Democrat Sherrill, Republican Ciattarelli to face off for NJ governor

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By Joseph Ax

PRINCETON, New Jersey (Reuters) -U.S. Representative Mikie Sherrill beat a crowded field on Tuesday for the Democratic nomination for New Jersey governor and will face Republican former state Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, who easily won his party’s contest, in November’s election, CNN projected.

The race will be closely watched ahead of next year’s congressional elections. New Jersey is one of only two states, along with Virginia, that hold gubernatorial contests the year after a presidential election, and Trump’s whirlwind first four months made him the central character in both the Republican and Democratic campaigns.

Virginia has no primary elections this year after Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears and Democratic former U.S. Representative Abby Spanberger ran unopposed for their party’s nominations.

Sherrill, a 53-year-old former Navy helicopter pilot, defeated five other major candidates: fellow U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer; two mayors, Ras Baraka of Newark and Steven Fulop of Jersey City; Steve Sweeney, the former state Senate president; and Sean Spiller, the president of the state’s largest teachers’ union.

Ciattarelli, who lost a surprisingly close race to Murphy in 2021, received a boost among Republican voters when Trump endorsed him last month and easily won his primary election on Tuesday.

While New Jersey is a Democratic-leaning state, it moved further toward Trump from 2020 to 2024 than any state except New York. The state has swung back and forth from Republican to Democratic governors for decades – a Democratic victory in November would be the first time either party won three consecutive gubernatorial races in more than 60 years.

The race was the most expensive in state history, with more than $87 million spent as of June 4, according to the political advertising analysis firm AdImpact. Most of that spending has been driven by the intensely competitive Democratic primary.

More than 70% of all television ads mentioned Trump, according to AdImpact.

VOWING TO FIGHT TRUMP

All six Democrats vowed to protect New Jersey from Trump, seeking to harness the growing anger among Democratic voters over the president’s policy agenda. But they also focused on affordability, always a critical issue in a state with the highest property taxes in the country.

“MAGA is coming for New Jersey,” one Sherrill television ad warns, explicitly tying Ciattarelli to Trump.

Sherrill, 53, has leaned into her biography, arguing that her military experience and her time as a federal prosecutor had prepared her to fight Trump from the statehouse.

As the front-runner, she drew fire from some of her Democratic rivals, including criticism for taking tens of thousands of dollars for her congressional campaigns from a political action committee tied to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Sherrill’s campaign donated money equal to the funds she received from the SpaceX PAC to a food bank in March, according to campaign finance reports.

She won the endorsement of about half the state’s Democratic county parties, which in the past might have guaranteed her victory. But Tuesday’s elections were the first gubernatorial contests to take place under a new ballot design that has created vastly more competitive primaries.

For decades, New Jersey’s ballot included a so-called “county line,” which put the candidates who had earned the backing of county party leaders in a leading column on the ballot. Other candidates’ names appeared off to the side, in practice all but guaranteeing that party bosses could choose the eventual nominees for state offices.

A federal judge last year ruled that the old ballot was unconstitutional after Democratic Senator Andy Kim, who was running for a Senate seat, sued over the practice.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; editing by Paul Thomasch, Alistair Bell and Stephen Coates)