Posted on | October 25, 2025 | No Comments
Jack Ciattarelli (left) and Mikie Sherrill (right)
Far be it from me to predict that Republicans are on the verge of winning this year’s gubernatorial election in New Jersey, but (a) Jack Ciattarelli came pretty close to knocking off incumbent Phil Murphy four years ago, and (b) with Murphy term-limited, Democrats nominated Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who hasn’t exactly been running away with it. Ever since an Emerson College poll last month showed the New Jersey race to be a dead heat, Democrats have been freaking out about it.
How bad is the New Jersey freakout? Bad enough that Molly Jong-Fast felt the need to write a New York Times column about it:
When you spend as much time around Democratic Party people as I do, you find that everybody is worried about something. The specter of 2024, and the reign of Trump terror that has followed, has the party on edge. The polls are mostly in Democrats’ favor, but, they worry, what are we not seeing? What are we not hearing? They’re worried they’ve lost their mojo in the face of MAGA.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the governor’s race in New Jersey. Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democrats’ great-on-paper centrist nominee, is ahead in the polls but still being second-guessed.
I felt this skittishness this for myself when I attended a “No Kings” rally last weekend in the blue town of Montclair. It’s a community full of commuters but also the home of Ms. Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who flipped her reddish district in 2018. Her opponent is the suspiciously well-tanned Republican Jack Ciattarelli, who is running for governor for the third time in a row.
Ms. Sherrill is ahead in the polls, but that doesn’t quiet the doubters. The pollster G. Elliott Morris of Fifty Plus One put it best when he texted me, “It would be surprising if Ciattarelli won, but bigger upsets have happened before.”
New Jersey is a Rorschach test for a party in full freakout. . . .
While I do not hold G. Elliott Morris in high regard (and he certainly has no regard for me), his summary of the New Jersey campaign is probably pretty accurate: Yes, a win for Ciattarelli would be considered an upset, but it’s not impossible. Not a single poll has shown Ciattarelli actually leading the race, and this is a state where Kamala Harris won by a six-point margin last year. If we were wagering, and I was willing to bet Sherrill wins by a three-point spread — in other words, half the margin Kamala won by in New Jersey — would you bet against me?
You see that, as a matter of probability, a Republican win in New Jersey would be surprising, as Morris says, but the fact that Democrats are even worried about it is a very good sign for Republicans. Molly Jong-Fast speaks of “the reign of Trump terror,” and if it were widely regarded as such, you’d expect the Democratic candidate in a blue state like New Jersey to have a cake walk — Mikie Sherrill on her way to winning by a double-digit margin — but that’s not happening, is it?
This paragraph of Molly Jong-Fast’s column is priceless:
One of the biggest problems facing Mikie Sherrill’s bid for governor may have nothing to do with Mikie Sherrill and everything to do with a certain pundit-class miasma about the supposed unelectability of women. After all, this is a party that has run two supercompetent women for president on its ticket, and they both lost against Mr. Trump.
“Miasma,” ma’am? Hunting around for a fancy substitute for “attitude” or “prejudice,” what on earth would lead you to miasma?
Awkward word choices aside, what color is the sky in your universe, where a candidate’s “biggest problem” is the attitude of pundits?
The pundit class weighed in on this topic:
What is the evidence that Kamala Harris in particular was “supercompetent”?
I think the true problem here is that identity-brain is making it hard for Democrats to think about which female (and nonwhite) politicians are actually good. https://t.co/2Xo2z5WJ2F pic.twitter.com/cMF0wCTfcs
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 24, 2025
“One of the biggest problems facing Mikie Sherrill’s bid for governor may have nothing to do with Mikie Sherrill and everything to do with a certain pundit-class miasma about the supposed unelectability of women.” How is the miasma about electability supposed to cost votes?
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 24, 2025
The whole thing isn’t really an argument, it’s just a set of urges — everyone’s sexist and failing our female candidates, yet somehow also being female is not an electoral disadvantage
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 24, 2025
Do you see what I mean about the New Jersey situation being a very good sign for Republicans? Whether or not Ciattarelli scores an upset victory, the strength of his campaign has backed Democrats into a corner where they’re second-guessing themselves and arguing with each other about tactics and strategy. And the credit for this goes to none other than Donald J. Trump, who defeated both of those “supercompetent women” and thereby demonstrated that identity politics can be a liability.
If somehow Ciattarelli wins this thing, I’ll give a lot of credit to Scott Presler, who’s been doing his ground-game magic in New Jersey. Presler’s work in Pennsylvania last year played a key role in helping Trump win there, and knocking off the allegedly “supercompetent” Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey would demonstrate his effectiveness again..
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