A brief electoral history of Mikie Sherrill

Mikie Sherrill’s political career began with a questionnaire.

Back in early 2017, Sherrill was alarmed at President Donald Trump’s rise and wanted to get engaged in the political arena, but she wasn’t exactly sure where to start. So she filled out a questionnaire listing her attributes – retired Navy helicopter pilot, former federal prosecutor, mom of four – and sent it to EMILYs List, a group dedicated to cultivating female Democratic candidates.

The reaction at EMILYs List was immediate: they had a potential star on their hands. The group quickly dispatched staffers, who confirmed that Sherrill was the real deal and helped take her from political unknown to top red-to-blue candidate; even though Sherrill’s 11th congressional district hadn’t initially been on their radar, they decided Sherrill was more than worth the investment.

That is, in essence, a pretty good encapsulation of how Mikie Sherrill has moved through the political world. Her profile and background are so strong, so unimpeachable, that voters and pundits who meet her are often instantly won over; it’s why she flipped an ancestrally Republican seat by fifteen points in her first run for office, and it’s why people were already beginning to talk her up as a candidate for Senate or governor before she had even been sworn in.

Now Sherrill is indeed running for governor, and much of the sheen still hasn’t worn off. The congresswoman has broad institutional support from many different wings of the state Democratic Party, both within her own district and well outside of it; many Democrats – and Republicans – believe that she’d be the party’s strongest nominee in a general election.

But with five other serious and well-funded Democrats campaigning for governor, Sherrill faces a test unlike anything she’s confronted before. Sherrill, who has long tried to balance being everything to everyone, is now being scrutinized not just by Republicans but by fellow Democrats, too. Primary voters, even those who like her, have plenty of other options to choose from, many of whom have taken more ideologically distinctive lanes and bolder policy positions.

With a month and a half to go until the Democratic primary, Sherrill’s messaging has stayed consistent: she’s a Navy veteran and mom who will fight for you, for New Jersey, and against Donald Trump. It’s a message that has worked wonders for her ever since her first race in 2018; will it be enough to put her in the governor’s office?

This is the tenth – and likely last – in a series of in-depth histories of New Jersey gubernatorial candidates. Previous profiles: Steve Fulop, Steve Sweeney, Jon Bramnick, Ras Baraka, Jack Ciattarelli, Ed Durr, Bill Spadea, Sean Spiller, Josh Gottheimer

The pilot and the congressman

Rebecca Michelle Sherrill – she’s since changed her legal name to Mikie to avoid confusion – was born in 1972 in Alexandria, Virginia, and grew up “up and down the East Coast,” particularly in Virginia. That alone makes her stand out in the insular world of New Jersey politics; all 13 of her fellow New Jersey members of Congress, and all nine of her fellow serious gubernatorial candidates, grew up primarily in New Jersey.

After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy, Sherrill signed up to be a naval aviator, following in the footsteps of her World War II pilot grandfather, and she remained in the Navy for nearly a decade flying an H3 Sea King helicopter. Sherrill did not fly combat missions – she said in a 2017 Politico interview that she flew “more support missions” in places like Bahrain and Italy – but her time in the Navy, and her helicopter in particular, has become a core part of her political symbology.

In 2003, Sherrill left the armed forces shortly before her promotion to lieutenant commander and began the next phase of her life: she married Jason Hedberg, a fellow Navy veteran she had met at the Naval Academy; she had four children, most of whom are now in their teens; and, in 2010, she moved her family to Montclair, a diverse, politically connected town that has become a shorthand for everything that’s right or wrong with New Jersey’s progressive suburbia, depending on who you ask.

Sherrill also got a law degree from Georgetown in 2007, and worked for a time at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis. She then joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, working as an outreach and reentry coordinator for three years before being promoted to assistant U.S. Attorney in 2015, but it was not to last; she departed the office the next year after it became clear that the job was not the right fit.

Around the same time, Sherrill also began making her first forays into politics, advising Phil Murphy – who was in the process of steamrolling his opposition on his way to the governor’s office – on some policy matters and considering a career of her own in criminal justice work. In Sherrill’s telling, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was what pushed her over the edge into pursuing public service.

“I fought for this country my whole adult life,” Sherrill told Glamour in a 2017 profile. “I have four kids. There wasn’t a point where I could consciously decide that I was not going to fight for the future of this country.”

The first problem confronting Sherrill as she started gearing up to enter politics: she wasn’t sure, exactly, of what to run for. Sherrill’s house in Montclair was in the 10th congressional district, a majority-Black seat represented at the time by Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark); the neighboring 11th district seemed like a better option, but Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-Harding) was seen as extremely tough to beat (and Sherrill wasn’t technically his constituent anyways).

For a time, Sherrill considered leaping all the way up to the U.S. Senate and running against Senator Bob Menendez, who was under indictment at the time on federal bribery charges but whose famed vindictive streak had discouraged any better-known Democrats from challenging him. (Menendez ended up overcoming those corruption charges and beating gadfly challenger Lisa McCormick in the 2018 primary by a 62% to 38% margin; it’s anyone’s guess how a more serious candidate like Sherrill might have done.)

The first concrete step Sherrill took towards running was sending in a questionnaire and her resume to EMILYs List, which had not been closely looking at any of Sherrill’s local races but which instantly saw potential in her. The group sent Mollie Binotto to New Jersey to help Sherrill learn the campaign basics; Binotto was supposed to leave a few weeks later to run a different House campaign in Kansas, but she instead decided to stay on with Sherrill as her campaign manager and remains in the congresswoman’s inner circle today (she’s now an advisor to a PAC supporting Sherrill for governor).

In May 2017, Sherrill dotted her i’s, crossed her t’s, and made it official: she was running for New Jersey’s 11th congressional district, with a mission to take Frelinghuysen down. “I think after 22 years in Washington, Rodney Frelinghuysen has stopped listening and stopped talking to his constituents,” she said in an interview with the Star-Ledger.

It would not be an easy task. Frelinghuysen had been in public office for over three decades, and his family’s service in New Jersey politics went back much, much further than that; his father had been a congressman, and one of his 18th-century ancestors was the namesake for Frelinghuysen Township in Warren County. Frelinghuysen had also recently risen to become the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, making him one of the most powerful people in Congress (and putting him in a position to deliver huge amounts of money for his home district).

Moreover, the 11th district was not the most natural place to run for office as a Democrat. Based in historically arch-conservative Morris County, no Democrat had ever held the seat since it was redrawn into something similar to its modern incarnation in 1985, and Frelinghuysen had never faced a particularly serious race; he won re-election in 2016 against an obscure challenger 58% to 39%.

But under the hood, there were clear signs that the 11th district was changing. The district had voted for John McCain by five points and Mitt Romney by six, but only supported Donald Trump by a tiny 48.% to 47.9% margin, indicative of the new president’s poor standing in the New Jersey suburbs. If suburban voters’ antipathy for Trump extended to their local Republican representatives, then the GOP would be in major trouble.

And perhaps owing to his long-safe seat, Frelinghuysen was not well-prepared for a challenger of Sherrill’s caliber. He was a solid fundraiser, but hadn’t had to do anything like airing attack ads in decades; he’d taken some less-than-popular votes with the GOP majority in Congress, including voting for his party’s ill-fated Obamacare repeal attempt in 2017 after initially opposing it; and his frosty relationship with the press corps in New Jersey and Washington meant that he had few allies in the media ready to spring to his defense.

Especially embarrassing was the revelation in May 2017 – just a few days after Sherrill announced her campaign – that Frelinghuysen had complained to Lakeland Bank that one of the bank’s employees, Saily Avelenda, was helping to lead the local liberal activist group NJ 11th for Change, which had been calling for Frelinghuysen to hold town halls and oppose Trump.

“P.S. one of the ringleaders works for your bank!” Frelinghuysen wrote in a fundraising letter sent to the bank’s leaders, a note that later prompted an ethics complaint. (Avelenda was not fired but chose to resign from the bank, and later became executive director of New Jersey’s state Democratic Party.)

The letter, which became a rallying cry for Frelinghuysen’s critics, was the kind of rookie mistake, Cook Political Report analyst Dave Wasserman said in a 2017 interview, “that someone who has survived in a competitive district for many years would not make.” And it all amounted to a “perfect storm” for the veteran congressman, with Sherrill looming on the horizon.

Sherrill was not, of course, the only Democrat to take note of Frelinghuysen’s stumbles. Lots of local Democrats held elected office in the parts of Morris, Essex, Passaic, and Sussex Counties included in the 11th district, and a number of them began actively taking steps to run for Congress as Sherrill was building up her own operation.

But it was too little, too late. Sherrill’s fundraising had begun with a bang – she had raised $1.2 million by the end of 2017, then a tremendous sum for a first-time candidate – and despite her moderate politics, she proved to be a massive hit among the liberal activists who filled out the ranks of groups like NJ 11th for Change.

Potential opponents like Assemblyman John McKeon (D-West Orange), Woodland Park Mayor Keith Kazmark, and Bloomfield Mayor Mike Venezia opted against campaigns; Passaic County Commissioner John Bartlett (D-Wayne) did in fact enter the race in July, but he left it again in December, saying that “it does not appear to be my moment to be the agent of that change” in Washington. Sherrill had essentially become the party’s de facto nominee by late 2017, with only a few minor opponents remaining in the race.

And Frelinghuysen was spooked. In early 2018, he commissioned an internal poll of the race, and it revealed what he most feared: he was in deep trouble. In order to beat Sherrill, he would have to run a campaign far more intense than any he’d run before, and even then victory was far from guaranteed as long as Trump sat in the White House. Like many Republican incumbents that year, he decided it just wasn’t worth it.

“My father reminded me often that we are temporary stewards of the public trust,” he said in a January 29 statement announcing his retirement. “I have sincerely endeavored to earn that trust every day and I thank my constituents and my home state of New Jersey for the honor to serve and I will continue to do so to the best of my abilities through the end of my term.”

A total unknown a year earlier, Sherrill had accomplished something extraordinary: she had, in essence, defeated a 24-year incumbent congressman before a single vote was cast. Now she needed to make sure the person who succeeded him was her.

15 points

Frelinghuysen’s retirement sent shockwaves through Washington; the New York Times quoted one former top Republican official as simply saying, “Wow.” And its timing created an enormous headache for local Republicans in the 11th district, who suddenly had to find a new nominee for a highly competitive seat in just two months.

After a number of Republican elected officials passed on campaigns, Assemblyman Jay Webber (R-Morris Plains) emerged as their top candidate, who had the benefit of being a seasoned politician and a former state party chair but the drawback of being a stark conservative in a seat where that was no longer the prevailing mood. And not all local Republicans were happy to go along with Webber, forcing him to win a protracted primary against two serious opponents before he could reach the general election.

Sherrill, meanwhile, had unanimous support from local Democrats and faced no issues winning her own primary. Discussions about reforms to the county line system were still years away, and while Sherrill’s four opponents tried to cast themselves as more liberal or less establishment-oriented alternatives – “This is a disruptive time in the Democratic Party and the democratic process,” runner-up Tamara Harris told the New York Times – there was little appetite for their message. Sherrill won the primary, her first-ever election, with 77% of the vote.

By the time the primaries were over, the 11th district was already starting to slip away from Republicans. At the end of June, Sherrill had seventeen times as much money in her campaign account as Webber did, and small-dollar Democratic donors promised to expand that gap even further. National Republicans, increasingly worried about other New Jersey incumbents like Leonard Lance and Tom MacArthur, pulled out of the district entirely.

As the general election approached, it became increasingly clear that the 11th district – a longshot flip opportunity when the cycle began – would be a core part of any hypothetical Democratic majority. A mid-October New York Times-Siena College poll found Sherrill leading by 11 points, 49%-48%, and Sherrill used the more than $8 million she raised to press her advantage, blanketing the airwaves with ads touting her military background and calling Webber anti-women and anti-LGBT.

Webber, recognizing that Sherrill’s own background made her tough to attack, tried to expand the race into a referendum on more controversial figures like Nancy Pelosi and Bob Menendez, and tied “Montclair Mikie” to her famously liberal hometown. But outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan’s claim that Sherrill was one of Pelosi’s “clones” rang hollow, given that Sherrill had repeatedly stated she wouldn’t support Pelosi to become speaker if she won.

When Election Day arrived, the result wowed even the most optimistic of Democrats. Sherrill defeated Webber by nearly 15 points, 57% to 42% – an astonishing 34-point swing towards Democrats compared to Frelinghuysen’s 2016 victory. Some 11th district voters who had probably never voted for a Democrat in their entire lives were among Sherrill’s winning coalition.

And Sherrill had done so with her sterling political image – center-left, patriotic, smart military veteran and mom – entirely intact. Local progressives still loved her, swing voters still trusted her, and as Democrats swept back control of the House, politicos and reporters outside of New Jersey started taking notice of her.

“She’s a future fill-in-the-blank for the party,” one Democratic operative told Politico in early 2019 – meaning a future senator, or governor, or president. First, though, she had to learn how to be a congresswoman.

The ‘badasses’

The very first vote any new member of the House has to take is for the next House Speaker. Sherrill had pledged throughout campaign season to oppose Pelosi, and that’s exactly what she did, voting for Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos instead. Pelosi won anyways, but Sherrill and 14 of her fellow moderates made it clear that they wouldn’t always toe the party line: “It’s important to keep your promises,” Sherrill said following her vote.

“[Pelosi] just got the majority, OK?” she elaborated later in an interview with Politico. “And we did it with districts like mine. And we’re going to hold it through districts like mine.”

Her decision contrasted with that of fellow freshman Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown), who had similarly pledged to vote against Pelosi but reneged in order to secure a spot on the Armed Services Committee. And yet despite her anti-Pelosi stance, Sherrill still got a seat on the exact same committee; in a world defined by grudge-holding and transactional politics, Sherrill somehow managed to be exempt.

The new congresswoman flexed her moderate bona fides by joining the Blue Dog Coalition, a caucus of Democrats who made up the party’s right flank; also in the group at the time were Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly), now one of Sherrill’s opponents for governor, and Jeff Van Drew (D-Dennis), now a Republican.

More important to Sherrill, though, was a cohort of female Democratic military and intelligence veterans first elected in 2018: herself, Chrissy Houlahan from Pennsylvania, Abigail Spanberger and Elaine Luria from Virginia, and Elissa Slotkin from Michigan. Many of the five had met one another on the campaign trail, and by the time the 117th Congress began, they had a name for themselves: “We call ourselves the badasses,” Houlahan said.

With New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her progressive “Squad” arriving in Washington at the same time, many journalists began framing Sherrill and her crew as a sort of anti-Squad: the “other Squad” or the “mod squad,” five women who may not draw flashy headlines but who were critical pieces of the new Democratic House majority. Sherrill rarely deigned to criticize her more progressive colleagues by name, but she clearly was fine with the comparison.

“What I have seen in the party is a group of people who come from very different districts,” she said at an early town hall. “So, you know, there are districts – like Queens, for example, is very different from Morristown.”

“I don’t agree with everything she says,” she continued, referencing Ocasio-Cortez. “I’m not going to vote on a lot of things she says that she might put before the floor. But I’m more than happy to talk to her about what shaping the future of this country might need to look like and then to look at it and say, ‘Gosh, we really need to move forward on environmental legislation. Where can we move forward together?’”

That was a message the “badasses” repeated over and over again, every time the media wanted to profile one of them (which they did near–constantly): every congressional Democrat may have their own way of representing their districts, but if the party wanted to start winning again, their backgrounds and their moderate politics were the way to go.

Sherrill’s spot on the Armed Services Committee, her top choice, allowed her to hone in on the national security issues that she cared deeply about. She also found a few issues to make her own, like the building of the Gateway project underneath the Hudson River – she’s been dubbed the “tunnel-obsessed congresswoman” – and the protection of abortion rights for servicemembers.

But national political debates were never too far off. One of the key battles during Sherrill’s first term was whether the new Democratic House majority, which had little ability to enact any major legislation on its own, should pursue the impeachment of Donald Trump. Sherrill and her fellow moderates were very skeptical at first – until allegations came out that Trump had tried to pressure Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden.

“If these allegations are true, we believe these actions represent an impeachable offense,” wrote Sherrill and six of her fellow freshman Democrats, all of them swing-seat military veterans, in a Washington Post op-ed. “We do not arrive at this conclusion lightly, and we call on our colleagues in Congress to consider the use of all congressional authorities available to us, including the power of ‘inherent contempt’ and impeachment hearings, to address these new allegations, find the truth and protect our national security.”

The op-ed, which came out in September 2019, helped open the floodgates for impeachment; by December, the House had impeached the president, though he was then acquitted by the Senate. And it also carried not-insignificant political risk for Sherrill, who despite running on a distinctly anti-Trump platform in 2018 still had to seek re-election in a Trump-won district.

Fortunately for her, though, the GOP was not in a position to make a serious effort to defeat her in 2020. The party’s nominee was Rosemary Becchi, an attorney from Millburn who started the 2020 cycle by running for the neighboring 7th district but switched races in order to give Tom Kean Jr. a clearer path to the nomination there; the tougher 11th district race was Becchi’s consolation prize. (Becchi didn’t live in her new district, but then again, neither did Sherrill, whose efforts to buy a house in the part of Montclair located in the 11th district had never come together.)

Much like Webber in 2018, Becchi found herself abandoned by national Republicans, who were panicked about losing even more seats and had no attention to spare for uphill fights like Becky versus Becchi. That let Sherrill, once again, completely set the terms of the campaign, outspending Becchi 2-to-1 and ending the cycle with plenty of money still left over.

The end result was far from a landslide; as Democrats nationwide fell well short of expectations in House races, Sherrill beat Becchi 53% to 47%, essentially matching Joe Biden’s performance in her district. Had Republicans seriously engaged in the race, it might have been even closer.

But it still meant Sherrill would return to Congress under a Democratic trifecta – and just as importantly, all four of her fellow “badasses” won re-election to their seats, too, collectively providing Democrats’ entire five-seat House majority.

Everything to everyone?

After the 2020 election, Sherrill – and several of her New Jersey Democratic colleagues – were given a major reprieve by the state’s congressional redistricting commission. On a map that was drawn by Democratic commissioners and eventually adopted into law, Sherrill’s 11th district shifted from Biden +7 to Biden +19 – a change explicitly designed to make it so that Sherrill would no longer have to worry about re-election. (It also, at last, placed her house within the boundaries of her own district.)

Even still, local Republicans were energized at the thought of taking her on in a midterm under a Democratic president, and a bumper crop of candidates emerged to run for the seat. The one who emerged from a contested primary was Paul DeGroot, a former assistant county prosecutor entering the political arena for the first time.

Sherrill, despite her newly revamped district, took the race very seriously, perhaps in part out of a desire to be safe rather than sorry and in part out of a longer-term interest in boosting her profile. Regardless, it worked: she won 59% to 40%, outperforming even Joe Biden’s 2020 high-water mark.

Heading into 2024, Republicans were even more despondent about their chances of ever winning back the 11th district, and the candidate they landed on was a genuine unknown: Joe Belnome, a building inspector in Belleville who had lost a deep-blue State Senate race the year before. 

Once again, the national GOP ignored the district, and once again, Sherrill spent millions just in case, ultimately winning 57% to 42%. (The ads she aired were conspicuously broad, fueling speculation that they were intended for the gubernatorial campaign she went on to launch a few weeks later.) The 2024 cycle also featured Sherrill’s first Democratic primary opponent since 2018; she beat oddball challenger Mark De Lotto with 94% of the vote.

In other words, Sherrill has won four congressional contests in a row against severely underfunded Republicans, two of them in a district that was specifically drawn for her. Not all of the races were easy, but it’s part of why Sherrill’s political image has remained so unbruised over the years: there’s been no one capable of bruising it.

But as Sherrill’s re-election contests grew easier at home, the fights she faced in Washington grew thornier.

In early 2023, the Blue Dog Caucus faced an internal rift over a seemingly small dispute: whether to rename and rebrand the group in order to move it away from its Southern, “boys’ club”-tinged roots. Sherrill and Spanberger were both among the rebrand proponents; when their effort failed, they and five other Blue Dogs left the group entirely.

Sherrill said at the time that she was leaving the coalition to “work with a broader coalition of leaders” and indicated no rancor towards the group, which had supported her since her first race in 2018; “I would like to thank them for their support over the years and I look forward to continuing to engage with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass common-sense legislation,” she said in a diplomatic statement.

But it wasn’t too hard to see why Sherrill would want to ditch the Blue Dogs, rebrand or not. She and Spanberger had both been given more Democratic seats after redistricting, and both were in the early stages of preparing statewide campaigns; a group known for its dogged centrism, and occasionally even obstructionism, wasn’t necessarily the right place for them anymore.

Later that year, Sherrill was unexpectedly given a shot at a U.S. Senate seat – the same one she had mulled running for in 2018 – when Bob Menendez was indicted on new federal corruption charges and lost the confidence of his party. But Sherrill, increasingly set on a gubernatorial campaign, chose to pass.

More controversial was who she decided to support instead: First Lady Tammy Murphy, thus snubbing her own colleague and 2018 wave baby, Andy Kim. Sherrill kept more distance from the troubled Murphy campaign than other New Jersey Democrats, but her endorsement was still seen as a betrayal by many Kim supporters; it was the most serious rift Sherrill had ever had with the activist base that helped elect her in 2018.

(A sideplot during the Senate campaign was Sherrill’s ever-evolving stance on the county line, a key faultline in the Murphy-versus-Kim contest. Sherrill initially declined to say much at all, then issued a call for “ballot uniformity and reforms like block voting” after the issue became a big deal in the Senate race, then seemed to partially back off that call, then reaffirmed that she did, indeed, support office-block ballots, in effect abolishing the line. When U.S. District Judge Zahid Quraishi issued his monumental anti-line decision, Sherrill said she “welcomed” it.)

But if Sherrill was reluctant to break from party leadership back home in New Jersey, she was far bolder on the national stage. In the agonizing weeks after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Trump in 2024, most New Jersey Democrats either stood behind the president or constructed artful dodges on whether he should stay in the race. Not Sherrill: on July 9, she said that Biden needed to go, becoming one of the first congressional Democrats to do so.

Sherrill faced a deluge of anger on social media and from many of her fellow New Jersey Democrats – even her allies, some of whom privately raged at what they saw as a betrayal of the party. But she stood firm, saying that regular voters who saw Biden’s apparent decline with their own eyes shouldn’t be “gaslighted” by their own party.

“I had a lot of positive feedback,” she said. “I had people texting me who I hadn’t heard from in years. I got a sense that a lot of the sentiment was just, ‘Thank you for saying what we are all feeling and seeing.’”

All of these decisions had their own motivations, but they all took place within a broader context: everyone in New Jersey politics was pretty sure Sherrill would run for governor. It was such an open secret that Sherrill got multiple prominent endorsements, and a supportive super PAC raised millions, before she was even in the race; she held out until she had won re-election to her congressional seat before officially announcing on November 18 that, yes, she was running for governor.

“We know that for too many people, they just don’t feel like they have access to the opportunity in this state. It’s too hard to get ahead,” Sherrill said. “People are worried that their rights and freedoms are under attack. And so I think we need real leadership in Trenton – not just somebody who’s going to talk about the problem, but actually deliver.”

Just like in her prior campaigns, Sherrill has leaned heavily into her military background, pitching herself as the best candidate to hold the line against Donald Trump and Elon Musk. And just like in her prior campaigns, the reaction from much of the state’s Democratic establishment has been overwhelmingly positive; after aggressively courting state power brokers, Sherrill has gotten endorsements from the Democratic organizations in most of the state’s largest counties, even flipping Hudson Democrats away from Josh Gottheimer.

What data we have thus far suggests that voters are receptive to her arguments, too. In more than a dozen polls, nearly all of them internal polls from the various campaigns, Sherrill has held a small but extremely consistent lead over the six-way field. At this point, it’s not a stretch to call her the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

But with frontrunner status comes a major target on Sherrill’s back, and many of her opponents, especially former State Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford) and Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, have begun to train their fire on votes she’s taken in Congress and on views she has – or hasn’t – espoused over the years. (One dustup came over old donations Sherrill’s congressional campaign had received from Elon Musk’s SpaceX PAC; Sherrill eventually gave the money to charity.)

And looming over the campaign is the question of to what extent New Jersey’s current status quo can or should stay in place. Fairly or unfairly, Sherrill is now seen as the candidate most in tune with Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration – she gave the governor a B grade at the New Jersey Globe’s February debate – and least likely to overhaul the state’s existing power structures.

It’s a complicated balancing act for Sherrill, who has always pitched herself as an agent of change but who, like any party-backed candidate, has to avoid alienating her own strongest supporters. She always has her sterling resume to fall back on, but for the first time in her political career, there’s no guarantee that’ll be enough.

In the spring of 2017, Sherrill recalled a conversation with a friend who helped spur her into her first campaign against Rodney Frelinghuysen.

“I was meeting with a friend of mine to talk about an organization I might start and how I might affect change in Washington,” Sherrill told Politico. “She said, ‘You really need to run for Congress.’ I said ‘Oh well, maybe someday I will. Let’s get back to this plan.’ She said, ‘No, you really need to run.’”

The friend, whoever they may have been, was onto something; it would have been a colossal waste for Democrats not to take Mikie Sherrill – mom, prosecutor, veteran, “badass” – and put her as close to the national spotlight as they could. Now it’s up to New Jersey’s Democratic primary voters to decide whether to add “governor” to that list.