Sherrill leads Ciattarelli by six points in latest Quinnipiac poll

Democrat Mikie Sherrill maintains a small lead over Republican Jack Ciattarelli in New Jersey’s expensive and closely watched campaign for governor, according to a new poll released today by Quinnipiac University.

The poll finds Sherrill, a four-term congresswoman, leading Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman, by a six-point margin among likely voters, 50% to 44%.

That’s only slightly changed from Quinnipiac’s prior look at the race from mid-September, which put Sherrill up by eight points, 49% to 41%.

Like in Quinnipiac’s earlier poll, Sherrill seems to have a likability edge over Ciattarelli; 43% of respondents said they had a favorable opinion of her to 38% unfavorable, while Ciattarelli is underwater at 39% favorable, 46% unfavorable. (Both candidates have grown less liked since September, potentially a product of the millions of dollars spent on attacking one another.)

One area where Ciattarelli does have an edge, though, is enthusiasm: 55% of Ciattarelli voters said they’re “very enthusiastic” to support him, while 42% of Sherrill voters said the same.

“The raucous debates are done, the attack ads are everywhere, and the race is close, with Sherrill holding a slight advantage,” Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy said in a statement accompanying the poll. “As the clock ticks down to Election Day, voter enthusiasm will translate into turnout. For the moment, in that category, Ciattarelli has an edge.”

Quinnipiac tested the two candidates head-to-head on a variety of issues, and found mixed results. By a 47%-44% margin, voters think Ciattarelli would do a better job than Sherrill at growing the economy; the two candidates are tied at 45% each on keeping New Jerseyans safe; and Sherrill is up 48%-38% on handling NJ Transit and 50%-41% on handling the state’s schools.

Voters also said that, on net, they view Sherrill as more honest than Ciattarelli (45%-38%) and that they think Sherrill better understands the problems of people like them (49%-41%).

And if nothing else, the two candidates’ advertising is certainly reaching voters: 86% of respondents said they’ve seen Sherrill’s TV or social media ads, and 85% said the same for Ciattarelli. Whether the deluge of ads is helping their cause, though, is another story; only small percentages of voters in each instance said they were more likely to support the candidate based on the ads they’ve seen.

Lastly, in a foreboding result for New Jersey’s powerful party organizations, both parties are quite unpopular among state voters; the Republican Party has a favorability ratio of 39%-52%, while the Democratic Party is just barely better at 41%-50%. That means that some of both Sherrill’s and Ciattarelli’s votes are likely coming from voters who don’t approve of the parties they represent.

Throughout the summer, after Sherrill and Ciattarelli had won contested primaries for their respective parties’ nominations, Sherrill consistently held a solid lead in public polls of the race, leading by nine points in a Rutgers-Eagleton poll and by eight points in a Fairleigh Dickinson poll. (Until Quinnipiac’s return this year, those two in-state universities were the two pollsters that typically paid the closest attention to New Jersey politics.)

Once the general election campaign started in earnest last month, some pollsters still found Sherrill up by a decent margin, including a Fox News poll that gave her a 50%-42% lead. Other polls, however, have indicated that the race is tightening; one Emerson College poll from September made headlines when it showed the two candidates tied at 43% each.

Casting a shadow over every poll of the race is the fact that the last time New Jersey voters chose a governor, in 2021, pollsters underestimated Republicans across the board; nearly every poll gave Gov. Phil Murphy, who is term-limited this year, a healthy lead over Ciattarelli, but Murphy ended up prevailing by just three points.

Quinnipiac never polled that 2021 race, having largely left the Garden State behind after the 2018 elections, but it has evidently decided to re-engage in Garden State politics this year. The pollster’s track record was once fairly good; its final polls ahead of the 2018 U.S. Senate election and the 2017 New Jersey gubernatorial election were both just a few percentage points off the actual result.

The Quinnipiac University poll was conducted from October 9-13 with a sample size of 1,327 likely general election voters and a margin of error of /- 3.6%.