2025 New Jersey Globe Year in Review

Click HERE to download a high-resolution version of the 2025 New Jersey Globe Voter’s Guide.

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For the eighth time, the New Jersey Globe presents our annual Year in Review, a look back at the people and the news that, for better or worse, make the Garden State the most exciting in American politics.

Mikie Sherrill won significant victories in the primary and general elections.  Her victory was decisive because she rejected noise and leaned into competence. Her discipline, biography, and message aligned with a state that prefers seriousness to spectacle. She becomes the state’s governor after beating two Republicans in the general election: Jack Ciattarelli and Donald Trump.

New Jersey politics spent the first part of 2025 learning how to operate without its training wheels.  The abolition of the county organization line did not produce total chaos, as some predicted (though some did), nor did it usher in reformist nirvana.  Instead, it forced recalibration. Candidates adjusted, and leaders adapted.  Influence remained, but it had to be exercised the old-fashioned way—through coalition-building, message discipline, and turnout, not ballot design.  Some legislators, if they’re smart, will have seen the ghost of primary future.

All of this unfolded as legacy media continued to contract, raising the prospect that New Jersey’s 9.5 million residents—living in the nation’s most densely populated state—could soon find themselves in America’s largest news desert.

By year’s end, New Jersey politics looked familiar but operated differently.  The line is gone. Mikie Sherrill will be governor, with Democrats holding a maybe too healthy 57-23 majority in the State Assembly.  Adaptation, not nostalgia, now defines power in the Garden State.

Have a very Happy New Year, New Jersey, and enjoy the reorganizations and inaugurations to those who celebrate.

Click HERE to download a high-resolution version of the 2025 New Jersey Globe Voter’s Guide.

Click HERE for a lower-resolution version