels about the stakes of her race. There are significant local issues shaping the face-off, including the climbing cost of electricity and tax hikes by the outgoing two-term Democratic governor, Phil Murphy. But New Jersey’s contest is one of only two gubernatorial off-year, statewide elections in 2025, and it is significantly closer than the other matchup in Virginia, where Democrat Abigail Spanberger appears to have a solid lead. Sherrill has been consistently ahead in most polls, but usually by around five or so points. David Wildstein, the founder and editor of the New Jersey Globe—a political news site—and a state Republican insider, thinks the race is even tighter than the public polling shows. “I just caution everybody how wrong Jersey polls have been lately,” he says. “A week before the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris was double digits ahead, and Trump came within six.” That recent history is one reason to believe things are close. Another is that New Jersey’s Democratic registration numbers have been bleeding for years, with independents growing to become the second-largest bloc. A longer-term headwind for Sherrill is that New Jersey voters have not awarded either the Democrats or Republicans a third straight term in the governor’s office since 1961. “If Trump wasn’t in the White House, Ciattarelli would be up by 12 or 15 points,” says Steven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, who ran in the Democratic gubernatorial primary last spring and is now backing Sherrill. “Ciattarelli is running a great campaign, but the deal he made with Donald Trump to secure the nomination could be the reason he doesn’t win this thing.” In 2015, Ciattarelli labeled Trump a “charlatan”; in 2016, he said Trump should drop out of the race. Last year, though, he endorsed Trump’s bid, which in return helped earn Ciattarelli a Republican primary endorsement from the president this year. Throughout the campaign, Sherrill has portrayed her opponent as a Trump loyalist, and the president recently helped her cause by declaring he was “terminating” the construction of the $16 billion Gateway Tunnel, a project that would speed the commute to New York City for thousands of New Jersey residents. Ciattarelli had said that he didn’t plan on suing the Trump administration, giving Sherrill an opening. “I fought tooth and nail for this for years [as a congresswoman]. We finally got the federal share. This could be responsible for almost 100,000 jobs,” she tells me in Belleville. “But Jack has basically said, ‘It’s not a New Jersey problem.’ I’m like, whose problem is it? What New Jersey wants is a leader, not a lackey. And that’s basically what he’s shown himself to be.” In campaign ads, Ciattarelli and his allies have accused Sherrill of favoring green energy no matter the cost and making misleading statements about her involvement in a cheating scandal at the Naval Academy when she was an undergraduate. (A Republican ad hitting Sherrill over energy costs took a clip of her out of context. In 1994, Sherrill did not walk at her graduation, she says, because she would not inform on her classmates; Ciattarelli has implied that her association with a scandal reflects poorly on her, although Sherrill went on to serve as a Naval officer for nearly 10 years.) In person, often in shirtsleeves, Ciattarelli is smoother. In Red Bank, he worked the room, signing autographs and posing for photos, including one with a guy wearing a T-shirt depicting Trump and Mike Tyson. When a woman wearing a back brace stands next to him, Ciattarelli is quick to quip, “It wasn’t a tax burden from the Democrats that broke your back?” Ciattarelli nearly pulled off an upset of Murphy in 2021, attacking the incumbent over COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates. He seems determined to keep this year’s campaign within the state’s borders. “I understand the narrative about the implications this has for the Trump midterms next year,” he tells me in Red Bank, “but there’s only one implication I’m worried about—the future of New Jersey. We got to win this race and put the state in a different direction.” Then he was off to a rally in East Brunswick. Sherrill’s last stop of the day was in the North Jersey middle-class town of West Orange, in front of about 150 people cramming all the pews of the Nia Fellowship Baptist Church. The room vibrated with anger and enthusiasm. Sherrill had been on the road for more than 12 hours, but instead of sounding tired, she was inspired and loose. “I’m not going to ask you to vote, because if you’ve come out tonight and you’re not voting, we’re in a lot of trouble,” Sherrill says, drawing laughs. She talked about the nuances of phonics in schools and cutting red tape for small businesses. But she closed with a declaration that’s both political and patriotic, and crosses state lines. “There’s something that the world over is known as the American Dream,” Sherrill says. “It’s not too much to ask, and yet at every single turn we see it being attacked from Washington, DC. So I’m running for governor to draw the line, to say not here, not here in New Jersey.” One state operative says the race will turn on whether suburban voters blame their troubles on Trenton (good for Ciattarelli) or Washington (good for Sherrill). Yet the results will also signal larger trends. Julie Roginsky, a veteran New Jersey Democratic strategist, started seeing a Latino shift to the right in 2021, a change that benefited Trump last year. “Will that still be the case?” she asks. “Or are Latino voters horrified by what they’re seeing from Washington?” Another top New Jersey Democratic strategist is more anxious about what the outcome may say about Trump’s ability to overwhelm the political system. “We’re in the middle of a government shutdown, right?” he says. “If New Jersey, in an off-year election, with all Trump’s doing, can’t elect a Democrat, then this whole concept that we have all acclimated and are nonplussed by what he’s doing is very real—we’re almost fucking immune to it.”
