DGA polling memo says N.J. voters don’t approve of Big Beautiful Bill

Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair), this year’s Democratic nominee for governor, has spent months warning about how bad the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4, will be for New Jersey. A new polling memo from the Democratic Governors Association (DGA) argues that, on the whole, New Jersey voters agree with her.

Per the poll, which was conducted by the progressive pollster Public Policy Polling on July 9 and 10, 53% of New Jersey voters oppose the Big Beautiful Bill, while 36% support it. 53% of respondents also said they’d prefer to have a governor who opposes the bill – a governor like Sherrill, in other words – and 39% said they’d rather have a governor who supports it, like GOP gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli. (The New Jersey Globe did not view the original poll, and cannot verify how its questions were phrased.)

PPP also conducted a parallel poll in Virginia, which is hosting the year’s other gubernatorial election, and found similar results.

“While Republicans will be forced to own these unpopular and harmful health care cuts, Democrats are running on affordability and improving lives for working families,” the DGA’s memo states. “[Virginia gubernatorial nominee] Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill are not only standing up to these harmful cuts, they are also outlining their own positive vision to lift up families and putting forward real plans to lower costs.”

The DGA’s poll is the first public New Jersey-specific data on the One Big Beautiful Bill; other national polls have similarly found the law to be broadly unpopular, though some of its individual provisions are substantially more popular when asked about separately.

The far-reaching bill, which was supported by New Jersey’s three Republican congressmen and opposed by its 11 Democratic representatives and senators, could have a number of impacts on New Jersey, both positive and negative.

The statistic that Democrats have cited the most is the number of New Jerseyans projected to lose Medicaid coverage thanks to changes made by the bill: 350,000, according to the state Human Services Department, which based its calculation on estimates made by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. State officials have also warned about losing funds for food stamps, which could blow a new hole in the state budget, and about threats to the state’s transition to clean energy.

Republicans, meanwhile, have hyped up the bill’s tax cuts for individuals and businesses: it makes permanent the new tax rates established under the 2017 Tax Cuts & Jobs Act while also raising the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction cap, long a headache in New Jersey, from $10,000 to $40,000.

When the bill was still in the process of being negotiated, Ciattarelli said “shame on any Republican across the country who doesn’t support [it]” on a radio program, and later responded to a Bergen Record question about the bill’s Medicaid cuts by saying he wanted to focus on “New Jersey issues.”

Sherrill, on the other hand, voted against the bill both times it came before the House, and has repeatedly attacked Ciattarelli for endorsing it: “Supporting a bill this devastating for New Jersey demonstrates incompetence and callousness at the highest level – a choice that proves he is both too partisan and too ill-informed to lead our state,” she said in a statement after the bill passed the Senate.

The Public Policy Polling poll, commissioned by the Democratic Governors Association, was conducted from July 9-10 with a sample size of 541 registered voters in New Jersey and a margin of error of +/- 4.2%.