For Democratic primary voters, Mikie Sherrill was the consensus candidate

When the county organizational line was struck down last year, everyone in New Jersey wanted to know: how would it affect the 2025 gubernatorial election? Were all the rules about New Jersey primaries, in which county political parties have typically gotten to dictate the outcome, about to be thrown out the window?

The answer, in part, was yes; results in both parties’ gubernatorial primaries, not to mention a bevy of state legislative races, show an electorate that was more willing than ever to buck traditional power structures and vote for whichever candidates it liked best. But the net result was a victory by the candidate supported by a broad range of the party establishment, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair), who may have won in part because, not in spite of, the end of the line.

Sherrill, who won a six-way primary with 34% of the vote, undoubtedly benefited from having party support across much of the state. But her county party endorsements only tell part of the story of how she won; results from across the state, including in counties that either stayed neutral or backed one of her opponents, show that Sherrill, who was far from the highest spender in the race, simply did a better job of winning over persuadable voters than any of her opponents. Presented with an even playing field, voters on net chose Sherrill.

Closest behind her was Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who activated a statewide coalition of Black voters the likes of which hadn’t been seen in years. Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop tried to energize suburban progressives, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly) ran from his base in Bergen County, New Jersey Education Association President Sean Spiller benefited from heavy spending from an affiliated super PAC, and former State Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-West Deptford) ran heavily on his South Jersey roots – but none came close to toppling Sherrill.

Sherrill still faces a tough race against Republican Jack Ciattarelli in the fall, but with her convincing primary victory, she’s proved that she can hold her own. (Click here for a spreadsheet with data on every town.)

Sherrill’s statewide sweep

Ever since her first campaign for Congress in 2018, Mikie Sherrill has been something of a hero for Democratic voters in the 11th congressional district, a longtime Republican bastion that Sherrill flipped blue. On Primary Day, no one was more enthusiastic than those voters to put Sherrill in the governor’s office.

Sherrill got 55% of the vote in her own district, and passed the 60% mark in Morris County, an extremely impressive number in a six-way field where every candidate was spending plenty of money to appeal to every voter they could. The more than 30,000 votes Sherrill netted out of her district was dramatically more than any other candidate netted out of their political home base.

But while it certainly gave Sherrill a boost statewide, the 11th district wasn’t the primary reason Sherrill won. It was everywhere else.

Far more so than any of her opponents, Sherrill proved to have broad appeal among pretty much every subset of voters. She got at least 20% of the vote in almost every county and carried towns up and down the state that she had never campaigned in prior to this year; in a crowded field, she simply proved to be the best at persuading voters to her side.

In some places, she was helped along by the endorsements of county parties and local bosses; there’s no way she would have gotten 68% of the vote in Union City, for example, without the help of Mayor and State Sen. Brian Stack. But since the county line is no more, those endorsements often had minimal meaning – and Sherrill won all three counties that didn’t make an endorsement as well as four counties that had backed one of her opponents.

Cape May County is a particularly good example of Sherrill’s persuasive powers. The local county party declined to endorse anyone, none of the candidates had ever represented it before, and it didn’t cast enough votes for it to be worth making it a major campaign focus, so its voters were essentially clean slates. And their verdict was definitive: Sherrill won the county with 39% of the vote, and no one else broke 20%.

Progressive voters, broadly defined, weren’t opposed to Sherrill either, despite her generally moderate stance in Washington. Sussex and Warren Counties, the two counties that supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, both voted for Sherrill; so too did the prototypically progressive suburbs of Maplewood and Montclair, though South Orange narrowly voted for Fulop, who put the local mayor on his ticket as his lieutenant governor candidate.

If there’s a downside to Sherrill’s victory map, it’s that she struggled to win over urban areas. Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, and Elizabeth, the state’s four largest cities, were all among her worst municipalities statewide, and lots of Black and Hispanic voters opted for one of her five opponents.

Of course, there’s the mitigating factor that two of those cities are led by two of her opponents, Baraka and Fulop, so those results may have been less a referendum on her than an affirmation of support for them. But with minority voters flocking increasingly to Republicans in recent New Jersey general elections, Sherrill’s soft urban support is something her campaign will have to watch out for.

Baraka’s urban wave

Besides Sherrill, the one other candidate who can reasonably claim that their campaign strategy was successful – even if it wasn’t victorious, per se – is Ras Baraka.

Baraka ran on activating New Jersey’s Black voter base, and he delivered. Tens of thousands of people came out to vote in heavily Black cities like Trenton, Plainfield, East Orange, and Baraka’s home of Newark – and a huge majority of them voted for Baraka, giving him a powerful statewide base. (Newark alone gave him 73% of the vote and netted him more than 12,000 votes.)

Somewhat more surprisingly, Baraka also found widespread support among Hispanic voters, who were seen as a wild card given the lack of any Hispanic candidate in the race. Baraka won the cities of Paterson, Elizabeth, Passaic, and New Brunswick, all of which are majority-Hispanic (and all of which are in counties where the local organization was firmly behind Sherrill).

Baraka faced two main impediments, though, to turning that local success into a statewide coalition.

For one, the further south he went, the less support he found, and he outright lost majority-minority South Jersey cities like Camden and Atlantic City that he probably needed to win. (The loss in Camden came despite the fact that the mayor had endorsed him.) That may have been a resources issue: Baraka was among the least well-financed candidates in the race, and while he could overcome that in places like Newark where he had an operation already in existence, he had little help to fall back on further south.

The other issue was that Baraka simply did not break through among suburban white progressives to the degree he would have wanted. Outside of his urban base, he typically maxed out at 15% to 20% of the vote, with suburban liberals mostly opting for Fulop or Sherrill instead. In a state where suburban voters, both white and nonwhite, make up a substantial majority of the electorate, that proved difficult to overcome.

Fulop’s anti-establishment gamble

Steve Fulop had something of the opposite problem as Baraka: he had fairly widespread support across the state, but he didn’t have any political base to pair it with.

Originally, his base was supposed to be his home of Hudson County. But after Hudson Democrats turned on him, he found himself as the underdog in his own home territory, and powerful bosses like Stack actively worked against him. He ended up losing Hudson to Sherrill 35% to 29% and only won Jersey City by two percentage points, with Baraka nipping at his heels thanks to enormous support from the city’s Black community.

Without Hudson in his corner, Fulop focused instead on rebuilding the Andy Kim coalition – the coalition, never actually tested in a real primary contest, that propelled Kim to the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination last year over First Lady Tammy Murphy – and leaned heavily into an anti-corruption message, arguing that voters wanted to move on from the status quo.

But that, too, didn’t catch on to nearly the extent Fulop would have wanted. He won a few towns here and there (including Atlantic City, where he had the mayor’s support), but a lot of the suburban progressives he had hoped to win over were instead perfectly fine with Sherrill, whom Fulop tried unsuccessfully to cast as Tammy Murphy 2.0.

In the end, Fulop ended up with a broader statewide coalition than any candidate except for Sherrill, but since he was coming in second or third place almost everywhere rather than first, it wasn’t nearly enough to win. Fulop’s slate of Assembly candidates, too, came short in every safe-seat race they ran in, though they came agonizingly close in several districts.

There’s been lots of discussion whether Fulop and Baraka, the two most outwardly progressive candidates in the race, split the vote and allowed the more moderate Sherrill to win. That may have been true to some extent, but given how different their bases were, there’s no guarantee Fulop’s suburban and exurban progressives would have flowed to Baraka, or Baraka’s urban Black voters to Fulop.

Gottheimer’s Bergen base

Josh Gottheimer’s calculation in this year’s primary was that Democratic voters, alarmed by Donald Trump’s rise and frustrated by persistently high costs, would flock to an outspoken centrist with a single-minded focus on lowering taxes.

But as the campaign went on, it became increasingly clear that Gottheimer’s message was only really resonating among a few subsets of the electorate. One was Gottheimer’s own constituents: with the strong support of the Bergen Democratic organization, he won his 5th congressional district 39% to 24% over Sherrill, and also kept things somewhat close in Warren County, which he represented until 2022.

The other group that came out for Gottheimer was Jewish voters, particularly Orthodox Jews. He won the Orthodox hub of Lakewood by 66 percentage points – a larger margin than any of his opponents got out of any single town – and also benefited from the support of smaller Orthodox communities in places like Passaic, Jackson, and Teaneck.

Outside of those two groups, however, Gottheimer wasn’t able to remain competitive, and the modest win he got from Bergen County wasn’t nearly enough to make up for that. New Jersey Democrats may simply have not been in the mood for an aggressively moderate, tax-focused message, or if they were, they were satisfied with what other candidates had to offer. (Hudson Democrats were also originally on Gottheimer’s side before they flipped to Sherrill, but even if they had stuck with Gottheimer, it still wouldn’t have been enough for him to win.)

Particularly telling is a divide in Bergen County between Gottheimer’s district and the neighboring 9th congressional district. Of the 46 Bergen County towns that are in Gottheimer’s district where vote data are available, Gottheimer won 44 of them; of the 22 that he doesn’t represent, he won just ten.

Spiller’s ad blitz

If you live and breathe in the state of New Jersey, chances are you’ve gotten a Sean Spiller mailer in the last year. Chances are, in fact, that you’ve gotten 20 of them.

Spiller relied heavily on a shock-and-awe strategy funded by his super PAC, Working New Jersey, which was in turn funded by his union, the New Jersey Education Association. While final reports aren’t in yet, Working New Jersey spent at least $40 million on Spiller’s campaign, far more than any other outside group spent on behalf of any candidate this year.

And it certainly did push Spiller, whose only prior electoral experience was serving as mayor of Montclair for four years, into a higher tier than he otherwise would have been – especially in South Jersey. Spiller won Cumberland County and came in second or third place in every other South Jersey county, swiping away majority-minority towns like Camden, Pennsauken, and Vineland that Baraka and Sweeney were trying to win. (Spiller, like Baraka, is Black.)

Why South Jersey? The answer might lie in media markets; Spiller’s super PAC may have simply outspent his opponents on the Philadelphia airwaves, winning over less-informed voters who weren’t ever reached by other candidates. One piece of evidence in favor of this theory: Spiller’s next-best county outside of South Jersey was Mercer, which isn’t culturally part of South Jersey but which is part of the Philadelphia market.

But Spiller didn’t net a particularly large number of actual votes out of South Jersey, and he had no base elsewhere to make up for it. In the vote-rich parts of North Jersey where Sherrill, Baraka, Fulop, and Gottheimer were duking it out for votes, Spiller was essentially a non-entity.

Worst of all was Montclair, which Spiller led until just last year: after becoming embroiled in a series of ethical difficulties while in office, Spiller won just 2.4% of the vote from his former constituents, his 17th-worst showing in any of the state’s 564 towns (not counting the four tiny towns – Walpack, Teterboro, Tavistock, and Rockleigh – where either zero votes were cast or vote data are not available).

Sweeney’s southern swoop

Regardless of what else happened in this year’s race, Steve Sweeney was always going to be a heavily regional candidate. The former State Senate president had never run for office outside of South Jersey, and all of his party support came from the South Jersey political organization headed by his longtime friend, George Norcross.

And indeed, South Jersey was where Sweeney did best. He easily carried his old legislative district with 41% of the vote and won Salem and Gloucester Counties, and he kept things competitive with his opponents in the region’s other counties.

But that wasn’t enough – not even remotely. In order to win statewide, Sweeney would have not only needed to win South Jersey’s seven core counties, he would have needed to get absolute landslides out of them. The fact that he lost four of them to Sherrill and Spiller, and only got 40% of the vote in Gloucester County, was a tremendous failure by the South Jersey Democratic organization to remain relevant in a primary that had largely left the region by the wayside. 

Camden County going for Sherrill was a particularly big black eye for Norcross and company. Sweeney had never represented any part of the county before, so it makes sense that voters there were less familiar with him. But in the past, it would have been possible for the local organization to deliver him a huge win anyways; with the county line gone, that power has evidently faded.

As for anywhere outside of South Jersey, Sweeney was seemingly barely known at all. He didn’t crack 10% of the vote in a single town outside of South Jersey and Ocean County; in Essex and Bergen Counties, the two biggest vote-producing counties this year, he couldn’t even crack 1%.

Click here for a detailed spreadsheet.