The Watcher: Will anyone attack Mikie?

Five New Jersey men are between a rock and a hard place

In the race for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, Mikie Sherrill has been in the lead in every poll, public and internal, but the six-way race remains close, and a large block of primary voters remain undecided.  The conventional wisdom is that someone will bludgeon her sometime soon.

Sherrill’s own internal poll has her unfavorables at 9%, the lowest in the field.  As one pundit put it: “She’s not going to lose a primary if voters like her.  Nobody is giving them a reason not to like her.  I mean, she’s a Navy helicopter pilot.”

Some thought Sherrill might be the target when the field gathered for the first Democratic debate in February, but attacks on her never materialized.  Beyond some social media posts by Steve Fulop and a couple of punches by Steve Sweeney, Sherrill has remained safe from attacks.

It will take significant dollars on broadcast, cable, and digital ads attacking Sherrill to drive up her negatives in any meaningful way.  A couple of press releases or a light spend won’t do it.

Here’s the biggest challenge: in a large field, the candidate who launches the attack doesn’t necessarily pick up the votes they drive away from Sherrill.  No one wants to spend their money to send possible Sherrill votes to one of their opponents.

And with vote-by-mail ballots going out in three days – and with less than eight weeks until Election Day, time is running out.  That could leave Sherrill the winner in a game of political chicken.

A dark money group could come in, but there’s no sign of one now.

There has been speculation that the Republican Governors Association might step in and attempt to influence the Democratic primary – perhaps they prefer a different general election candidate – but so far, they haven’t come near the race.

HUZZAH: There will be at least one in-state independent poll in the gubernatorial primary.  The New Jersey Globe has learned that the Rutgers-Eagleton Poll is set to go into the field soon, with head-to-head results expected to be released in the next few weeks.

HEADS OR TAILS – AND POLLOCK STILL WINS:  Two Democratic candidates for governor are using the same polling firm, with Global Strategy Group working for Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Mikie Sherrill.  The firm’s founding father and president, Jeffrey Pollock, works for Gottheimer; Montclair resident Jeffrey Plaut and Angela Kuefler are polling for Sherrill.  Supposedly, the firm has built a wall between the two pollsters – but that kind of wall is sometimes built with balsa wood.  If Sherrill wins the primary, Pollock’s firm still has the Democratic nominee as a client.

POLLS: Term-limited Gov. Phil Murphy, in his eighth and final year in office, has approval ratings of 56%-35%, making him the 17th most popular governor in the nation, according to a Morning Consult poll that looked at all 50 governors during the first three months of 2025.    Morning Consult also looked at New Jersey’s two U.S. Senators: Cory Booker is at 51%-33%, and Andy Kim is at 49%-22%.   Among freshman senators, Kim ranks fifth out of twelve.  President Donald Trump is at 44%-52% in New Jersey; in Virginia – the only other state that elects a governor this year – Trump is at 48%-49%.  And Joe Biden’s final approval rating in New Jersey was at 44%-51%.

WELCOME TO NEW JERSEY, 2028: Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who represents a Silicon Valley district and a potential presidential candidate, will hold a town hall meeting in White House Station in New Jersey’s 7th District on Monday as part of his “Benefits Over Billionaires” series.  Khanna is visiting swing districts represented by Republican congressmen “to stand up to the unholy alliance of wealth and power and reject the failed economic policies that put billionaires and corporations over the working class.”  Several labor unions and progressive groups are sponsoring the event.

TALES FROM THE CRYPT: It’s been almost twelve years since Frank Lautenberg died in office while serving his fifth term in the U.S. Senate, but he still has nearly $90,000 cash-on-hand, so his treasurer, Peter Nicholas, has dutifully filed Lautenberg for Senate reports with the Federal Election Commission since then.  Those records reflect that in February, the Lautenberg campaign retained a lawyer, Raj Parikh, perhaps to finally shut down the campaign and figure out what to do with the left-over cash.  What’s interesting is that the late senator’s family brought in Parikh instead of asking the longtime Lautenberg campaign lawyer, Angelo Genova, to handle it.  The Watcher assumes that the Lautenberg family understands they can’t raise the nearly $1.1 million the campaign owes to Frank Lautenberg.  The $90,000 could be used to pay down that loan, but that creates a possible tax liability; it’s more likely that the family will use the money to make campaign and charitable contributions.

WHAT ABOUT THE DROP BOXES: In February, a race for fire commissioner in Toms River ended in a tie – then the results were changed after the sudden discovery of another vote-by-mail ballot after the results were certified; there’s a court battle on that.  But one uncounted ballot merits disclosure: a vote-by-mail ballot was postmarked on February 10 – five days before Election Day and nine days before the deadline to receive properly postmarked ballots.  But the U.S. Postal Service didn’t deliver the ballot from the post office until March 14, which was 32 days later.  That means the voter, a Toms River police officer, was disenfranchised; it’s unclear whether his vote would have changed the election result. What’s the moral of the story? Fire Commissioner Elections don’t use secure ballot drop boxes, relying solely on the post office.

NEXT ACT: The director of the soon-to-be-shuttered Monmouth University Polling Institute, Patrick Murray, has opened his own polling firm, StimSight Research.

THEY DON’T TEACH HVAC IN LAW SCHOOL: During a court hearing on a close Toms River fire commissioner race, Superior Court Judge Craig Wellerson took a short recess after complaining that his new courtroom – he’s recently been transferred to the chancery division – was too warm.  During the break, a sheriff’s officer discovered the reason behind the sweltering courtroom: someone had turned on the heat instead of the air conditioner.

LEARNING HOW TO DO CALL TIME: Freshman Rep. Nellie Pou raised $351,113 during her first three months in Congress – not a bad haul if she wasn’t running in a district Donald Trump narrowly carried – and a district Pou won by less than five points.  Other freshmen Democrats in swing districts over the last few years – Josh Gottheimer, Andy Kim, Tom Malinowski, and Mikie Sherrill – all raised more in the first quarter in office, but in Pou’s defense, she’s the only one who spent her first 27 years in office unencumbered by competitive elections; the others knew no other way.

A MENENDEZ WIN: A federal judge allowed Nadine Menendez to wear a pink breast cancer awareness pin during her bribery trial despite objections by a federal prosecutor who thought the pin might be distracting to jurors.  “We obviously all feel for her situation,” the New York Times reported the prosecutor as saying.  “Like any other political or policy symbol … we would ask that Ms. Menendez remove the pin.”  Menendez has battled breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy last year just before her husband, former U.S. Senator Bob Menendez, was convicted in a separate 2024

KEEPING WATCH ON CLICKBAITS: NJ.com has mentioned the name of Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman from Illinois and a critic of President Donald Trump, fifteen times since March 1.  In comparison, two New Jersey Democratic House members running for governor have had their name show up less on NJ.com: Mikie Sherrill has made it ten times, and Josh Gottheimer has shown up nine times.

TRIVIA: In the 1976 presidential election, the Maine Attorney General, a Democrat, refused to allow his party’s nominee to appear on the general election ballot as Jimmy Carter because state law didn’t permit nicknames and mandated first and middle names or middle initials.  He ruled that the name of the ballot had to be James E. Carter.  The Carter campaign fought that, and a county court judge agreed. (At least one other state has judges who view election laws as fungible.)  On Election Day, Gerald R. Ford carried Maine by 4,041 votes.

BOOK & FILM: The best book on the 1976 presidential campaign, a transformative time in American history that followed the Watergate scandal, is Marathon: The Pursuit of the Presidency, 1972-1975 by Jules Witcover.  Worth watching is a 55-minute, Emmy Award-winning documentary, Feeling Good About America.  You can watch it for free on YouTube by clicking HERE.

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