It won’t be easy, but Republicans have a path to winning in New Jersey. And it runs right through Mikie Sherrill’s weak spot.
To block the fourth-term representative from moving into the governor’s mansion, they’ll have to recreate success they’ve demonstrated in recent years: First, Jack Ciattarelli performed well enough in the suburbs and exurbs in 2021 to come just three points shy of unseating Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy. Then President Donald Trump made gains in the state last year, particularly among Black and Hispanic voters in urban areas.
Combine and build on those two showings, and Ciattarelli — once again the GOP nominee for governor, this time for an open seat — could become the first Republican in more than a decade to win the Garden State.
That road map would exist for Ciattarelli no matter the Democratic nominee. But it’s a particular danger for Sherrill, a POLITICO analysis of election results shows. Buried in her dominating win in a crowded Democratic primary in June is that she drew a lower share of the vote in many of the Black and Hispanic areas that shifted most toward Trump last year.
In majority-Black municipalities, for example, Sherrill won just 16 percent of the Democratic primary vote, compared to 34 percent statewide. Now, as she races to expand her support beyond her winning primary coalition, she’s competing against Ciattarelli for some of the same voters.
“This campaign is not simply going to be won through the suburbs,” said Antoinette Miles, head of the New Jersey Working Families Party. “It’s really going to take a united front in order to defeat a candidate like Jack Ciattarelli, who has a wide swath of support and is trying to make inroads with the same Trump coalition that was able to be won in 2024.”
Ciattarelli’s road to victory is still an uphill one in a state where Democrats have a large registration advantage. His performance in 2021 could be hard to replicate with Trump in the White House and no recent Covid restrictions to energize voters. And there’s no guarantee he’ll be able to recreate the gains the president made last year.
But both state and national Democrats acknowledge they have work to do. The Democratic National Committee recently injected $1.5 million into New Jersey, in part to expand reach “to key constituencies that we lost ground with in the November 2024 elections.”
Sherrill is likely to win the Black and Hispanic vote in the general election — it’s just a matter of how large her margin will be. In a tight race, those voters could make the difference. And Ciattarelli has been making a concerted effort to win them.
“Jack Ciattarelli has been a little more present and a little more specific on what he might do,” said John Harmon, the founder, president and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, who has met with both candidates. He added it feels like Democrats are acting like “we’ve got a lead, we’re going to run out the clock and we’ll talk to Black people more later on the specifics.”
What the election results reveal
Republicans have made gains in New Jersey elections over the last few cycles in two different ways, the POLITICO analysis found.
Ciattarelli’s near-upset in 2021 was powered by shifts from Republicans’ performance four years prior across the state’s whiter suburbs and exurbs. But an almost entirely different set of municipalities — many of them places with large Black and Hispanic populations, including urban areas — raced toward Trump from 2020 to 2024.
Putting those two trends together would create a potent electoral combination for Republicans.
Early polling shows Sherrill, as expected, starting with a stronger standing among Black and Hispanic voters compared to Ciattarelli. A recent poll from the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University found that she leads Ciattarelli 69 percent to 4 percent among Black voters and 56 to 22 percent among Hispanic voters. Other polls show Sherrill with a lead as well.
But Sherrill, whose 11th District is whiter and more suburban, did not have the strongest performance in areas with large Black and Hispanic populations: In majority-Black municipalities, she finished a distant second in the primary, 40 points behind Newark Mayor Ras Baraka.
In majority-Hispanic municipalities — some of which were in her congressional district, where she has an established reputation — she won just shy of 33 percent of the vote, comparable to her statewide total. Baraka was a close second with 31 percent of the vote in those municipalities.
Many of her strongest performances were in municipalities that showed little or no swing toward Trump last year, where she won 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote. She received just 25 percent in places that swung toward the president by 15 or more points.
Democrats say Sherrill’s performance in a historically competitive primary doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll have problems in those areas in November. Each of the six hopefuls running for the Democratic nomination had a viable path to victory, meaning they often focused on ginning up support among their core supporters at the expense of spending as much time on their opponents’ home turf.
The conventional wisdom, for example, was that Baraka, the state’s most prominent Black progressive, was the candidate with the strongest appeal to Black voters, especially in urban areas.
“You had a pretty prolific African American candidate in the race that was from the heart of urban New Jersey — Newark, New Jersey — and that was an appeal to African American voters and Latinos,” said New Jersey Democratic Party Chair LeRoy Jones. “That in itself was a lane that I believe that Mikie couldn’t compete with Ras Baraka. The primary showed that. However, that was the primary, and the general is a whole different animal.”
At a recent event hosted by the Capital City Area Black Caucus, Sherrill lauded Baraka, saying that he “brought a voice to the primary, to our Democratic Party, that was really important to hear, and he made me a better candidate as he challenged me on different issues.” She added that he has spoken with her policy team, and Baraka said in an interview with WBGO that he is working to develop “a robust policy agenda for her” because he thinks “she could be a real champion for our community and for working class people.”
But he’s yet to endorse Sherrill. He said that is “absolutely” contingent upon her developing those policies, which they are “working towards.”
Both campaigns are vying for Black and Hispanic voters
Sherrill’s campaigning over the summer has begun to hone in on places where she lagged in the primary. She held an event bashing Trump’s megabill in the South Jersey city of Camden, which is majority-Hispanic and almost 40 percent Black and swung 14 points toward Trump last year.
Sherrill had received just 9 percent of the primary vote in the city.
Camden City Council President Angel Fuentes expressed confidence that Sherrill will spend more time in South Jersey — and in deep-blue Camden in particular — because “she needs our vote.”
Earlier this summer, she also campaigned in Trenton, a city where more than 80 percent of residents are Black or Hispanic, and where Sherrill came behind both Baraka and New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller in June.
Teaneck Mayor Mark Schwartz, who supported Rep. Josh Gottheimer in the primary, has a “pretty simple answer” to how Sherrill can run up the numbers in his racially diverse North Jersey town after coming in fourth in the primary there: “Show up.”
“I’m not necessarily blaming her because, for the most part, and especially in Teaneck, that’s Josh territory, and why are you going to waste your time when frankly speaking, you probably would lose?” he said. “But at the same time, Bergen County is purple, and she has a Republican opponent, who … did pretty well there.”
Meanwhile, Ciattarelli is scrambling to win over Black and Hispanic voters who didn’t support him last time but did vote for Trump last year. After Ciattarelli lost the 2021 election, he acknowledged that he “could have done even better” in Black and Hispanic communities.
Chris Russell, a Ciattarelli adviser, said the campaign has made a “serious investment in Jack’s time and resources in these communities” at an “activity level that didn’t exist in ‘21,” in part because of Trump’s success.
Ciattarelli’s campaign stops include places like Paterson, a city that has a majority of Hispanic and Black residents where Trump made gains last year, as well as Dover, where around three-fourths of its population is Hispanic. He has also made efforts to engage with Black faith leaders.
Both Sherrill and Ciattarelli are centering economic messages while on the trail, which Democrats and Republicans agree was a major reason for Trump’s gains last year among Hispanic and Black voters.
“When I go into our major urban centers, I ask the Ronald Reagan question, which is timeless,” Ciattarelli said in a recent radio appearance. “And I ask it particularly of the Black and brown communities that Murphy promised everything to eight years ago: Are you better off today than you were eight years ago? I mean, who can possibly answer that question ‘yes’?”
While Black and Hispanic voters can tilt an election, they do not historically have high turnout in New Jersey’s off-year gubernatorial races. It’s also unclear whether Trump’s gains among Black and Hispanic voters is unique to him, or if it will extend to other Republicans.
Democrats argue that even though Ciattarelli is showing up in these communities, his policies — and affiliation with Trump, whose approval rating is underwater in the state — should hurt him in November.
“Jack takes a picture, but he’s refused to support Black or Latino communities when his vote or voice mattered,” Sherrill spokesperson Sean Higgins said in a statement. “As a ‘100% MAGA’ candidate, Jack backs Trump’s extreme agenda that strips healthcare from New Jerseyans and supports tariffs that burden small businesses.”
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