When New Jersey’s 2025 primary rolls around next June, Jack Ciattarelli will have been running for governor for nearly ten years straight. He ran the first time in 2017, losing the Republican primary to then-Lieutenant Gov. Kim Guadagno; he returned to the fray in 2021, snagging the GOP nomination but falling just short against Gov. Phil Murphy in the general election; and, with Murphy term-limited next year, he’s now campaigning for the governor’s office once again.
He’s hoping this will finally be the time he succeeds.
A native of the borough of Raritan in Somerset County, Ciattarelli has been involved in electoral politics for almost 40 years on and off, as a councilman, county freeholder, and assemblyman. He’s won some tough races in unfriendly territory, and made his most prominent election to date – the 2021 gubernatorial contest – far closer than most thought it would be.
Along the way, he’s crafted a political image that lets him be many things to many people: a reasonable moderate for swing voters, a solid conservative for the GOP base (one increasingly comfortable with Donald Trump), and a reliable ally for the Republican Party leaders who hold tremendous influence in New Jersey politics.
But as the 2025 primary ramps up, Ciattarelli faces a new type of challenge, running against candidates who are much more willing to stake their claims to different poles of the party: radio host Bill Spadea and former State Sen. Ed Durr (R-Logan) to his right, State Sen. Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield) to his left. If things go sideways, Ciattarelli could get boxed out or get dismissed as old news.
Just a few years ago, Ciattarelli was the unambiguous standard-bearer of the New Jersey GOP, and was probably the most recognizable and widely liked Republican in the state since the halcyon days of early-term Chris Christie. After decades spent working his way up the ranks, he was at the pinnacle of his party, and very nearly became governor.
Can he manage it again?
This is the fifth in a series of in-depth histories of New Jersey gubernatorial candidates. Previous profiles: Steve Fulop, Steve Sweeney, Jon Bramnick, Ras Baraka
Somerset time
Giacchino Michael Ciattarelli was born in 1961, the grandson of Italian immigrants and the son of parents who only had one high school diploma between them (his mom’s). He grew up in Raritan, a working-class borough in Somerset County, where his parents owned a restaurant and bar.
To hear Ciattarelli tell it – and he’s told it, over and over, to gatherings of voters at campaign events and town halls across the state – his was a classic New Jersey Italian American upbringing, replete with three siblings, devoted parents, and occasional corporal punishment.
“There was a drawer in the kitchen – [my mom] would open it with great force and out came the wooden spoon,” Ciattarelli said in his 2021 stump speech. “And when that one broke, she had another one. I was working the boardwalk and I saw this guy in a T-shirt that said, ‘I survived the wooden spoon.’ I went up to him, I shook his hand and said, ‘You and I are in the same club!’”
Ciattarelli got interested in politics early, and after getting a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from Seton Hall University, he came home to begin his political career. Raritan was, and still is, a politically competitive town, and Ciattarelli decided to get his start the same way many ambitious young pols do: running for a seat on his local council.
In 1988, Ciattarelli – who was at that point a 26-year-old baseball umpire and restaurant supply company salesman – ran for the council seat left open by retiring Councilman Mark Pellecchio, a Democrat. He lost, but not by much, finishing 105 votes behind Democratic Councilman Van Van Houten (and 356 votes ahead of his own GOP running mate) out of 2,670 votes cast.
He quickly dusted himself off to try again in 1989, this time with more success. He came in first place in a four-candidate field for two seats, flipping a Democratic-held seat and again finishing hundreds of votes ahead of his Republican running mate; his win came in spite of the fact that Democrat Jim Florio was simultaneously winning Raritan 63%-37% in his landslide election as governor.
As is typical for municipal races, especially in that less polarized era, Ciattarelli’s campaigns weren’t focused on hot-button social issues or national debates. Instead, he pushed messaging on lowering property taxes, privatizing garbage collection, and limiting overdevelopment.
Ciattarelli easily won re-election in 1992 and became council president in 1995; shortly after that, he dropped his council re-election bid and announced he would instead run for Somerset County Freeholder. That campaign, though, was quickly abandoned as well, and Ciattarelli re-entered the race for council.
But in the summer of 1995, he surprisingly announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election after all, bringing a temporary end to his political career. He was 33 at that point, had recently had a daughter with his wife Melinda, and was working on opening his own business. Politics, at that moment, was not where Ciattarelli wanted to be.
Thus began Ciattarelli’s long period in the political wilderness. He and his growing family (he eventually had four kids) moved to Hillsborough, a larger suburb bordering Raritan, in 1998, and entered the medical journal publishing industry, where he was quite successful.
Then, in 2006 – more than ten years after he’d last held political office – Ciattarelli decided he wanted back in. That year, Somerset County Freeholder Ken Scherer (R-Hillsborough) was retiring, and Somerset Republicans were on the hunt for a new candidate to run alongside Freeholder Rick Fontana (R-Bridgewater).
As a former councilman who had been out of office for a decade, Ciattarelli was far from the most obvious choice. When Scherer announced he was retiring, Politics NJ listed seven possible candidates for the seat; Ciattarelli was not among them.
But at the Somerset GOP convention that spring, Ciattarelli got up and blew county committeemembers away. Facing Bernards Township Mayor Mohammad Ali Chaudry, Warren Township Committeeman Victor Sordillo, Montgomery Township Committeeman Mark Caliguire, and former North Plainfield Councilman Jim McGarry – most of whom had much more recent and prominent electoral experience than him – Ciattarelli won on the first ballot.
As is customary in county races, that convention win let Ciattarelli glide through the actual GOP primary uncontested. And in November, facing the Democratic ticket of Somerville Councilman Dennis Sullivan and Montgomery Township Committeewoman Louise Wilson, Fontana and Ciattarelli collectively won 52%-48% – a narrower win than Republicans often got in increasingly blue Somerset County, where Democrats hadn’t won a freeholder seat since 1979, but a win nonetheless. (Two years later, Barack Obama became the first Democrat to carry the county in a presidential election since 1964, but it wouldn’t be until 2018 that Democrats broke through and won seats on the freeholder board.)
County freeholders in most of New Jersey are elected to three-year terms, and in 2009, Ciattarelli faced a very different sort of opponent. That year, Chris Christie and Steve Lonegan were vying for the Republican nomination to take on Gov. Jon Corzine, and they each teamed up with local candidates across the state.
Christie, who had the support of the Somerset County Republican Party, was on a slate with Ciattarelli and Bridgewater Council President Pat Scaglione, who had eked out a convention win for Fontana’s open seat; Lonegan, meanwhile, ran with Gloria Leustek and David Wallace, two local conservatives on their first campaigns for public office.
In the end, Ciattarelli and Scaglione collectively won 59%-41%, modestly outperforming Christie’s 54%-42% win in the county. And that November, with Christie unseating Corzine, Ciattarelli and Scaglione beat the Democratic ticket of Montgomery Mayor Cecilia Xie Birge and North Plainfield Councilman Doug Singleterry in a 58%-40% rout.
Up to that point, Ciattarelli had made his own luck, winning office in both Raritan and Somerset County simply by convincing people he was the right man for the job – even in scenarios like the 2006 freeholder convention where he wouldn’t have seemed like a natural fit. But in 2011, Ciattarelli got a boost from forces well beyond his control.
Cartographic destiny
A key moment in the rise of Jack Ciattarelli – perhaps the key moment – had nothing to do with him at all, really. It had to do with Democrats wanting to gain seats in the state legislature, and using creative mapmaking to do it.
For decades, the 16th legislative district had obeyed approximately the same boundaries, covering most of Somerset County and a few varying towns from neighboring counties. It had been represented by Republicans since the advent of the 40-district system in 1973, and was widely seen as a safe seat for the GOP.
But in 2011, Democrats on the Legislative Apportionment Commission decided that they wanted to change that. Seeing the potential for gains in future cycles, they submitted a map to the tiebreaker that substantially reshaped the 16th district, removing much of its most conservative territory and adding in deep-blue Princeton and South Brunswick.
The map was approved, presenting two different problems for Republicans. For one, the new district was much more competitive, meaning that they had to expend effort and resources defending seats that they hadn’t previously had to worry about. And for another, Assemblywoman Denise Coyle (R-Bernards) had been redistricted into the neighboring 21st district, creating a residency headache – one that had to be resolved extremely quickly, since the map was approved on April 3, 2011, just two months before the primary election.
Coyle considered running in the 21st district, but that option was foreclosed when it became clear that GOP leaders there would continue to support the district’s two existing incumbents, one of whom was none other than Jon Bramnick. She then filed paperwork to run for re-election to her 16th district seat with intentions to move back into the district – but abandoned that plan, too, about a week later, saying that executing an immediate move was “not feasible” given the housing market.
Maddeningly for Republicans, though, it was too late to put anyone else on the primary ballot in Coyle’s place, necessitating a last-minute write-in campaign. To execute that, they needed a candidate who was already well-known in the district and who was ready to hit the ground running immediately. Two-term freeholder Jack Ciattarelli was their man.
The resulting primary campaign – in which Ciattarelli teamed up with the one Republican who actually was on the ballot, Assemblyman Peter Biondi (R-Hillsborough) – was an odd one. Ciattarelli wasn’t running against anyone, but he still had to educate voters and make sure he won at least 100 write-in votes; a mysterious group called “Red Wave Republicans” tried to trip him up, urging voters via robocall to write in Coyle instead.
In the end, Ciattarelli did perfectly fine, winning 1,520 write-in votes and earning his spot on the general election ballot. And despite the fact that Democrats had specifically redrawn the district to make it more winnable, it wasn’t their top priority that year, and few observers thought it had much chance of flipping, giving Ciattarelli a glide path to the legislature.
But the general election most definitely wasn’t a landslide, with Ciattarelli and Biondi winning a combined 53% of the vote to 47% for Democrats Joe Camarota and Marie Corfield. It was clear that when Democrats did seriously try to flip the district, they’d be able to make it a very competitive race.
They got their first chance unexpectedly quickly. Just two days after Election Day, Biondi died after a battle with cancer; Ciattarelli was sworn in for the remainder of Biondi’s term in the lame duck session, thus leaving the Assembly seat he himself had just won open and necessitating a 2012 special election.
To fill what was technically Coyle’s open seat, Republicans chose Donna Simon, a Readington Township committeewoman. (Her opponent at the GOP convention? Bill Spadea – meaning that three of the four leading GOP candidates for governor next year were all at least tangentially involved in the race for a single legislative district within the span of a year.)
Democrats, meanwhile, stuck with Corfield, a teacher who had made a name for herself chastising Gov. Chris Christie at a 2010 town hall. Unlike in 2011, they put a huge amount of effort into flipping the seat – and came up just short, with Simon winning 50.5%-49.5%.
2013 was something of a reprieve for Republicans, who benefited from the sky-high popularity of Christie – yes, really – amid his landslide re-election. Ciattarelli and Simon, finishing up their first terms after each arriving in the legislature in dramatic fashion, defeated Corfield and new Democratic candidate Ida Ochoteco by a comfortable combined margin of 56%-43%.
The 2013 cycle would prove to be an anomaly, however, rather than the rule. In 2015, Democrats were once again raring to flip the 16th district blue, and with Christie’s approval ratings beginning their second-term nosedive amid his doomed presidential campaign, they had reason for optimism. They also had a new ticket: Princeton physicist Andrew Zwicker, who had run a longshot campaign for Congress the year before, and Maureen Vella, who had run for the district’s Senate seat in 2011.
Ciattarelli and Simon tried to portray Zwicker and Vella as unserious liberals, using outdated photos of Zwicker’s shaggier days and tying the two Democrats to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But in a district that had voted for Obama in 2012 by a 53%-45% margin, that ended up not being the most effective strategy. And the Republican incumbents were not massively beloved, either; a Democratic poll in October 2015 found Ciattarelli with favorability ratings of 23%-15%, meaning that more than half of his own constituents didn’t even have an opinion on him.
The end result was a squeaker, with Zwicker unseating Simon by just 78 votes; in fact, it was so close that Zwicker initially conceded on election night before retracting his concession the next day. Ciattarelli fared better, but still came frighteningly close to losing, getting 25.4% of the vote and beating Vella by 534 votes.
As the recount between Zwicker and Simon was ongoing, Ciattarelli expressed optimism that he and his new Democratic ticket-mate would be able to get along.
“If Mr. Zwicker is indeed successful in winning, obviously we have an obligation to work together in representing the people of the 16th district,” Ciattarelli said. “It is my hope we can do that very successfully.”
But privately, Ciattarelli saw the writing on the wall. Sooner or later, he would probably lose to a Democrat too; the district was becoming too blue for that not to happen eventually. If he stayed, his legacy would be as a well-liked legislator, but ultimately not a terribly consequential one.
Fortunately for him, he had other plans.
The governor’s office beckons
Even before his 2015 close call, Ciattarelli was beginning to pitch himself for higher office. A New York Times piece said he was “viewed as a possible statewide candidate” in May 2015 – when he still had not even completed two full terms in the legislature – and the Observer called him “a possible 2017 Republican candidate for governor” a month later.
How did Ciattarelli reach that level of prominence so quickly? Not really through the legislature, where a newcomer assemblyman in the minority party has no real power or pulpit to speak of. Instead, it had more to do with Ciattarelli’s eager willingness to poke at powerful people from across the political spectrum, building up his image as an independent warrior.
In the spring of 2015, Ciattarelli went toe-to-toe with the New Jersey Education Association, calling for reforms to the state’s pension system over the protests of enraged NJEA members. But just a few weeks earlier, he had sharply rebuked Christie, the arch-foe of the NJEA, over his aides’ role in the Bridgegate scandal, calling the indictments against them “infuriating and sickening.”
“Every party needs to move on and out from under the shadow of as dominant a figure as Kennedy was, as Reagan was, and here in New Jersey, as Christie is,” he told the New York Times.
The remarks were in keeping with Ciattarelli’s status as one of Christie’s least loyal legislative partners, someone who didn’t hesitate to criticize the governor and sometimes voted to override his vetoes. (Ciattarelli didn’t entirely break with Christie, though, since he went on to endorse Christie’s presidential campaign later that year.)
But Ciattarelli saved his harshest criticism for the man who was, at that point, still seen as a longshot to win his party’s 2016 nomination for president: Donald Trump. In a scathing statement released in December 2015, Ciattarelli tore into the soon-to-be president, making him the first prominent New Jersey Republican to do so.
“Instead of providing the kind of leadership that appeals to the better angels of our nature in calling us to meaningful and just action, Mr. Trump preys upon our worst instincts and fears,” Ciatarelli fulminated. “In addressing important issues, he is a charlatan who is out of step with American values. He is a celebrity in his own political reality TV show. He is a Republican who is out of step with the Party of Lincoln – ‘We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope on earth.’”
“Sitting silently and allowing him to embarrass our country is unacceptable,” he added. “He is not fit to be President of the United States.”
Trump and Christie, Ciattarelli reasoned, were not the future of the New Jersey Republican Party. But he could be.
On October 4, 2016, Ciattarelli made official what everyone had long suspected: he was running for governor in 2017. He pitched himself as a moderate Republican, someone far more interested in lowering property taxes and reforming the school funding formula than picking political fights and entering into culture-war battles.
“If elected governor, my brand of leadership in my administration will be very, very different from any other New Jersey’s ever seen,” he said at his campaign launch.
Ciattarelli immediately worked to position himself as the anti-Christie, someone with both different policy plans and a different style from the increasingly unpopular governor. In May 2016, before he launched his gubernatorial campaign, Ciattarelli suggested Christie should resign if he was going to spend time out of state campaigning for Trump; in an interview with the Star-Ledger shortly after he entered the race, he gave Christie’s administration a “D” grade.
“There was great hope in the beginning, but he lost his focus on New Jersey,” Ciattarelli said of Christie.
That presented a striking contrast with Ciattarelli’s main GOP primary opponent, Lieutenant Gov. Kim Guadagno, who was inextricably tied to Christie, for better or for worse. Upon entering the race in January 2017, Guadagno immediately established herself as the frontrunner; Ciattarelli, after all, had only ever been elected to county and legislative office, while Guadagno had been known to voters statewide for eight years as Christie’s #2.
From there, things proceeded as they typically do in New Jersey politics. In the winter and spring of 2017, Guadagno and Ciattarelli (the only two formidable candidates in the race) fought for money, endorsements, and all-important county lines, the party endorsements that allow candidates to appear in a favorable position on primary ballots.
And by most of those metrics, Guadagno – who, like Ciattarelli, was a moderate Republican skeptical of Donald Trump – came out on top. She got 11 county party endorsements, including in critical counties like Ocean, Bergen, and Monmouth, while Ciattarelli got seven; she led every poll conducted of the race by double digits; and she used her more extensive fundraising network to outspend Ciattarelli $3.5 million to $1.8 million. (It didn’t help Ciattarelli that he had to ease up on campaigning in early 2017, a crucial period, due to a bout of throat cancer that he eventually beat.)
Ciattarelli, recognizing his status as an underdog, leaned heavily into criticizing Guadagno’s policy proposals (including her proposed audit of the state government) and highlighting her ties to Christie. For those plugged into the race, he was seen as a better general election candidate, one without the baggage associated with the Christie administration.
“We need to move beyond the Christie-Guadagno era,” Ciattarelli said at a debate a few weeks before the primary. “The only way we win in November is with a new message, a new messenger and a new direction. And I’m not just talking about our policies, I’m talking about our politics.”
But faced with an onslaught of negative spending from Guadagno – and confronting the fact that he had never campaigned for votes outside his home territory before – Ciattarelli couldn’t break Guadagno’s lead. Guadagno won the primary 47%-31%, with three other candidates (Hirsh Singh, Joseph Rullo, and Steven Rogers) splitting the remainder; the result was better for Ciattarelli than was expected at the beginning of his campaign, but still a sizable loss.
Ciattarelli conceded the race on election night, saying that Republicans winning in November was what was most important.
“We don’t have a white flag in our closet as Republicans,” he said. “We are going to come out and I am going to campaign for the lieutenant governor and those 120 candidates for the state legislature in all 40 legislative districts.”
Losing the nomination, though, didn’t prove to be a career-ending setback for Ciattarelli; in fact, it may have been the best possible outcome for him.
Try, try again
Though she may have gotten the GOP nod, essentially nothing went right for Guadagno after that point. She had the dual misfortune of being tied to the unpopular Christie – it was hard for her to declare her independence when she was still his sitting lieutenant governor – and to Trump, whose election as president galvanized Democratic voters to an extreme extent.
Guadagno lost to Phil Murphy 56%-42%, dragging down a number of state legislative candidates with her – including Donna Simon, who tried to win Ciattarelli’s open Assembly seat but lost to Democrat Roy Freiman. Guadagno brought her own particular problems to the race, but in such a bad year for the GOP, any Republican candidate might have been doomed against Murphy.
Ciattarelli, meanwhile, escaped essentially unscathed. His Assembly seat may have flipped to Democrats, but that wasn’t his fault, and he got to be something of a Cassandra for the New Jersey GOP; after all, he had been warning them for years about the downsides of both Trump and Christie, and look where it had gotten them.
And having run a gubernatorial campaign that impressed observers from both parties, Ciattarelli was now on the GOP’s radar for all sorts of other offices. Could he try to run against embattled Senator Bob Menendez in 2018? Or perhaps for Senator Cory Booker’s seat in 2020, if Booker left to run for president? Would he try again for the governor’s office in 2021? Until recently a backbench assemblyman, Ciattarelli had become one of his party’s most promising recruits, with more political connections across the state than almost anyone else.
Just two months into Phil Murphy’s first term, Ciattarelli made it clear which of those options he wanted to pursue: he was going to run for governor again. For the next two years, he descended into the shadow primary, working to win over party leaders across the state before he took his message to voters. Finally, in January 2020, Ciattarelli went public, declaring his second gubernatorial campaign at a rally in his hometown of Raritan.
The Jack Ciattarelli of 2020 was, in most ways, the same as the Jack Ciattarelli of 2016. He was still focused on a few core issues like the state’s high property taxes, poor business climate, and unfair education funding formula; he still wanted to be a governor who would put controversial social issues on the backburner and approach the office more like a CPA (which, in fact, he was).
But his chief antagonist had changed since his last campaign. The days of Chris Christie were long over, and in Christie’s place was Phil Murphy, who had spent much of his first term battling with members of his own party in the legislature and whom Ciattarelli could caricature as an out-of-state, out-of-touch liberal.
“Phil Murphy doesn’t get it,” Ciattarelli said at his campaign launch. “Maybe it’s because he’s not from New Jersey. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t understand New Jersey. But the bottom line is this: He’s not New Jersey.” (Murphy was originally from Needham, Massachusetts, and moved to New Jersey in the 1990s.)
Moving on from Christie was easy enough, but Donald Trump, Ciattarelli’s other foil from the 2017 campaign, proved more resilient. With Trump in near-total command of the Republican Party by that point, Ciattarelli’s brazen never-Trump views would no longer fly in a GOP primary – but being a firm pro-Trumper would be a liability in a general election in blue-leaning New Jersey. Ciattarelli had a difficult needle to thread.
When Trump came to Wildwood for a rally with recent party switcher Jeff Van Drew in January 2020, Ciattarelli was in attendance, saying that “Trump’s policies are working” and that “he has earned my support.” Asked by the Bergen Record’s Charlie Stile about his past anti-Trump comments, Ciattarelli said, “My wife has called me much worse in 26 years of marriage.”
That seemed to resolve the question, but it created some new headaches for Ciattarelli – such as when he attended a pro-Trump rally on November 28, 2020, after Trump had already lost the election, with a “stop the steal” sign directly behind his head. Ciattarelli claimed he didn’t know the sign was there, but it became an enduring image that Murphy later used to portray him as a threat to democracy.
As awkward as the Trump question was for Ciattarelli, though, it was a much greater albatross for the man who was supposed to be his chief primary rival, New Jersey GOP Chairman Doug Steinhardt, who like Ciattarelli had been preparing for the 2021 election for years.
From the day he launched his campaign in December 2020, Steinhardt emphasized that he was the true Trump warrior in the race, and strongly implied that Ciattarelli was a faker. “Some cut and run from our president, hoping you wouldn’t notice, while others were never there in the first place,” Steinhardt said in his launch video.
That messaging seemed like a pretty good bet, given that the overwhelming majority of Republican primary voters approved of Trump. It was the opening salvo in a competitive, long-anticipated Republican primary, in which Ciattarelli and Steinhardt would face off for votes and county party endorsements throughout the spring of 2021.
The January 6 attack on the Capitol changed everything. Steinhardt, who had released another video that very morning mocking Ciattarelli for not standing by Trump, found himself in the uncomfortable position of defending a man who had inspired a riot against a democratic election result. Under heavy pressure from his politically connected law firm, Steinhardt abruptly ended his campaign on January 11.
In an instant, the two-man showdown New Jersey Republicans had been expecting evaporated, leaving Ciattarelli as the heavy frontrunner. Ciattarelli had already gotten guaranteed party support in a few key counties at that point, and with no other notable Republicans stepping up to fill the void left by Steinhardt, he was able to sweep the remaining endorsements with little trouble. What could have been a divisive GOP showdown became a cakewalk.
The few Republicans who did decide to take on Ciattarelli weren’t the most formidable bunch: Hirsh Singh, a businessman and perennial candidate who had also run in 2017; Phil Rizzo, a pastor from Morris County with a history of shady property tax maneuverings; and Brian D. Levine, a former Somerset County freeholder and Franklin Township mayor. None were remotely able to compete with Ciattarelli for money or endorsements, and Ciattarelli seemed to be on course for a dominant win.
Rizzo and Singh, though, did tap into a vein of voters that Ciattarelli struggled to win over: hardcore Trump supporters. For those voters, Ciattarelli’s perfunctory support of the former president wasn’t enough; they wanted someone like Rizzo, who said at a debate that Trump was “the greatest president of my lifetime” and who claimed the 2020 election was stolen, or like Singh, whose campaign manager accosted Ciattarelli’s wife Melinda over her husband’s past distaste for Trump.
The primary, which had fallen off most people’s radars after Steinhardt’s exit, got a spurt of renewed media attention in its final weeks, especially after Singh released a (much-derided) poll showing him narrowly in the lead. (A separate independent poll gave Ciattarelli a modest edge.) The race even took on some national significance, since it was the first major Republican primary election since Trump had left office under a cloud of impeachment and chaos.
In the end, Ciattarelli won easily, getting 49% of the vote and winning every county in the state – the first time in more than 100 years that a non-incumbent GOP gubernatorial candidate had done so. But given that he had the support of all 21 county parties, the fact that Singh and Rizzo combined for 47% of the vote was still noteworthy. Ciattarelli clearly had not consolidated the pro-Trump base, and if Singh and Rizzo had united into an anti-Ciattarelli coalition – or if Steinhardt hadn’t dropped out – the race could have been close.
But a win is a win, and with the primary over at last, Ciattarelli could turn to his real foe: Philip Dunton Murphy.
Murphy, who had never held (or even run for) elected office before winning the 2017 race, had a rough start to his time in the governor’s office, facing constant battles with the legislature and persistent whispers about a primary challenge in 2021. As his legislative relationships improved and Covid strengthened his approval ratings, however, those whispers faded, and he won his 2021 primary uncontested after kicking a pair of gadfly candidates off the ballot.
Famously, no Democratic governor had won re-election in New Jersey since 1977, but Murphy’s position in the summer of 2021 was an enviable one. He had the state Democratic Party united behind him, a double-digit lead in every early poll of the race – Monmouth University, the state’s most trusted pollster, put Murphy up 52%-36% in August – and the simple advantage of running as a Democrat in New Jersey.
In order to win, or even stay competitive, Ciattarelli needed every vote he could get. That meant keeping close to the conservative Republican base, which was still largely pro-Trump and focused on issues like immigration and “critical race theory,” and winning over the moderate suburbanites who had fueled recent Democratic successes in the state.
To appease the latter, Ciattarelli kept up his penchant for focusing on kitchen-table issues, hammering Murphy over and over again on property taxes, school funding, and the damage that had been done to the state’s small businesses and senior living centers during Covid. For his running mate, he chose former State Sen. Diane Allen (R-Edgewater Park), a well-liked South Jerseyan with a reputation as even more of a moderate than Ciattarelli. (One of the first bills Murphy signed upon taking office was the Diane B. Allen Equal Pay Act, which had previously been vetoed by Christie.)
And yet at the same time, Ciattarelli and Allen didn’t shy away from conservative stances on some issues. Ciattarelli attracted controversy for saying at a campaign stop that he wanted to roll back the state’s LGBTQ curriculum, declaring that “sodomy” shouldn’t be taught to 6th graders; Allen, meanwhile, shared her fears that illegal immigrants with Covid were being shuttled to New Jersey.
For many journalists and other outside observers, the Ciattarelli campaign’s feints to the right seemed perplexing. What on earth were they doing, running a conservative message on guns, gay rights, and voter ID laws in a state that voted for Joe Biden by 16 percentage points?
But there was a method behind the madness. Endlessly catering to the center of the electorate, the Ciattarelli campaign figured, was eventually a dead-end strategy; their real path to victory came from energizing conservatives in an off-year election where voter turnout was unpredictable and malleable. Don’t give up hope, Ciattarelli told Republicans; I’m with you, and we can win this thing.
“Don’t let anybody stay home because they think we can’t win or because it’s rigged,” Ciattarelli said two weeks before the election. “It’s not rigged here in New Jersey. We can win this race.”
As the campaign entered its final months, the polls began to tighten somewhat, with Murphy mostly posting high single-digit leads instead of double-digit ones. On the financial side, the two candidates were dead-even thanks to the state’s campaign finance limits on those who participate in the public financing system, with Murphy spending a total of $24.1 million over the course of the election to Ciattarelli’s $22.8 million.
Most worryingly for Democrats, things were very much not going their way on a national level. Biden’s approval ratings began to severely dip amid inflation and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, sinking Democratic hopes that they would be able to avoid a typical midterm slump.
Still, Murphy and New Jersey Democrats went into Election Day feeling confident. Murphy might not win in a landslide, but he didn’t have much to worry about, they believed, and Democrats looked like they were on track to pick up a few competitive seats in the state legislature as well.
Then results began rolling in on November 2, and everyone realized just how wrong they had been. Not only was the governor’s race close, but Ciattarelli was actually leading in early counts; not only were Democrats not flipping their offensive targets, but they were losing seats they didn’t even think were on the playing field. Most shocking of all was the loss of Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford), now one of Ciattarelli’s competitors for the governor’s office, who fell to an unknown Republican truck driver.
At some point in the dead of night, Murphy pulled into a narrow lead as more mail-in ballots were counted, one that he would not relinquish. By the next morning, it was fairly clear that the governor was on track to win re-election.
But Ciattarelli could still hold his head up high. His campaign strategy had nearly worked, uniting both conservatives and moderates behind one anti-Murphy banner; he had flipped three counties that Murphy carried in 2017, carried every competitive congressional district in the state, and won some Biden-won towns like Upper Saddle River and Warren by more than twenty percentage points.
Most impressive were Ciattarelli’s coattails in the state legislature and in county offices. Republicans, who had been bracing for potential losses, flipped a total of eight legislative seats and eight county offices, including in places like Gloucester and Passaic Counties that had not been seen as competitive. (In an ironic twist, Democrats flipped exactly two offices into their column: the Senate seat in the 16th district, which Ciattarelli once represented, and the county surrogate’s office in Allen’s home of Burlington County.)
When all was said and done, Murphy won by just over three percentage points, 51% to 48%. Ciattarelli took more than a week to concede, and when he did, he said he was proud of how well he had done (and flatly rejected conspiracy theories that the race had been stolen from him).
“The fact is, we almost did win,” he said at a press conference on November 11. “Why? Because every single time misguided politicians take this state too far off track, the great people of this state push, pull, and prod it right back to where it belongs, right back to where it needs to be: the common-sense center. I do not see the result of this election as a failure.”
At the same press conference, Ciattarelli went ahead and declared his plans for 2025: he would run for governor yet again.
“That’s exactly my plan,” he said. “I’ll be running for governor in four years.”
Third time’s the charm?
When Ciattarelli officially launched his third gubernatorial campaign on April 9 of this year, he sounded in most ways like the same Jack Ciattarelli who’s been running for governor for nearly ten years. New Jersey continues to face too-high taxes, a grim business climate, and all sorts of other liberal ills, and he’s the right guy to fix it.
“It’s time for bold, competent, serious leadership; leadership determined to fix our state,” Ciattarelli said. “It’s time for a Jersey guy who understands what people are up against every day.”
But Ciattarelli will be up against a very different sort of challenge than he’s faced in the past, and lots of things have changed since 2021 and 2017.
For one, Ciattarelli is now fully aboard the Trump Train, to a much greater extent than his cursory support in 2020. Before he even formally announced his bid for the governorship this year, he took to social media to proclaim his support for Trump, marking a complete turnaround from his once-strident anti-Trump views.
“The fact is America was safer and more prosperous when Donald Trump was President,” Ciattarelli said in March, shortly after Nikki Haley ended her campaign and Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee. “And so, as the Republican nominee, he has my support. America can’t afford four more years of Joe Biden.”
For another, he and his wife Melinda announced their separation last year after nearly 30 years of marriage. That normally wouldn’t be a particularly notable development – except for the fact that Melinda has ostentatiously attended pro-Spadea events and even briefly considered running for U.S. Senate herself.
The New Jersey GOP also has not been able to sustain Ciattarelli’s momentum from 2021. While Republicans went into the 2023 legislative elections with hopes of building on their previous victories, they instead lost a net six seats, essentially erasing the gains they had made two years earlier.
That speaks to the fact that, while Ciattarelli may have struck gold in his 2021 campaign, there’s no guarantee that any of his successes or support from that race will automatically transfer over. A poll from February of last year found Ciattarelli with 76% name recognition among New Jersey Republicans and favorability ratings of 47%-6%, but those could be dented over the course of a rough primary.
And unlike in 2021, when Doug Steinhardt’s abrupt exit let Ciattarelli consolidate GOP support early on, he faces multiple very serious opponents in the upcoming primary who each have their own paths to victory. Jon Bramnick has had more than 20 years to make friends in Trenton, and he can make a compelling argument about how his moderate politics make him the most electable candidate in the race; Bill Spadea wants to win over the state’s many conservative, pro-Trump voters, and his (so far still ongoing) radio show gives him a direct ability to communicate with them.
Adding further uncertainty to the race is that New Jersey’s party line ballots, which boost candidates endorsed by individual county political parties, could be on their way out pending litigation. Ciattarelli’s last two primary campaigns took place under the party line system, which was an obstacle for him in 2017 and a benefit in 2021, but the implementation of more neutral office-block ballots would create a whole new type of race.
No matter who his opponents are, no matter what the ballots look like, Jack Ciattarelli will keep chugging along. It’s what he’s been doing for nearly ten years now – or nearly forty, if you go back to his borough council days. He’s got his message; he’s got his supporters; he knows what his path to victory is.
In 2017, he intrigued some people, but it wasn’t his time yet. In 2021, he blew away the naysayers, breathing new life into the New Jersey GOP even in defeat. Who can say what 2025 will bring?