Mikie Sherrill is projected to win Tuesday’s gubernatorial race in New Jersey. It’s a major relief for Democrats, who appeared to be struggling to regain the support they lost in the state last year.
Sherrill — a House Democrat and former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor — defeated Jack Ciattarelli, a former state representative who has unsuccessfully run for governor three times, The Associated Press projected.
“I know your struggles, I know your hopes, I know your dreams. So serving you is worth any tough fight I have to take on, and I am incredibly honored to be your next governor,” Sherrill told a crowd in New Jersey on Tuesday night.
The race was neck and neck into its final days, with a poll finding Sherrill leading Ciattarelli by just 1 percentage point in the days leading up to the election.
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It was the state’s first gubernatorial contest since New Jersey saw a sizable rightward shift toward Republicans in the 2024 presidential election, which included blue-to-red flips in multiple counties. The state has seen rising Republican voter registration.
Sherrill erased those rightward gains on Tuesday; every single county in New Jersey shifted left compared to the 2024 presidential election, according to The New York Times, and NBC exit polling suggests that Sherrill’s win erased gains made by Trump in 2024 among Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters.
New Jersey Democrats viewed the race as a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency so far. It was also a test of Democrats’ ability to amp up voter outreach, something several state party operatives told NOTUS was lacking last year.
They succeeded, at least partially, on those fronts on Tuesday.
Sherrill’s win marks the first time in the state since 1965 that the same party will hold the governor’s seat for three consecutive terms.
Democrats’ victory came despite the state’s move to the right, and reports that she was tied to a class-wide cheating scandal when she attended the U.S. Naval Academy.
The Democratic National Committee’s chair, Ken Martin, told NOTUS ahead of June’s primary election that it was “absolutely critical” for Democrats to win New Jersey’s gubernatorial race.
“Governor-elect Sherrill ran a remarkable campaign fiercely focused on lowering costs for working families and creating jobs,” Martin said Tuesday, adding in a statement to NOTUS that “Donald Trump and Jack Ciattarelli learned the hard way that there are consequences for betraying working families.”
The DNC invested more than $3 million in the state — a record-breaking amount — between the primary and general elections, and a slate of former presidents and Democratic governors campaigned for Sherrill in the weeks before the election.
Sherrill, a moderate Democrat, frequently highlighted Ciattarelli’s connections to Trump. Democrats more broadly capitalized on Ciattarelli–Trump parallels, painting them as a liability for the Republican nominee. Some Republicans in the state acknowledged in the lead-up to the election that Ciattarelli’s references to the president could work against him.
“I think Trump is showing recently that some of the policies, especially with these tariffs, are going to hurt New Jersey,” Paul Mirabelli — the Republican mayor of Mountainside, New Jersey, who did not support Ciattarelli in the primary — told NOTUS earlier this year. “I’m not sure that that’s a winning strategy to tie yourself to Trump at this point.”
Sherrill largely built her campaign around state-focused affordability issues, including combating rising energy prices — an issue that could be difficult to deliver on. She will join a host of Democratic governors who have stepped up as the faces of the movement against Trump, especially as the president’s administration has slashed federal funding to projects and programs in New Jersey and as the ongoing government shutdown is projected to continue affecting state residents.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated with addtional reporting.
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