After tens of millions of dollars were spent blanketing the airwaves with ads; after hundreds of thinkpieces were written about whether Democrats might be blowing it; after dozens of polls were conducted, many of them showing a race balancing on a knife’s edge – New Jersey’s 2025 gubernatorial election is at last at an end.
And it wasn’t even close.
Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the race to succeed Gov. Phil Murphy in an utterly dominant fashion, beating Republican Jack Ciattarelli by 13 points statewide, 56% to 43%, and blowing past all but the most optimistic Democratic predictions. Sherrill will be the first Democratic woman to lead New Jersey (and the second woman overall), and the first gubernatorial candidate to succeed a two-term governor of the same party since 1961.
“We’ve chosen liberty, the very foundation of democracy, and we’ve chosen prosperity, necessary to create opportunity for all,” Sherrill said in her victory speech. “So, New Jersey, to quote the Boss: ‘The future is now. Roll up your sleeves and let your passion flow. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.’”
Democrats’ superb election night didn’t stop there. Lifted up by both Sherrill’s coattails and by strong local Democratic organizations, the party is on track to flip at least three Assembly seats and possibly as many as six, depending on how uncalled races in the 2nd and 25th districts shake out. Republicans had hopes that they could put a dent in the Democrats’ majority like they did in 2021, but they failed to flip a single seat.
All of this happened with sky-high voter turnout. As of now, nearly 3.2 million votes have been counted, blowing past prior records for total votes cast in a New Jersey gubernatorial election; the 2021 race between Murphy and Ciattarelli had 2.6 million voters show up at the polls, and Murphy’s first win in 2017 had just 2.1 million. “A New Jersey Republican can win, but not when New Jersey Democrats turn out,” as Micah Rasmussen put it on social media.
The result is in keeping with a generally excellent Democratic night around the country, with the party scoring major wins in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and California as well. New Jersey is sure to be slotted into a national narrative about politics during the second Donald Trump presidency: Democrats are energized, Republicans are lethargic, and a 2026 blue wave is on the table.
That’s a narrative that Sherrill’s own campaign certainly leaned into throughout the election. Whenever possible, Sherrill tied Ciattarelli to Trump, saying that he wouldn’t stand up for New Jersey on critical issues like the Gateway Tunnel. Ciattarelli barely even contested the connection, declining to break with the president in most instances and saying at a debate that he’d give Trump’s second term an “A” grade – a helpful stance during the Republican primary, to be sure, but a severe misstep for the general election.
But Sherrill also, critically, took the fight to Ciattarelli on nuts-and-bolts issues on which Republicans might have otherwise claimed the upper hand. Energy costs skyrocketed this year, so Sherrill proposed a statewide utility rate freeze, over doubts from both Ciattarelli and Murphy; more sneakily, her campaign neutralized perennial Democratic vulnerabilities on high taxes by cutting selectively edited ads that made it look like Ciattarelli was the one who wanted to raise taxes (he didn’t).
And she never shied away from promoting her own background as a Navy helicopter pilot, federal prosecutor, and mom of four. Opponents and pundits accused her of prioritizing style over substance, but her life story is one that helped win her four terms in Congress, and it’s still as potent as ever.
The results speak for themselves. Not only did Sherrill win by double digits, far outrunning Kamala Harris’s 2024 performance and coming close to matching Joe Biden’s 2020 landslide, she appears to have carried all five of the state’s core swing counties: Gloucester, Atlantic, Passaic, Cumberland, and Morris. The result in Morris, which heavily overlaps with her congressional district, is especially impressive; no Democratic gubernatorial candidate had won it since Brendan Byrne’s 1973 landslide. Donald Trump’s historic gains last year: almost entirely wiped away.
It’s too early to know exactly how those results filter down onto the state’s congressional and legislative maps, but back-of-the-envelope math suggests that Sherrill almost certainly won Rep. Nellie Pou (D-North Haledon)’s 9th congressional district, and likely won Rep. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield)’s 7th congressional district as well. Both districts voted for Trump in 2024, and both are set to be top battlegrounds in 2026.
On the legislative side, Democrats went into tonight worried about a repeat of 2021, when – even as he lost statewide – Jack Ciattarelli helped his party gain a net seven legislative seats, including some that weren’t supposed to be remotely competitive. Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin didn’t think his 52-28 majority was at risk of flipping to the GOP, but perennially competitive seats like South Jersey’s 4th district, Monmouth County’s 11th district, Central Jersey’s 16th district, and Bergen County’s 36th and 38th districts all seemed to be at least somewhat threatened.
Instead, Democratic incumbents held all of those seats by big margins, and also swept the three districts that both sides knew would be highly competitive: deep South Jersey’s 3rd district, where Assemblymembers Heather Simmons and Dave Bailey held onto a seat that very likely voted for Ciattarelli; Burlington County’s 8th district, where a rematch of an incredibly tight 2023 contest was won by Democratic Assemblywoman Andrea Katz and running mate Anthony Angelozzi; and the 21st district in the suburbs of Union and Somerset Counties, where GOP Assemblywomen Michele Matsikoudis and Nancy Muñoz – the latter of whom has served in the Assembly for 16 years – lost to Democrats Andrew Macurdy and Vinnie Kearney after years of defying partisan gravity.
And Democrats have a shot at flipping even more seats; as vote counts stand right now, 2nd district Assemblywoman Claire Swift and 25th district Assemblyman Christian Barranco narrowly trail their Democratic challengers, Maureen Rowan and Marisa Sweeney, in districts that few people on either side believed were in much danger.
(Democratic Assemblyman Avi Schnall also won re-election in the 30th district, by some measures the reddest district in the state, but that comes with the asterisk that Schnall had the unwavering support of Lakewood’s Orthodox Jewish community and thus was always the favorite for another term.)
Further downballot, Republicans also struggled in county and local races, failing to break through in some swing areas and actively losing ground in others. Perhaps the most interesting result came in Jersey City, where Councilman James Solomon and former Gov. Jim McGreevey will face off in a mayoral runoff, though that nonpartisan race has little to do with D-versus-R dynamics.
None of this is to say that Gov.-elect Sherrill or the expanded Democratic legislative majority will have an easy time when they take office next year. Murphy won by a similarly large margin in 2017 and carried a lot of Democratic legislators into Trenton along with him, and yet he spent the early years of his governorship bickering with Democratic legislative leadership and running into brick walls on some of his signature policy proposals.
Democratic divides will likely be exacerbated by the presence of a new bloc in Trenton: legislators who won their primaries without party support, a phenomenon made possible by the death of the county line.
Four assemblymembers-elect (Ed Rodriguez, Ravi Bhalla, Katie Brennan, and Kenyatta Stewart) beat party-backed candidates in the June primary; a fifth, Macurdy, officially had party support but is a bit of a wild card; and Sweeney, who leads by 245 votes in the 25th district, could be the only member of Steve Fulop’s ticket to make it to the Assembly. Not all of them will necessarily agree on everything, but they’re all independent operators in a way that few current members of the legislature are allowed to be.
And because New Jersey’s election cycles never allow for any rest, everyone will soon have to start gearing up for the next rounds: for 2026, when Kean and Pou (both former state legislators themselves) will be running for re-election in nationally watched races, and for 2027, when the State Senate will be on the ballot again and substantial legislative turnover is a possibility.
In Sherrill’s 11th congressional district, things will be developing very fast; a special election to fill her seat is looming sometime in the winter or early spring, and a huge crop of ambitious Democrats will likely announce campaigns in the coming days.
Sherrill and Lieutenant Gov.-elect Dale Caldwell will also have to begin the work of selecting a Cabinet, including critical positions like Attorney General and Secretary of State. New Jersey vests an unusual amount of power in the governor’s office, power that Sherrill will be able to wield almost immediately upon taking office.
But for now, Democrats can take a victory lap for an election well won, and Republicans – so energized and optimistic after their near-miss in 2021 – will have to do some introspection on where they go from here. Ciattarelli, it turns out, was not their savior, nor was Donald Trump.
They’ve got four years to figure out whether someone else can be.
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