The New Jersey Problem

Mikie Sherill should be waltzing to victory. And she probably will win the governor of New Jersey race tomorrow, but it’s hardly the kind of statement that Democrats will be hanging their hats on as they go into the midterms, unlike Virginia. Alex Shephard looks at the problem:

The Democratic nominee for governor in New Jersey has represented a suburban district in the U.S. House since 2019. A moderate and veteran, she is well positioned to win back voters who have voted Republican in recent elections, particularly the surprisingly close 2021 gubernatorial race and the 2024 presidential race, when Donald Trump garnered 46% of the vote in a state that hasn’t gone red in almost 40 years. No one could accuse Sherrill of being woke or a communist; she is different in most respects from Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic socialist who is poised to become New York City’s next mayor. And, perhaps most importantly, the president is very unpopular, which should be a drag on Republican candidates.

So it should be a very good time to be a seasoned Democrat running for statewide office in a blue state—but maybe not in New Jersey.

Despite the aforementioned litany of advantages, Sherill is running neck-and-neck with Jack Ciattarelli, a pro-Trump politician who narrowly lost the last gubernatorial election to Democrat Phil Murphy, who is term-limited. Why is the race so close? New Jersey, ever the outlier, is just a little bit different from its northeastern brethren. Trump is not quite as unpopular there (he has a 41 percent approval rating, six points higher than Murphy’s ) and Ciattarelli has run a disciplined campaign, keeping the president close—but not too close to alienate the moderate and swing voters he needs to win. The result is a perilous situation for Democrats. Not only could they lose control of a crucial state, but doing so would raise troubling questions about the health of the party heading into the 2026 midterm elections.

“I think you saw the beginnings of this in ‘21. There’s a frustration by voters in New Jersey on economic stuff, on crime issues, and I also think there’s an underbelly in the stuff Trump tapped into culturally,” Republican strategist Chris Russell, who advises Ciattarelli, told Politico after Trump did surprisingly well in the state last fall. “People are tired of being told they’re bad people, racists, bigots or Nazis—all these crazy aspersions that are cast on people who support Trump or things that he believes.”

So, personally I think the cultural stuff is a big thing here. Living in the Northeast since 2011, my major takeaway is that I’m surprised Trump isn’t more popular in the region, largely because the people really get off on being bigoted assholes in the kind of obnoxious way that Trump loves, rather than the other parts of the nation where traditionally at least, there’s at least some lip service about being nice people. That doesn’t exist in New Jersey or Rhode Island. But it is these states where Trump has really improved his vote share over the past three elections and this makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not so much a policy thing. It’s a style thing and as traditional Democratic voting blocs in the Northeast move away from the party as they have done in the rest of the nation, it really doesn’t surprise me that embracing the biggest assholes in the world would be the result.

Now, this gets in the way of Trump being unpopular. And that’s true. But the evidence is pretty overwhelming that while voters may hate Trump, they still don’t see the Democratic Party as a desirable alternative. In short, Democrats haven’t done a great job of channeling the kind of rage that actually motivates real voters as opposed to the ones that exist in liberals’. heads where people think about policy and decency. This seems to be part of Sherrill’s soft support as well:

This race has serious implications for Democrats as they head toward next year’s midterms. It suggests that safe, moderate, milquetoast candidates may not be enough—even if they have all the right items on their resumes—if they can’t communicate effectively with voters. More troublingly, it suggests that voters are still frustrated with Democrats and that anger and dissatisfaction at Trump may not be enough to win in some cases. When you compare Sherrill’s stumbling performances to that of Mamdani in New York City—who is not exactly a favorite of the Democratic powerbrokers who adore Sherrill—it also suggests a candidate selection problem. The people running the Democratic Party don’t seem to have a handle on what voters are looking for.

The rest of America is not New Jersey, of course—for better or for worse. Many other Democrats won’t face the specific problems Sherrill is facing. Narrowly leading in the polls, she may yet eke out a victory. But even if she does, there will be the lingering sense that her party hasn’t learned anything in the last year.

And as I’ve felt ever since the election, I don’t think the issue at play here is whether the Democratic Party is too far left, though there’s certainly evidence that the party’s elites got way too far out ahead of the public on a lot of cultural issues. The real point is not whether you need to rehash 2016 again. It’s that whatever your positions actually are, you need to communicate the hell out of them and that’s not something the Democratic Party has been good at in many years. It’s what Mamdani is outstanding at, by the way, which is what really matters for him in his rise. Democrats have to quit being scared of communication and so careful in crafting and this and that image and just go out and say that Republicans are motherfuckers who hate you and also fuck them. This is not what the post-Clinton consultant-industrial complex likes though and that has a lot of salience with generations of candidates now.