Sitting in front of a poster of himself and President Donald Trump in his hometown campaign office, Republican gubernatorial nominee Jack Ciattarelli has nothing but praise for his party’s leader.
“His policies have worked, and I support those policies and support him,” Mr. Ciattarelli says.
The affable, backslapping, three-time gubernatorial candidate is running not far behind Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill in the polls heading into Tuesday’s closely watched election. He nearly pulled off an upset in his 2021 bid, losing by just 3 percentage points despite little national support. And his state has clearly shifted a bit to the right in recent years: President Trump lost New Jersey by less than 6 points last fall, a 10-point improvement over 2020 and the best showing for a GOP presidential nominee in the state in more than three decades.
Why We Wrote This
The closely contested governor’s race in New Jersey hinges in part on whether voters perceive the election as a referendum on state policies or on the country’s direction. The Trump administration’s decision to withhold funding for a major infrastructure project raises the stakes.
But the president’s poll numbers have faded in the Garden State since his return to office. Ms. Sherrill has done everything she can to tie Mr. Ciattarelli to Mr. Trump and his more controversial policies. And she’s had some help in that effort from the president.
With Republicans and Democrats in Washington at loggerheads over the government shutdown, President Trump injected himself into the New Jersey race by declaring two weeks ago that the Gateway tunnel project to expand a rail transit system under the Hudson River from north Jersey into New York City was canceled.
“It’s billions and billions of dollars that Schumer has worked 20 years to get,” Mr. Trump said of New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, Democrats’ Senate leader. “Tell him it’s terminated.”
Mr. Trump’s move to block a major New Jersey infrastructure project just weeks before a key election has helped Democrats as they try to make this race a referendum on how his policies are impacting voters. It’s an early test for whether the party can capitalize on the president’s low approval ratings heading into next year’s midterm elections in order to establish a check on his administration. A loss in blue-leaning New Jersey on Nov. 4, on the other hand, would show the limits of campaigning against the president even in places where he’s unpopular and has undermined local priorities.
Caitlin Babcock/The Christian Science Monitor
Even as U.S. politics have grown increasingly polarized, governor’s races remain more isolated from national trends. Democrats hold the governor’s mansion in deep-red Kansas, there’s a Republican governor in deep-blue Vermont, and other Republicans won reelection in Maryland and Massachusetts during Mr. Trump’s first term. And while New Jersey has leaned Democratic for decades at the national level, voters have ping-ponged back and forth for their gubernatorial candidates. It’s been more than 60 years since New Jersey voters elected governors from the same party to three consecutive terms – a trend Ms. Sherrill is looking to snap.
Ultimately, this election may come down to whether New Jersey voters are unhappier with the direction of their state or with their country.
What matters to New Jersey voters?
While Mr. Ciattarelli is dealing with the drag of Mr. Trump’s approval ratings, Ms. Sherrill is swimming against a tide of voter dissatisfaction with how Democrats have run New Jersey. The state has long had among the highest taxes in the country, and recently spiking utility bills have become a key issue for both candidates. Mr. Ciattarelli blames New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy for joining a regional climate change pact with other states and promises to quit the regional group. Representative Sherrill’s most-repeated promise on the campaign trail is to declare a state of emergency and freeze utility costs for a year. Polls show that taxes and affordability are the top issues for voters in this race – issues both candidates have run hard on.
Mr. Ciattarelli is much more eager to talk about state issues than about the president. He hammers on the fact that he’s a third-generation Jersey boy (Ms. Sherrill grew up in Virginia). He slams the Democratic Party, which has held the state Legislature for a quarter century, for the spiraling cost of living in the state, and he gets big cheers when he promises to reverse Democrats’ ban on plastic bags.
Even when he was surrounded by red-hatted MAGA supporters at a restaurant campaign stop in Hillsborough Township, the only time Mr. Ciattarelli mentioned Mr. Trump was to mock his opponent for talking so much about the president.
“Her entire campaign is based on a stack of lies about me, her disdain for the president, and that she can fly a helicopter. Is that going to fix New Jersey?” he said.
But the loss of funding for the Gateway tunnel project has given Representative Sherrill a tangible point to drive home.
She has promised to sue the Trump administration to get back the funds if she wins, and attacks Mr. Ciattarelli for not standing up to the president. It’s become a central part of her stump speech. And in attack ads, her team juxtaposes Mr. Ciattarelli’s debate comments that he’d “certainly give the president an A” for the start of his second term with President Trump’s moves on the project and rising costs that she pins on Mr. Trump’s tariffs. This week, she campaigned at the Westfield Rail Station across the river from New York City with former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg – a pointedly chosen location.
Mr. Ciattarelli would “rather see those workers get hurt and commuters get hurt than display one inch of independence from his dear leader,” Mr. Buttigieg said at the rally. “If he can’t stand up for the Hudson tunnels, there’s no way that he’s going to stand up for you.”
As the shutdown began Oct. 1, the Trump administration announced it would pause funding for the $16 billion project, the largest ongoing infrastructure project in the country and one that New Jerseyans are depending on both to reduce train commutes and to create 95,000 new jobs. The tunnel to connect New Jersey to New York City’s Pennsylvania Station would replace infrastructure that’s more than a century old and struggling to keep up with the more than 200,000 daily passenger trips.
Mr. Ciattarelli told the Monitor that President Trump is just playing “hardball” with Democrats to try to force them into reopening the federal government. He calls the Gateway project “a critically important project to the region” and argues he’s better positioned to get federal funding for the tunnel released because of his support of the president.
He wouldn’t take the Trump administration to court to release the funds, however, calling that a waste of taxpayer dollars. “We’re not suing the White House,” he says. “I think a governor of any state has an obligation to have a working relationship with the president. It’s been made clear already that my opponent will not. That’s not good for New Jersey.”
He makes a similar argument when asked whether he supports the Trump administration’s ramping up of raids to arrest unauthorized immigrants.
“What I’ve told the president is that I know you’ve secured the border. I’m going to better secure New Jersey,” he says, promising to make the state safer so that President Trump wouldn’t feel the need to send in federal forces. “What I’ve also told the president is you won’t ever have to worry about sending the National [Guard] into New Jersey.”
He dodges, however, when pressed on whether he supports the raids.
Representative Sherrill told the Monitor that if the president cares about Mr. Ciattarelli as much as the candidate suggests, he wouldn’t have pulled crucial funding just weeks before the election.
“That shows you the kind of leverage Jack Ciattarelli has over Trump,” she said in a brief interview after a campaign rally in Martinsville. “I think Trump just doesn’t care about what Jack Ciattarelli thinks. … Ciattarelli has just been currying Trump’s favor. I think he’s his lackey. I don’t think he’s going to be the type of leader that New Jerseyans would need.”
Shifting positions and a close race
Mr. Ciattarelli wasn’t always a fan of Mr. Trump. He called the then-candidate a “charlatan who is out of step with American values” during Mr. Trump’s first run for office in 2015. He’d come around by 2020, speaking at a “Stop the Steal” postelection rally. He later said he thought the event was meant to back local GOP candidates and that Mr. Trump’s rhetoric “is what led to the riot that took place” at the U.S. Capitol a few weeks later. Mr. Trump endorsed the former New Jersey assemblyman’s 2021 bid for the governor’s office in the general election. This time around, Mr. Ciattarelli has embraced Mr. Trump wholeheartedly – and Mr. Trump has returned the favor, backing Mr. Ciattarelli in the primary over the local MAGA favorite, radio host Bill Spadea, helping him sail to the GOP nomination.
He’s sought a tiny bit of distance from the president, specifically on renewable energy.
During his second debate with Ms. Sherrill, when he was asked if he’s now part of the MAGA movement, he responded, “I’m part of the New Jersey movement.”
The race is no slam dunk for Ms. Sherrill. She leads Mr. Ciattarelli by 7 points in FiftyPlusOne’s latest weighted polling average, a steady advantage that’s virtually unchanged since Labor Day. A handful of recent polls have found a much closer race. In 2021, Mr. Ciattarelli trailed in most public polls by an even wider amount at this point before the election – he was down by nearly 8 points in RealClearPolitics’ preelection average – but then lost the race by less than 3 points.
Ms. Sherrill, a moderate congresswoman who defeated a longtime GOP incumbent to win her House seat in 2018, has heavily stressed her biography as a former U.S. Navy helicopter pilot and a mother of four. But she’s proved to be an occasionally clumsy wordsmith on the trail. Mr. Ciattarelli’s allies have spent heavily on ads that highlight a TV interview from earlier this year in which Ms. Sherrill struggled to answer what one piece of legislation she’d choose to pass nationally.
And some Democrats have been sharply critical of what they see as a cautious, calculated campaign.
“I think she’s running a very mediocre and bland race, while he’s running a much stronger race. But I think that the Trump factor is playing and motivating many people to come out and vote for her,” says Jeff Tittel, a longtime Democratic activist in the state and former head of the New Jersey League of Conservation Voters.
Ms. Sherrill’s defenders point out that she flipped a House seat in 2018, and this June won a hard-fought six-way gubernatorial primary by a 14-point margin over the next-closest candidate. Former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski says Democrats’ criticism comes from a place of overall worry about the president and the relative closeness of the race, not from anything she’s done wrong.
“In a race with stakes this high, everybody is giving the candidate contradictory advice because they’re anxious, because they can’t imagine waking up the morning after the election having lost New Jersey to the MAGA Trump party,” says Mr. Malinowski, who now chairs the Hunterdon County Democratic Party. “At the end of the day, all she can do is run as she always has – as herself.”
Ms. Sherrill, for her part, seems tired of the criticism. When asked what she’d say to Democrats who said she was running too cautious a campaign, she shot back.
“I think Democrats have forgotten how to run to win – and I don’t think they recognize it when they see it,” she said.
Mr. Ciattarelli also wasn’t interested in contemplating a loss. He gave a tight smile when asked if it would be his fault or the president’s if he fell short.
“We’re going to win,” he said.
Tuesday night will show which candidate is right.
Staff writer Caitlin Babcock contributed reporting from New Jersey.
