The votes are in, the primaries are decided: Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair) and former Assemblyman Jack Ciatatrelli (R-Somerville) will be headed to this November’s general election for governor.
Their victories followed a primary unlike any other in state history – where voters voted on fair ballots without guidance from the county line, where no fewer than nine serious candidates from both parties competed for voters’ attention, where spending topped $120 million and will likely grow even further after final reports are in, and where more than a million voters ultimately showed up to the polls.
Here are 18 takeaways on what the results mean, both for this year’s elections and for the future of politics in New Jersey.
An unpredictable election cycle led to a predictable result. If you had told someone two years ago that the 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial election would be a race between Sherrill and Ciattarelli, they would have said … yeah, that makes sense.
A lot has happened in the last two years, from the indictment of a sitting U.S. Senator to the demise of the county line ballot design system. But Ciattarelli and Sherrill both had strategies for victory that could navigate those rough waters, and voters who have shown plenty of inclination to ditch the status quo in other races liked the two party-backed candidates enough to go along.
If one of their opponents had pulled off an upset – especially on the Democratic side, where the outcome felt uncertain right up until votes started coming in – it might have warranted a fundamental rethinking of the New Jersey electorate. (What would a win by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka or Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop have done for a state Democratic apparatus that’s already had a tough few years?) Instead, we get the most widely expected result, and the state can soldier on approximately as before.
Seven years on, Sherrill’s political profile remains a winner. As her ads made very clear, Sherrill is a Navy helicopter pilot, former federal prosecutor, and mom of four. That profile made her a diamond in the rough in 2018 – Democrats and Republicans alike were so wowed by it that 12-term Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen retired rather than face her – and it clearly continues to pay dividends to this day.
Sherrill didn’t put out as sweeping of a vision for the state as many of her opponents did; she has a policy platform, to be sure, but the grand upheaval of state affairs that might have happened under a Governor Baraka or a Governor Gottheimer wasn’t her style. Instead, she put her own character at the forefront – vote for the congresswoman you know and trust – and it worked.
And no one ever found the winning argument against her. In the final weeks of the race, some of Sherrill’s opponents started lobbing attacks at the wall to see what stuck. She’s funded by Elon Musk! She made millions on the stock market! She’s a creature of the party machine!
But no one ever committed to any particular message, and the little money that they did put behind their scattered attacks didn’t seem to make much of a dent. They discovered, perhaps too late, what has driven Republicans crazy for years: Sherrill is just an unusually difficult politician to attack.
It didn’t help that all of the non-Sherrill candidates, all of them men, couldn’t stop getting in one another’s way; it’s tough to focus on the frontrunner when there are four other guys strategizing about how to take you down, too. But given that Sherrill was broadly well-liked and positioned herself near the center of her party, there’s no guarantee that a smaller field would have helped anyone but her.
Ciattarelli played his cards perfectly. On the Republican side of the aisle, no one can really dispute that Jack Ciattarelli ran a masterful campaign. He started out with some enormous advantages, to be sure, but he made sure those advantages – name recognition and goodwill from his 2021 campaign, a big edge in party support – weren’t squandered.
Nowhere was that clearer than in how Ciattarelli handled the Trump factor. The former assemblyman used to be a harsh Donald Trump skeptic, which opened up a lane for conservative radio host Bill Spadea to run as the true Trump believer and attack Ciattarelli as a “RINO.” But Ciattarelli went to great lengths to make amends with Trump and shore up his right flank, eventually earning him a Trump endorsement and short-circuiting Spadea’s campaign.
The result? 68% of the vote and a win in every single county.
Trump delivered Ciattarelli a landslide, but he didn’t change the result. About that endorsement, though: it guaranteed Ciattarelli’s win, but it didn’t cause it. In fact, the causality is better understood as running the other way.
Ciattarelli’s team made a concerted push to convince Trump that Ciattarelli was not only an ally, but also that he was a winner. They showed off primary polls showing him far up over Spadea and argued that his three-point loss in 2021 was a sign he could win this year – he was the kind of guy, in other words, that Trump, who hates being on the losing side of anything, could get behind.
Spadea’s oft-repeated line that “Trump endorsed a poll,” instead of endorsing Ciattarelli on his own merits, perhaps wasn’t too far from the truth. The problem for Spadea was that the poll was right: Ciattarelli was a massive favorite both before and after Trump endorsed him.
“Mainstream” is called that for a reason. As state politics are increasingly nationalized, it’s no surprise that Sherrill and Ciattarelli can be reasonably designated as “mainstream” representatives of their party. Sherrill has always been a fairly middle-of-the-road Democrat, while Ciattarelli consciously got Trumpier to match his base.
That turned out to be a winning strategy for them. Both are largely tolerable for a broad swath of their party’s electorate, with Sherrill showing she can win progressive voters and Ciattarelli showing he can win the MAGA wing. In turn, their performances across the state were consistent; few of their party’s voters, outside of their opponents’ hardcore partisans, will likely have issues with them come November.
Baraka, in losing, came out a winner. Aside from the actual primary victors, Baraka, the Democratic runner-up behind Sherrill, is the only candidate on either side who looks stronger now than he did before he launched his campaign.
Baraka based his campaign around the basic proposition that Black voters were itching for a candidate who could speak directly to them and their needs. His efforts weren’t enough to win, of course, but his theory of the case was basically right: Black voters around the state turned out for him by huge margins, delivering him second place and wins in two of the state’s biggest counties, all despite the fact that he spent less money than anyone else in the Democratic field.
Far outrunning some initial expectations that his campaign would be a dud, Baraka proved that he really is a force to be reckoned with among primary voters. It was enough to put him on the radar for Sherrill’s lieutenant governor, though that’s a decision that ultimately rests with her.
The same can’t be said for the race’s other losers. It’s no fun to kick losing politicians while they’re down. But everyone besides Sherrill, Ciattarelli, and Baraka isn’t looking too hot right now.
Fulop, Spadea, and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly) had all been teasing statewide campaigns for years, and all began their campaigns with high expectations about what they’d be capable of. But they just never clicked with voters statewide, failing to win over anyone outside of their most devoted core of supporters; that’s especially brutal for Fulop, who had seemed like he might be within striking distance of Sherrill but ended up with third place and less than half of her vote total.
And while expectations were lower for State Sen. Jon Bramnick (R-Westfield) and former State Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford), they still didn’t meet them. Bramnick’s principled anti-Trump stand earned him just 6% of the vote; Sweeney’s decades of being South Jersey’s biggest legislative booster earned him 7% and a loss in five of South Jersey’s seven counties.
Money can’t buy everything. When a super PAC affiliated with New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller’s campaign filed a statement of organization last year indicating that it planned to spend $35 million on this year’s primary (all of it funded by the NJEA itself), it sent shockwaves through the political world. That kind of money from a single source was near-unprecedented – would it be enough to make Spiller into a frontrunner?
Not really. It certainly helped Spiller stay relevant, and the same can be said for Gottheimer, who also pursued a shock-and-awe ad blitz strategy via a super PAC funded by his congressional campaign. But while their messaging reached plenty of voters, there’s not much evidence that a huge number of them were convinced by it.
In the end, it may have been a case of diminishing returns. Although Spiller’s PAC spent more than anyone else, it’s not like it was doing so in a vacuum, and Spiller’s opponents were all spending plenty of money too; how many people are swayed by 46 mailers when two will do?
(Some other candidates’ lack of money, though, didn’t help them either. Bramnick, Spadea, and Baraka never hit the full match for public funds, leaving millions of dollars on the table; Fulop, meanwhile, spent most of his money early, leaving him very little wiggle room in the final weeks of the race.)
Party endorsements are only as good as the party makes them. “Mikie Sherrill had the lion’s share of party endorsements” and “Mikie Sherrill won the Democratic primary” are both true statements, but it’s less clear how much they had to do with one another.
In some places, like Brian Stack’s fiefdom in North Hudson, it’s obvious that even without a party line, organizational support still matters a huge amount. Stack’s home base of Union City gave Sherrill 68% of the vote – and you can trust that if the Hudson Democratic organization had stuck with its earlier plan of supporting Gottheimer, he would have done just as well.
But for every example like that, there are plenty of counterexamples; Sherrill won Camden, Burlington, and Atlantic Counties, where local organizations couldn’t convince voters to vote on regional lines for Sweeney, but lost her home of Essex County thanks to Baraka’s gangbusters operation with Black voters.
In a world without county lines, it’s up to every organization to actually make their endorsements count; when they don’t, other candidates will take advantage.
But the winners do now owe some favors. Party endorsements aren’t free in New Jersey. They come with an expectation of some return on investment: appointments to state jobs, signoff on parties’ preferred legislation, endorsements for local mayors and legislators, and so on.
Whether Sherrill or Ciattarelli wins this November, they’ll go into office as the standard-bearers for an entire set of organizations that supported them through the primary and general elections, and there will be some favors to pay back; no New Jersey governor is an island.
Things got funkier downballot. Though Sherrill’s and Ciattarelli’s wins may not have come as a surprise, races for State Assembly – buoyed by the end of the county line – featured some much more unexpected results.
As things stand right now, four Democratic candidates backed by their local party organizations have lost, and a fifth trails his challenger. (No Republican party endorsees lost outside of LD-4, where local county parties backed different candidates, although there were also far fewer GOP primaries this year.) And for every challenger who won, there were several more who came far closer to unseating incumbents than might have been anticipated.
Money means a lot in lower-level races. Money indeed can’t buy everything, but Assembly results could have gotten even funkier if a handful of races had seen less of a fundraising disparity.
In the 17th legislative district, for example, Piscataway Board of Education member Loretta Rivers came within a few hundred votes of defeating Assemblyman Joe Danielsen (D-Franklin) – that’s despite the fact that Danielsen and his running mate spent more than $400,000 on their campaigns, and Rivers spent only about $10,000. Even a small amount of money sent to some of Tuesday’s unsuccessful challengers could have made all the difference.
The legislature has a new independent caucus to reckon with. Between Katie Brennan and Ravi Bhalla in the 32nd district, Kenyatta Stewart in the 35th district, and potentially Ed Rodriguez in the 20th district – not to mention a few Fulop running mates who prevailed in primaries for competitive seats – there’s going to a new cohort of legislators come 2026 who will arrive in the Legislature having beaten the party organization.
To emphasize how remarkable that is, the number of current legislators who fit that description is zero. The new independent caucus may not be a huge portion of the legislature – and they may not have much of anything to do with one another, ideologically or politically – but the fact that there will be anyone at all in Trenton who (theoretically) answers to no one but themselves is a sea change.
And that could make 2027 look very different. For decades, New Jersey legislators from non-competitive districts have operated on the basic assumption that as long as they play their local party politics correctly, they’ll be fine for re-election. That’s clearly no longer the case.
Heading into the 2027 elections, legislators will have to start making sure that their support is strong both among party leaders and among voters themselves – that means getting better at fundraising, that means increasing name recognition, and that means running real campaigns tailored to the voters of the district they represent. The same is doubly so for party-backed non-incumbent candidates, who had a much worse track record than incumbents on Tuesday.
The parties themselves may also look to get smarter about who they put forward for seats. In the 28th district this year, Essex County Democrats avoided an Assembly upset by folding one of the opposition’s strongest potential candidates, Chigozie Onyema, into their own organization; if lots of legislators head for the exits in two years (or even if they don’t), that’s a strategy that may be replicated.
But the end of the county line won’t inherently bring about change on its own. Going into 2025, there was much uncertainty about what an election cycle would look like without the line; the most extreme scenario was something of a revolt, the possibility that anti-establishment candidates would wallop their longtime foes across the state and up-and-down the ballot (energy that Fulop’s campaign was hoping to harness if it arose).
Instead, establishment-embraced candidates won both gubernatorial nominations, and all but a handful of Assembly incumbents secured renomination, albeit with some close calls. Fair ballots evened the playing field, but they didn’t upend political gravity all on their own, and organizers will need to pair the reforms with continued grassroots organizing and financial investments.
Voter turnout was a gamechanger. A total of nearly 1.3 million voters turned out to vote for governor this year, the highest raw number of primary votes in a governor’s race in state history and the highest turnout the state has seen in decades.
There’s a lot of potential explanations for that: a return to the first Trump era’s high-voter-turnout status quo (although the 2017 primaries only saw around 750,000 people show up); a show of enthusiasm for the candidates running, especially among women and Black voters; a simple reflection of the fact that when candidates spend more than $120 million on election, voters will start to tune in. But whatever may have caused it, politicians have to take notice.
November is a wild card. Who will prevail in November? Can Ciattarelli at last pull off a win? Will Sherrill be the first Democrat to succeed another two-term Democratic governor since 1961?
The easy, and true, answer is that no one knows. Voters showed plenty of enthusiasm on Tuesday by voting in record numbers and delivering convincing wins for both parties’ nominees. But who can say how a much larger electorate will react to those same two candidates in November? And if Donald Trump, or term-limited Gov. Phil Murphy, or the U.S. Supreme Court does something between now and November that changes the contours of the race, what can either of the two candidates do about it?
Members of both parties will try to tell you over the course of the next five months that they know what’s going to happen. But they don’t, and neither do we.
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June 1, 2023 -
