2025 New Jersey gubernatorial election

Based on Wikipedia: 2025 New Jersey gubernatorial election

The Night New Jersey Broke Its Own Rules

For sixty-four years, New Jersey voters had maintained an unbroken habit: whenever one party won the governor's mansion twice in a row, they'd hand it to the other side. It was as reliable as the tides rolling into the Jersey Shore. Democrats, Republicans—didn't matter. Two terms was the limit of voter patience.

Then November 4, 2025 happened.

Mikie Sherrill didn't just win. She demolished expectations, carrying New Jersey by over fourteen percentage points in what became the widest Democratic margin in nearly a quarter century. Political analysts had spent months predicting a nail-biter, pointing to Republican momentum from recent elections, to polls showing a toss-up race. They were spectacularly wrong.

Who Is Mikie Sherrill?

Before entering politics, Sherrill flew Navy helicopters. She's a graduate of the United States Naval Academy who served as a Sea King pilot—those are the large helicopters used for missions like search and rescue and anti-submarine warfare. After a decade in the military, she went to law school, became a federal prosecutor, and only then turned to electoral politics.

When she takes office on January 20, 2026, she'll make history in three distinct ways. She becomes just the second woman to serve as New Jersey's governor. The first was Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who served from 1994 to 2001. But Sherrill will be the first Democratic woman in that role. And here's the truly unusual distinction: she'll become the first female military veteran to serve as governor of any American state.

That last fact is remarkable when you consider how many governors the United States has had across fifty states over more than two centuries. Not one of them has been a woman who served in the armed forces. Sherrill will be first.

The Man Who Lost Three Times

On the other side of this race stood Jack Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman who had now lost three separate bids for governor—in 2017, 2021, and 2025. The 2021 race was agonizingly close. He lost to incumbent Phil Murphy by just 3.2 percentage points, a margin so slim it surprised everyone who assumed New Jersey was safely Democratic territory.

That near-miss seemed to set up 2025 perfectly for Republicans. Murphy was term-limited and couldn't run again. Recent elections had shown the state drifting rightward. In 2024, when Kamala Harris won New Jersey over Donald Trump, she did so by less than six points—the worst Democratic performance in the state since Bill Clinton's first election in 1992. Everything pointed toward a competitive race.

Ciattarelli won his party's nomination with nearly 68 percent of the vote, easily dispatching Bill Spadea, a radio talk show host. He entered the general election as a known quantity to New Jersey voters, someone who had already proven he could come within a whisker of victory.

It didn't matter. The election became a rout.

The Primary Season

The Democratic primary was considerably more chaotic than the Republican one. Sherrill won with just 34 percent of the vote—not exactly a commanding mandate—because the field was crowded with ambitious mayors and established politicians.

Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, represented the state's largest city and its predominantly Black political base. Steven Fulop, mayor of Jersey City, brought strong name recognition from New Jersey's second-largest city and its rapidly growing population of young professionals. Josh Gottheimer, a congressman known for his centrist positioning and prolific fundraising, also competed. So did Sean Spiller, who led the powerful teachers' union, and Stephen Sweeney, who had been president of the state senate for over a decade before losing his seat in a stunning upset to a furniture truck driver in 2021.

Sherrill emerged from this scrum by threading a needle: moderate enough to appeal to the suburban voters in her congressional district, but with enough progressive credentials to satisfy the Democratic base. Her military background gave her a profile that stood out in a field of career politicians.

Why the Polls Got It Wrong

Political forecasters had good reason to expect a close race. The 2024 presidential results suggested a state moving toward Republicans. The 2021 governor's race had been shockingly competitive. Multiple polls in the fall of 2025 showed Sherrill and Ciattarelli within the margin of error of each other.

But polls measure intention at a moment in time. They don't always capture the ground game—the organizational machinery that actually gets voters to the polls. And they can miss late-breaking shifts in sentiment.

Something shifted. Whether it was national events, local dynamics, or simply a mobilization of voters who had sat out previous elections, the result bore no resemblance to what the surveys predicted. Sherrill won by 14.4 percentage points, more than quadruple Murphy's margin four years earlier.

The turnout tells part of the story. This election drew more voters than any New Jersey gubernatorial race since 1997. Both candidates broke records—both Sherrill and Ciattarelli received more votes than any previous candidates for governor in state history. Ciattarelli didn't lose because Republicans stayed home. He lost because Democrats showed up in overwhelming numbers, and he couldn't match them.

The Map That Stunned Republicans

New Jersey has 21 counties. In most elections, the map divides predictably: Democrats dominate the urban northeast around Newark and Jersey City, while Republicans run up margins in the rural northwest and along the southern shore. The battleground lies in the suburbs.

Sherrill didn't just win the battleground. She invaded Republican territory.

Morris County sits northwest of Newark, a prosperous suburban expanse of corporate headquarters, commuter rail lines, and tidy residential neighborhoods. It hadn't voted for a Democratic governor since 1973, when Brendan Byrne swept the state in the aftermath of Watergate. That's over half a century of unbroken Republican loyalty. Sherrill carried it.

Hunterdon County, even more rural and even more Republican, didn't flip—but Sherrill lost it by single digits. The last time a Democratic gubernatorial candidate came that close was 1977. The margins were being compressed in places Democrats had long written off.

Four counties that had voted for Ciattarelli in 2021 switched to Sherrill: Atlantic (home to Atlantic City), Cumberland (in the rural south), Gloucester (across the river from Philadelphia), and Morris. When you flip counties that your opponent carried last time, you're not just winning an election. You're redrawing the political map.

The Trump Factor

This election happened during Donald Trump's second term as president. Historically, New Jersey had a peculiar habit of electing governors from the opposite party of whoever occupied the White House. From 1989 through 2017, this pattern held without exception: Republican presidents meant Democratic governors, and vice versa.

Phil Murphy broke that streak in 2021 by winning reelection under a Democratic president (Joe Biden). But his margin shrank dramatically from 2017, suggesting voters were reverting to form.

Sherrill's landslide suggests something different was happening. Rather than punishing Democrats for unified government in Washington, New Jersey voters seemed to be sending a message specifically about Trump's return. The state hadn't gone for Trump in either of his presidential campaigns, and the gubernatorial result suggested that opposition was deepening, not softening.

In October 2025, the Trump administration announced that the Department of Justice would deploy election monitors to polling sites in California and New Jersey. The administration cited concerns raised by Republican officials about alleged voting irregularities. Democratic leaders in both states condemned this as politically motivated voter intimidation. Whether this intervention energized Democratic turnout, angered swing voters, or made no difference at all is impossible to know. But it certainly colored the final weeks of the campaign.

The Coalition Sherrill Built

Exit polling revealed a campaign that succeeded across demographic lines. According to CNN's survey of voters leaving the polls, Sherrill won 94 percent of Black voters—a near-unanimous showing that reflects both party loyalty and specific enthusiasm for her candidacy. She carried 68 percent of Hispanic voters and 82 percent of Asian voters, strong numbers that exceeded typical Democratic performance.

Among white voters, the picture was more nuanced but still favorable. Sherrill won 54 percent of white women, a group that often determines suburban elections. Her background as a Naval officer likely helped in communities where military service confers respect across partisan lines.

The geographic breadth of her victory was equally striking. She won ten of New Jersey's twelve congressional districts, including one represented by a Republican in the House. She carried 28 of the state's 40 legislative districts, including four that had Republican state senators. This wasn't a victory concentrated in Democratic strongholds. It reached into territory that usually belongs to the other side.

What This Election Didn't Decide

One election doesn't transform a state's politics permanently. New Jersey remains a place where both parties can compete, even if one side dominated this particular night.

The minor party candidates barely registered. Vic Kaplan ran as the Libertarian nominee, having previously chaired his state party. Joanne Kuniansky ran under the Socialist Workers banner, continuing a long career of perennial candidacies. The Green Party nominated Lily Benavides, who had an unusual trajectory—she'd once served as a Democratic state representative in New Hampshire before moving to New Jersey and switching parties. Monica Brinson, a former Republican political strategist, ran as an independent after losing the Republican primary.

None of them approached even a fraction of the major party totals. In a race decided by fourteen points, they were footnotes.

The Broader Significance

New Jersey holds its gubernatorial elections in odd-numbered years, one of only two states to do so (Virginia is the other). This timing means the state's elections are often watched as early indicators of national mood. When a party's candidate wins big in New Jersey or Virginia the year after a presidential election, analysts treat it as a referendum on the sitting president.

By that standard, Sherrill's victory was a thunderclap. She didn't just win the state that Trump had targeted with federal election monitors. She won it by the largest Democratic margin in decades, in an election that drew more voters than any gubernatorial contest in nearly thirty years.

Whether this presages broader Democratic recovery or represents something unique to New Jersey's political culture remains to be seen. States have their own rhythms, their own issues, their own candidates. What works in the commuter suburbs of Morris County may not translate to the industrial Midwest or the Sun Belt.

But for one night in November 2025, Mikie Sherrill proved that a state assumed to be trending competitive could snap back hard toward its Democratic lean. She proved that polls showing a toss-up could be wildly wrong. And she proved that a sixty-four-year pattern could be broken when voters decided they wanted something different.

What Comes Next

Sherrill will be sworn in as the 57th governor of New Jersey on January 20, 2026. She'll take office with significant political capital—a mandate from voters that her predecessor never enjoyed. Phil Murphy governed as a weakened executive after his narrow 2021 reelection. Sherrill will have no such constraints.

The agenda she pursues will shape whether this election becomes a lasting realignment or just an exceptional night. Property taxes, always a simmering issue in a high-cost state, will demand attention. So will transit infrastructure connecting New Jersey to New York City. Environmental policy matters in a state with a long coastline vulnerable to rising seas and intensifying storms.

Jack Ciattarelli's political future seems finished. Losing once can be chalked up to circumstance. Losing twice suggests bad luck. Losing three times, and losing the third race by the largest margin, closes doors. The New Jersey Republican Party will need to find new standard-bearers.

But that's a problem for another day. On November 4, 2025, the story belonged to a former Navy pilot who flew her campaign to an altitude no one expected.