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What to watch in the NJ governor's race, a possible bellwether for the 2026 midterms
By
Mike Hayes
Published Sep 1, 2025
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Aristide Economopoulos For The Washington Post via Getty Images
By
Mike Hayes
Published Sep 1, 2025
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The weather may be cooling down, but the arrival of fall means something else is starting to heat up… why, it’s the New Jersey governor’s race, of course!
With the election 60-odd days away, the candidates have already been working hard to get themselves in front of voters, on the airwaves and in reporters’ inboxes. Still, experts agree that the real fight between Democratic nominee Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli starts now.
“People are at the beach until after Labor Day, and then the real world comes about and the campaign gets underway in earnest,” said Matt Hale, associate professor of political science at Seton Hall University.
As one of the few major off-year elections, political observers have long pegged NJ’s governor’s race as a tone-setter, going into the following year’s congressional midterms. And how these two candidates fare will provide a key snapshot of how voters are broadly feeling about both major political parties.
Here’s a look at where things stand in Sherrill v. Ciattarelli, and what each candidate might need to do to win this thing.
Sherrill leads — but it may get tight …
The recent polling has all fallen in Sherrill’s favor. Throughout the summer, a series of polls gave her roughly a 5- or 6-point lead on Ciattarelli. And the latest poll from Rutgers’ Eagleton Institute of Politics put Sherrill’s lead at 9 points among likely voters. However, Micah Rasmussen, director of Rider University's Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics, said Ciattarelli is still in “striking distance.”
“Any of the advertising or messaging has not gone underway. And so this [polling] is purely a reflection of what you already know about these two candidates,” he said. “It’s winnable by either of them.”
Ben Dworkin, director of the Rowan Institute for Public Policy and Citizenship, agreed we should expect the race to tighten. He noted that each candidate is looking to buck a New Jersey political tradition. For Ciattarelli, the Republican, it’s rare that the state elects a governor from the president’s party the year after a presidential election. Sherrill is up against an even starker trend: It’d be unusual for New Jersey voters to hand a party three consecutive terms as governor.
”These two themes are really competing against each other, and we'll have to see how this all plays out. But what I think most observers would tell you is that this is going to be a tight race,” Dworkin said.
Election traditions be damned, Hale noted that Sherrill has something substantial in her favor: there are 800,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in New Jersey.
“That's her biggest advantage. More than anything else, she's got the numbers on her side,” he said.
A second act for Sherrill
So far, Sherrill has focused most of her campaign efforts on tying her Republican counterpart to President Donald Trump, whose popularity in New Jersey is currently at sub-40%.
”Mikie Sherrill is focused on making sure everybody knows that Jack Ciattarelli and Donald Trump are best friends,” Hale said.
While we should expect her to keep reminding us of Ciattarelli’s alignment with the president, the experts say she’ll need to pivot to focus on more local New Jersey issues in the fall.
“ I don't think that will be able to last through November. They're going to need a second act,” Dworkin said.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen Sherrill start to lay out her plans if she wins the office. In August, she announced that as governor she would declare a state of emergency and freeze electricity bills — which have been skyrocketing in the Garden State — taking aim at one of the kitchen table issues that experts believe will be top of voters’ minds in November.
“The issues that are going to dominate the race will be the issues that usually dominate governor races, largely affordability,” Dworkin said. “Issues that contribute to the high cost of living in New Jersey. Things like housing costs, energy, general taxation.”
Ciattarelli’s third run for governor
Love him or hate him, there's one undeniable true thing about Jack Ciattarelli: He’s run for New Jersey governor a lot.
This year’s race marks the third time since 2017 that Ciattarelli has run, and the second time he’s earned the Republican nomination. Part of why experts feel this year could be close is because Ciattarelli came within 3 or 4 points of knocking off Gov. Phil Murphy in 2021.
“We should understand Jack Ciattarelli has been running for a decade and really hasn't stopped. This has pretty much been his full-time job,” Dworkin said.
To pull off an upset, Hale said, Ciattarelli will need to reel in “historically Democratic” voters to switch sides and support him.
“His idea is to try and pick off as many of those voters as he can in different places,” Hale said, noting that Ciattarelli has been working to woo Black, Hispanic and Orthodox Jewish voters.
Something else that all the experts agree on: The Democratic advantage in the state Legislature that’s stood for two-plus decades is not going to change. Hale said he expects Ciattarelli to start putting out the message that he can be an effective check on the Democrats’ control of Trenton.
“I don't think that there is anybody in the state who is conceiving of a Republican takeover, the Legislature,” he said. “I think [Ciattarelli’s] message is you need someone to tell the Democrats no, and that can be me.”
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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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