A week later, Sherrill attributed the skepticism to the political atmosphere when the race got going in earnest early this year. “Trump moved really quickly, so there was this toxic brew of despair and panic.” The outcome, she continued, had been constant second-guessing. “When we talked about affordability, people said we didn’t get what was going on. When we talked about Trump, always with respect to affordability, people said we talked about Trump too much.” On the trail, Sherrill promised to freeze utility rates, as Ciattarelli blamed Murphy, who was concluding his eighth year in office, and Democrats for high prices. (It had been six decades since New Jersey had voted the same party into the governor’s mansion in three straight elections.) The contest remained in a sort of holding pattern until the fall, when Ciattarelli revealed that Sherrill hadn’t been allowed to walk at her Naval Academy graduation. She maintained that this was because she hadn’t turned in classmates who were involved in a cheating scandal, and she then criticized the Trump Administration for including her personal information like her Social Security number when releasing her military records. In October, Sherrill accused Ciattarelli, the former owner of a medical-publishing company, of having “killed tens of thousands of people” by printing “propaganda” about opioid safety. (Ciattarelli said he would sue Sherrill over the claim. She kept criticizing his work on opioids but didn’t repeat the accusation on the trail.)
It was hardly inspiring stuff, but from the Democratic perspective it didn’t have to be, as long as Trump’s approval rating continued to sink and Sherrill kept advertising the connection between Ciattarelli and the President. Ciattarelli never explicitly based his campaign on Trump, focussing instead on local issues such as property taxes and school funding. But he welcomed national MAGA influencers like Vivek Ramaswamy to stump for him and refused on multiple occasions to distance himself from the President. At one debate, Ciattarelli said that he would give Trump an “A grade”; he also would not criticize Trump’s abrupt decision to pull funding for the sixteen-billion-dollar Gateway Program, a railway-infrastructure project that would have eased travel between New Jersey and New York City for hundreds of thousands of commuters. He tried arguing that he would be in a better position to negotiate with the Trump Administration and complained that Sherrill was too focussed on the White House. “If you get a flat tire on the way home tonight, she’s going to blame it on President Trump,” he took to saying at rallies.
Trump, however, was a pressing topic for the voters whom Sherrill was pursuing. Josh Gottheimer, a northern New Jersey congressman who ran against Sherrill in the primary on the strength of his bipartisan legislative record, spent much of the summer and fall campaigning for her and found talk of the President’s policies unavoidable. Gottheimer heard often from voters about Trump’s tariffs, he said, but their concerns about the shutdown were even more immediate. “He campaigned so much on working-class people and then just gave them the finger,” Gottheimer told me.
“What you’re looking at is a state that’s not necessarily Democratic anymore, so much as it is nationalized,” Julie Roginsky, a longtime Democratic strategist in New Jersey, said. The size of Sherrill’s win impressed politicos from Mahwah to Cape May, but after a few days I started to hear an alternative view, too. Trump’s approval numbers were scraping the low forties nationally and mid-thirties in New Jersey, and the shutdown was even less popular. Sherrill’s win may be offering inspiration for a national party in need of it. But, Roginsky—a strong Sherrill supporter—said, “I hope she doesn’t think that she won by fourteen points just because of Mikie Sherrill. I hope she understands that she won by fourteen points also because of Donald Trump.”
Montclair, where Sherrill lives, is an upscale commuter town known locally for its suburban-yuppie politics. When she walked into the mostly empty diner where we met, the server hugged her and asked for a photo, and a few minutes later another woman started upon seeing her through the window, and gave her a thumbs-up. I asked Sherrill if she was being greeted like that more often since her win, and she arched an eyebrow: “Yeah, this is Montclair,” she said. She’d won Essex County, which includes Newark, by fifty-four points the previous week.
Sherrill claimed a mandate as soon as the size of her victory became clear, but she has largely avoided filling in the details of what it’s for. Day One will entail “declaring a state of emergency on utility costs and freezing rate hikes,” she has said repeatedly. “The reason I took that on was I needed a way to communicate to people: I’m not just wah-wah-wah-wah,” she told me, imitating a droning politician. “I’m not just going to go down into Trenton, in the bowels of the statehouse, and have some conversations about the ten-year plan. That’s not going to cut it for people and the way they’re feeling right now.” She has also talked about going after drug-pricing middlemen, increasing assistance for first-time homebuyers, and working to restore the Gateway funding. But if the first question Sherrill has faced is what, exactly, she hopes to do, the second—and more pointed—is how she intends to do it. Though Trenton is heavily Democratic, the statehouse remains divided by regional and labor factions and studded with entrenched power brokers who are unafraid—even eager—to show off and publicly leverage their influence, even when it makes life hard for their own party’s leaders. (The South Jersey boss George Norcross, for one, effectively stalled out Murphy’s first-term agenda for months when Murphy tried to overhaul a Norcross-favored tax-incentive program in and around Camden.) When I pointed out that the actual job likely required at least some work in Trenton’s bowels, and some time spent negotiating, Sherrill seemed unmoved. “I just don’t think the sense of ‘It’s really time-consuming’ is working for anybody right now, because Trump has shown it doesn’t have to be. If we’re not willing to move fast, if we’re not willing to take on tough structural issues, we’re going to get played.”
