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Taxes, housing and the fist bump that wasn’t: Key moments from the NJ debate
By
Mike Hayes
Published Sep 22, 2025
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Mikie Sherrill for New Jersey; Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By
Mike Hayes
Published Sep 22, 2025
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Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli met Sunday night in the first of two debates in the closely watched New Jersey governor’s race. The hour-and-half-long discussion often turned contentious as Sherrill tried to tie Ciattarelli to President Donald Trump in the minds of voters, and Ciattarelli in turn attempted to cast Sherrill as one of a long line of Democrats who he said had failed the state.
Affordability issues dominated much of the discussion, including property taxes and skyrocketing electricity bills in one of the country's most expensive states. Ciattarelli committed to not raising sales taxes if elected governor — after the Sherrill campaign has repeatedly accused him of planning a tax hike — while Sherrill said she could not make the same promise.
The candidates spoke before an at-time raucous audience of 1,600 people at Rider University in Lawrenceville. The town-hall style debate was hosted by the New Jersey Globe, and those attending ranged from a wizened 96-year-old Skillman resident to a 12-year-old from Bridgewater who left Ciattarelli hanging when the candidate approached him for a fist bump.
The latest Quinnipiac poll last week gave Sherrill an 8-point lead over Ciattarelli in the race. The results show an increase from prior polls six weeks ago that put her lead at a tighter 5 or 6 points, but overall the race has been tightening since early summer, when Sherrill enjoyed a more comfortable 20-point advantage.
Political experts believe the race could tighten even further as Election Day approaches. In 2021, Ciattarelli came within about 3 points of upsetting current Gov. Phil Murphy, and his fellow Republican Trump made electoral gains in the state last year compared to previous presidential elections.
Our rate payers are constantly suffering.
Mikie Sherrill
The economy is a top issue on voters’ minds. A July 2025 Rutgers-Eagleton poll found that 85% of New Jersey residents were dissatisfied with the state's handling of affordability and the cost of living. Electricity bills in the state spiked a whopping 20% in June. And New Jersey remains one of the most expensive places in the country to buy a house.
One of the audience members asked the candidates what they planned to do to tackle the problem.
"Without blaming each other, what specifically you're going to do to tackle things like the grid operators, state mandates and other impacts that raise our costs,” said Michael, a Rider alum from Lawrenceville. Audience members did not provide their last names during the debate.
Ciattarelli blamed the Murphy administration for closing power plants and instead relying on the development of offshore wind power, which the Trump administration has halted. Ciattarelli said he would ban offshore wind projects off the Jersey Shore if elected.
“I'll reopen and repurpose the plants. We'll expand our nuclear footprint in South Jersey. We will accelerate solar on the rooftops, our warehouses, and we're pulling out the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative,” Ciattarelli said, referring to a regional cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions that he said had contributed to rising costs.
Sherrill was quick to cast blame on grid operators and Trump for rolling back incentives for solar energy. She committed to “freezing” rate hikes by declaring a state of emergency. She also said she would add a “massive” amount of power into the grid in the state.
Sherrill has also called for expanding solar and battery storage projects, as well as expanding nuclear capacity and modernizing natural gas plants.
“Let's face it, some of our utility companies have made over a $1 billion in profit. And yet our rate payers are constantly suffering,” she said.
Affordable housing and education
The candidates were also asked about their affordable housing policies.
On the campaign trail, Ciattarelli has proposed upending New Jersey's longstanding affordable housing rules requiring each municipality to develop its fair share of low-priced homes. At the debate, he said the state should not force “high-density” affordable housing to be built in every town.
“If a town doesn't have infrastructure, mass transit or opportunity for jobs, why are we putting more idling cars on the road?” he said.
Sherrill said she supports building more housing but said New Jersey needs a “statewide plan” to protect open spaces.
“We need to do both — develop and have our open spaces preserved,” she said.
My attorney general will not be wasting your tax dollars suing the White House.
Jack Ciattarelli
The question that defined the candidates in terms of how they’d handle Trump came from Mitchell, a student at Ryder University, who asked how they would continue to invest in education, given the administration's “dismantling” of the federal education department.
Sherrill said her attorney general would sue the administration to “claw back” as much of the money as possible.
“If they're not going to run their programs, they just need to send that money back so we can run them,” she said. “This is a real difference between myself and my opponent, who says he doesn't disagree with anything Trump's doing and that he's never going to sue him."
Ciattarelli said he would work with the state’s congressional delegation to negotiate with the administration.
“My attorney general will not be wasting your tax dollars suing the White House every other day,” he said.
Taxes and leadership
Taxes came up multiple times in the debate. When each candidate was asked whether they would commit to not raise the state’s sales tax, Ciattarelli promised he would not and Sherrill said she couldn't make a commitment at this time.
In attack ads, Sherrill's campaign has repeatedly accused Ciattarelli of favoring an increase in the tax to 10%, a claim she repeated on the debate stage.
Nancy, the 96-year-old from Skillman, asked the candidates if they supported combining school districts in some municipalities to reduce property taxes.
Sherrill said she supported combining districts, but she wouldn’t immediately make it “compulsory” if elected.
“Right now we have more municipalities than California and we have more school districts than municipalities, and it's raising costs on everybody,” she said.
Ciattarelli said he does not believe the state should force consolidation.
“That's up to the locals. But I'll tell you what, if you do consolidate or you do regionalize, Gov. Ciattarelli will help incentivize that to make it easier,” he said.
In another memorable moment, Mark, a middle-school student from Bridgewater, was called on to ask a question.
“I'm only 12, but I've already seen one of our U.S. senators go to prison. What's your vision for restoring public trust in government?” he asked, referring to former New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, who is serving an 11-year prison sentence for federal bribery and corruption crimes.
Ciattarelli walked over to the young member of the audience and tried to get a fist bump, but the boy denied him.
”Leadership matters, and it starts at the top. So I've never broken the law. My opponent has, I've never broken the law,” Ciattarelli said.
Sherrill has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. In 2022, Business Insider reported she was fined $400 for late disclosure as a member of Congress of her husband’s stock trades.
Sherrill told Mark that restoring trust in government was one of the race's “key questions."
“I go around the state and I tell people, 'This is the most nonpartisan race I've run because I think people have lost a lot of faith in both parties.' And it's really important right now … that we're restoring faith,” she said.
Ciattarelli and Sherrill are scheduled to debate again on Oct. 8 in New Brunswick. That debate will be moderated by local TV news personalities Tamala Edwards and Bill Ritter.
Tagged
Politics
economy
education
election
housing
new jersey
Mike Hayes
Mike Hayes covers equity and access to opportunity in New Jersey. He joined WNYC and Gothamist in 2023. Before that, he worked as a freelance journalist writing about policing and criminal justice. He has written for ProPublica, CNN, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News and The Appeal. He is also the author of the book, “The Secret Files: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform.” In 2019, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
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