Is the Democratic Party’s Future Zohran Mamdani or Mikie Sherrill?
Last weekend in New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill campaigned for governor at a senior center with Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro and at a community college in Camden with Arizona senator Mark Kelly, a trio of Establishment Democrats. In New York, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani spent Sunday night at a sold-out rally at a concert stadium alongside fellow leftists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, exhorting thousands of his followers to reclaim the city from the billionaire backers of Andrew Cuomo.
The election playing out on both sides of the Hudson River is something of an experiment about the Democratic Party during the second Trump era. Is the future Mamdani, a movement politician fluent in social media who commands the attention of both his faithful and his detractors? Or is it Sherrill, who has the sort of résumé and mainstream credentials that Establishment Democrats have long thought is the key to winning over voters skeptical of their party?
New Jersey is a good place to take a reading of the party’s health. It was once reliably blue, but in 2021, Republican Jack Ciattarelli came within four points of defeating Governor Phil Murphy. He posted better-than-expected numbers in the wealthier suburbs that had turned sharply Democratic over the previous two national elections. Then last year, Donald Trump came within six points of Kamala Harris after losing by 16 points in 2020, thanks to gains he made among Black and especially Hispanic voters in urban areas. This year will determine if these results are statistical blips, or if one of the most Democratic states in the nation is inexorably becoming more Republican.
“There is something going on in the electorate. I would suggest that this is an electorate that is looking for leaders to address their needs,” Sherrill told me. “I think what people are looking for is somebody that can do hard things. Voters are tired of empty promises.”
Polls show Sherrill with about a five-point lead over Ciattarelli and Democrats have an 800,000-person registration advantage over Republicans, but tigers hunt and birds fly, and Democrats do what Democrats do: fret. “There is just a feeling among Democrats that this is a lot closer than it should be,” said one local operative. “And there is a feeling among Republicans that they have all of the energy and enthusiasm on their side.”
Ask Democrats why this election feels closer to them than it should be, and you get a list of reasons that run the length of the turnpike, but most start with Sherrill. A former Navy pilot, prosecutor, and three-term member of Congress, she has been an uninspiring campaigner, someone prone to word-salad answers and awkward freezes. “There is a generation of Democratic candidates who were brought up in a certain way, and now they are behaving in that way,” says one party strategist in the state. “She is a good person who would probably do a pretty good job as governor, but she is a product of a system that spits out replacement-level candidates.”
Sherrill was elected in the #Resistance wave of 2018, flipping a seat centered in Morris County, a longtime wealthy suburban Republican stronghold. She won by 15 points after her Republican opponent had won by 19 points the election before — the biggest single-district swing in any race that year. She was hardly a giant though, entering the gubernatorial primary this year facing five other Democratic candidates. Sherrill won easily thanks to a surge of support from female voters and turnout from Morris County, which Ciattarelli won by 20,000 votes in 2021 and which he almost certainly needs to carry this time around to have a plausible path to victory.
Sherrill presents her candidacy as something of an antidote to both the promise-the-moon progressives and Donald Trump’s “I alone can fix it” campaign pledges.
“To win in a district like mine, you have to listen to people, listen to what is the thing that is keeping people up at night. You start there,” she said. “I think there are a lot of people in this state that feel as if they have not been listened to and their needs haven’t been addressed and that they have been promised that someone is going to focus on those kitchen-table issues. And I think the latest iteration of that is Trump saying he is going to address affordability and bring prices down on day one, but prices have skyrocketed and show no signs of abating.”
(As for what’s happening across the Hudson, Sherrill previously suggested she would support whoever was the Democratic nominee and praised what she termed Mamdani’s interest in government efficiency. She has since backed off that statement, taking incoming fire from Ciattarelli, first for supporting a socialist, then for flip-flopping. According to knowledgeable sources, it’s part of the reason a coalition of Orthodox Jewish leaders who endorsed Murphy in 2021 are considering banding together to back Ciattarelli, potentially bringing tens of thousands of voters with them.)
The shorthand way political observers have described the race is that Ciattarelli is trying to make the campaign about New Jersey while Sherrill is trying to make it about Trump, but this isn’t quite right either. As in the New York mayoral race, the top issue in New Jersey is affordability. Central to Sherrill’s campaign is her plan to declare a “state of emergency” for public utilities, which she says is necessary to institute a freeze on spiking electric bills. Still, it’s hard not to notice that Sherrill herself gets energized by talking about Trump, whom Democrats have spent millions in advertising portraying as Ciattarelli’s puppet master.
A day after the president announced that he was canceling the Gateway tunnel, which would provide much-needed relief to the nearly half a million New Jersey residents who commute into Manhattan by train every day, Sherrill called a press conference at the Secaucus Junction Train Station and lit into Trump.
“I don’t think there’s anything that’s a little more telling about the kind of power Jack Ciattarelli would have with the president than the fact that 19 days until the election, the president punched him in the face like this,” Sherrill told reporters, stabbing the air with her finger and pledging to “fight this tooth and nail and sue the Trump administration.”
If Sherrill ends up winning, that moment may be the reason why. Trump can’t help but get in the way of Ciattarelli. There was also the release of Sherrill’s Naval Academy records. Sherrill didn’t walk with the rest of her graduating class, a result, she said, of her refusing to rat out her classmates in a schoolwide cheating scandal. But the record release came from the National Archive, and if it wasn’t at the behest of Trump himself, the Sherrill campaign cleverly used the moment to remind voters of the president’s overreach and his willingness to use the power of the state for his own political ends.
Still, the anti-Trump playbook has its limits — he did win the last election after all. In New Jersey, he carried non-college-educated white voters decisively and saw Black and Hispanic voters drift his way, which some in the party think was because Democrats had become too left-wing on social issues. “We kind of lost sight of the bread-and-butter issues that put bread and butter on our table, and we are paying more attention to some of the social issues,” said Mike Hellstrom, vice-president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, whose members are working on the Gateway tunnel project. “The social issues don’t put bread and butter on our table.”
Ciattarelli has tried to make the issue of trans girls in high-school sports a major issue and conservative media have been lit up with the story of a 175-year-old family farm in the town of Cranbury that was slated to be taken by eminent domain and turned into affordable housing. “The suburban voters in New Jersey lean Democratic, they are socially liberal, and they will never say it, but they want the state to dictate local zoning and they think that public-school curriculum should be determined by parents and local school boards and not Trenton bureaucrats,” said David Wildstein, a longtime Republican operative in the state. “Republicans win these local races because these local towns don’t want 20-story apartment buildings in their downtown.”
New Jersey almost always votes against the party in power in Washington, D.C., but it almost always votes for a new party in Trenton after two terms. At a time when anti-incumbency sentiment is high, it is anyone’s guess whom voters see as the party in power: Donald Trump’s Republicans or Phil Murphy’s Democrats.
“It’s close, it’s combative, and it is really interesting because it’s important about what it tells us about the country but also because New Jersey is in a state of political transition,” says Tim Malloy, a polling analyst with Quinnipiac University polling institute. “I think it is going to go right down to the wire.”