On the menu today: This year’s Republican gubernatorial nominee in New Jersey, Jack Ciattarelli, believes he’s found the key to flipping the governor’s mansion red this fall — painting his Democratic opponent, Representative Mikie Sherrill, as a carbon copy of two-term Democratic Governor Phil Murphy.
Can he win? As things stand, the race is Sherrill’s to lose. She’s got a single-digit lead over Ciattarelli according to recent summer surveys, and Sabato’s Crystal Ball currently has the race in the “leans Democratic” column.
Ciattarelli Calls His Dem Opponent ‘Phil Murphy 2.0’
But Jack Ciattarelli, a businessman and three-time Republican gubernatorial candidate who narrowly lost to Murphy in a surprisingly close, pandemic-era 2021 contest, believes that the political stars are aligned for Republicans to flip the state red during this year’s off-year race. He’s feeling uniquely optimistic this time around, he recently explained in a wide-ranging interview with National Review, for three main reasons.
Number one: “There is no pandemic this time around,” he says, meaning he can campaign more easily given the state’s shelter-in-place orders on the 2021 campaign trail. Number two: “People now know because of the closeness of my race and the closeness of President Trump’s run in New Jersey last year that a Republican can win,” he said in a nod to his own three-point loss to Murphy four years ago and Trump’s six-point loss to Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential race. And number three? “We’re not going up against an incumbent this time around.”
Instead, there’s a new obstacle: a Republican in the White House. For months, Sherrill has sought to portray Ciattarelli as a carbon copy of President Trump. On the stump, the representative — a former federal prosecutor, naval officer, and mainstream Democrat — makes constant comparisons between both men, and continuously reminds voters that Ciattarelli declined in a recent interview to identify a single issue on which he disagrees with the president. She’s expected to spend the rest of the race talking about health care.
The broad contours of the race boil down to national versus local politics, election analysts say. “Even though Ciattarelli’s embraced Trump a bit more, maybe, than he did last time, he’s still trying to dominate more on the local issues,” says J. Miles Coleman, an election analyst for Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In focusing the race on national politics, Sherill could risk repeating Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s fateful mistake in 2021: over-nationalizing the race and over-playing the talking point that the Republican nominee is Trump 2.0.
Ciattarelli has indeed sought to keep the focus on local issues such as affordability, K–12 education, public safety, overdevelopment in rural communities, and high energy prices. Here’s how he responds to questions about Sherrill’s Trump comparisons:
My opponent is going to do everything possible not to talk about the failed record of Phil Murphy, all of which she has supported. She will try to exploit voters by talking about the president day in and day out. My rebuttal has been, “What has the president got to do with the property tax crisis in New Jersey? What does he have to do with the public education crisis, the public safety crisis, the energy crisis that we see all across the state with the rise in our monthly electric bills?’ The president doesn’t have anything to do with that. The Democrats have had everything to do with that. They’ve controlled the legislature for 25 years, and Phil Murphy has failed in addressing every one of those issues over the course of his eight years, and . . . she’s been endorsing every one of his policies. So, we’re not going to let New Jersey forget that this race is really all about New Jersey.
Republican conventional wisdom in the chattering class holds that Ciattarelli has a much better shot at winning the general election this off-year cycle than the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee in Virginia, Lieutenant Governor Winsome Sears, who is struggling to fundraise or excite the Republican base like Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin did in 2021. (Virginia bars its governors from serving consecutive terms, meaning Youngkin can’t seek another term this year. Read more about Sears’s political struggles in Politico.)
Flipping New Jersey red is still an uphill battle. Sherrill has a six-point lead in a StimSight Research poll released this week, and an eight-point lead in a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll released last week. But the polls had Murphy in a comfortable lead over Ciattarelli in the 2021 reelection race, only for the incumbent governor to narrowly win by 2.8 points. Republican voter registration has gradually ticked up since the 2021 race.
To win, he’ll need to juice high turnout among Republican voters like he did last time around while also appealing to independents when Trump is in office. “In 2021, his numbers in South Jersey were really great,” explains Coleman, the election analyst.
He’ll also need to overcome Sherrill’s massive fundraising edge, which includes a recent $20 million advertising commitment from a Democratic Governors Association-backed super PAC.
“Supporters of Mikie Sherrill can spend $100 million I’m telling you, the people of New Jersey are not going to vote for a third Phil Murphy term, and that’s exactly what she is,” Ciattarelli says. “She’s Phil Murphy 2.0.”
Still, he’s the underdog in the race. Here’s a helpful electoral analysis that Sabato’s Crystal Ball published in June after the gubernatorial primaries:
The main reasons to favor Sherrill are that she has been a good electoral performer in the House — although she was not strongly pushed in her four general election races — and that she is a Democrat running in what is still a Democratic-leaning state in what should be at least a modestly Democratic-leaning environment with Donald Trump in the White House. That said, she is also running for a third straight Democratic gubernatorial term, so Ciattarelli can make an argument for change at the state level.
Still, one of the things that likely aided now-outgoing Gov. Phil Murphy (D-NJ) in his initial 2017 victory is that not only was Trump an albatross for New Jersey Republicans, but so was then-outgoing Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), who was immensely unpopular. There’s not much recent approval polling of Murphy, and there’s a “choose your own adventure” aspect to what is out there. Morning Consult, in its 2025 first quarter approval rating polling of all state governors, found him at a +21 net approval; more recently, Emerson College found him at -5 net in May. Christie, meanwhile, sometimes had an approval rating in the teens by the end of his governorship. So whatever Murphy’s actual approval rating is, it’s got to be a lot better than Christie’s was in 2017.
I’ll leave you with a helpful chart from the Eagleton Institute of Politics’ Center on the American Governor, which reminds us that it’s not so unusual for Republicans to win statewide in New Jersey.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it, we reported last night that Attorney General Pam Bondi opened a grand jury probe into ex-Obama officials’ role in Russiagate. I’ll leave the legal analysis to National Review’s Andy McCarthy, but given how frustrated Trump and his inner circle still are about the Russia collusion story from his first term, we have every reason to expect that the president will continue hammering this story any chance he gets.