New Jersey’s tight race for governor may be the most hotly contested and closely watched election being held Tuesday.
New Jersey is one of two states — along with Virginia — that hold gubernatorial elections one year after a presidential election. That makes political types eager to treat it as a tea leaf for next year’s midterms.
And while the state has voted for a Democrat in every presidential election since 1992, it has toggled between governors of both parties for decades.
This year, Democratic nominee Rep. Mikie Sherrill and Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli have called in the big guns to gain a late edge: Sherrill stumped in recent days with former President Barack Obama and popular Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, while Ciattarelli has enjoyed loud backing from President Donald Trump since the primary.
Sherrill and Ciattarelli both campaigned on affordability, but with significantly different approaches.
Ciattarelli — a former state assemblyman and businessman who won the Republican nomination for governor in 2021 — promises to slash state spending using a state version of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, cap property taxes to a percentage of assessed home value and reduce taxes for corporations. (At 11.5%, New Jersey has the highest corporate tax rate in the country.)
Ciattarelli also wants to “mandate that all state employees return to an in-person, 5-day workweek immediately, and fully end remote work for public employees.” And he wants to bring back plastic bags.
Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor and Navy helicopter pilot, has represented the 11th Congressional District in the northern part of the state since 2019. She says she wants to expand universal pre-K, provide free school meals, increase access to loans and tax credits to incentivize new housing development, lower prescription drug costs and “require health insurance companies to publicly disclose and justify premium increases.”
The campaigns, however, descended past platforms and into the mud. Ciattarelli said he plans to sue Sherrill for defamation after she accused him on the debate stage of using his medical publishing company to push “opioid propaganda” that “killed tens of thousands of people.”
Meanwhile, Ciattarelli’s campaign is under federal investigation for allegedly accessing Sherrill’s military records illegally, which he denies. His campaign exposed the fact that Sherrill was not allowed to walk at her Naval Academy graduation, which she has said was because she refused to turn in classmates accused of cheating.
Gov. Phil Murphy beat Ciattarelli in 2021 to become the first Democratic governor in New Jersey in 44 years to serve a second term, but this is his final one due to the state’s two-term limit.