By Joseph Ax
PRINCETON, New Jersey (Reuters) -New Jersey voters head to the polls on Tuesday to select Democratic and Republican nominees for governor, following a campaign that has been dominated by a part-time state resident who isn’t even on the ballot: President Donald Trump.
New Jersey and Virginia are the only two states that hold gubernatorial contests the year after a presidential election, and the races offer an early check on how voters feel about the new administration – as well as an opportunity for the parties to test out their messaging ahead of next year’s congressional elections.
Trump’s whirlwind first four months have made him the central character in both the Republican and Democratic campaigns in New Jersey. Virginia has no primary elections this year after Republican Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears and Democratic former U.S. Representative Abby Spanberger ran unopposed for their party’s nominations.
There are six major Democratic candidates vying to succeed term-limited Democratic Governor Phil Murphy: U.S. Representative Mikie Sherrill, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer, former state Senate President Steve Sweeney and Sean Spiller, the president of the state’s largest teachers’ union.
While Sherrill has held a steady lead in the few public polls of the race, the margins have been narrow enough that the outcome is far from certain.
“Every candidate has a plausible path forward,” Dan Cassino, director of the New Jersey-based Fairleigh Dickinson University poll, said. “The polling is all over the map.”
On the Republican side, former state Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli – who narrowly lost the governor’s race to Murphy in 2021 – appears poised to win the party’s nomination after Trump, a Republican, endorsed him.
While New Jersey is a Democratic-leaning state, it moved further toward Trump from 2020 to 2024 than any state except New York. The state has swung back and forth from Republican to Democratic governors for decades – a Democratic victory in November would be the first time either party won three consecutive gubernatorial races in more than 60 years.
The race is already the most expensive in state history, with more than $85 million spent as of June 4, according to the political advertising analysis firm AdImpact. Most of that spending has been driven by the intensely competitive Democratic primary.
VOWING TO FIGHT TRUMP
All of the Democrats have vowed to protect New Jersey from Trump, seeking to harness the growing anger among Democratic voters over the president’s policy agenda. But they have also focused on affordability, always a critical issue in a state with the highest property taxes in the country.
“MAGA is coming for New Jersey,” one Sherrill television ad warns, explicitly tying Ciattarelli to Trump. Another memorable ad from Gottheimer showed him trading jabs with Trump in a boxing ring.
Baraka made national headlines when he was arrested by the Justice Department in May for allegedly trespassing at a privately run immigration detention center, though the charge was later dropped. The mayor sued the Trump administration last week, claiming the arrest was politically motivated.
“Trump looms large over the primaries and will do so over the general,” said Ashley Koning, who oversees the Rutgers-Eagleton Poll at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Sherrill, 53, has leaned into her biography as a former Navy helicopter pilot, former federal prosecutor and a mother of four.
As the front-runner, she has drawn fire from some of her Democratic rivals, including criticism for taking tens of thousands of dollars for her congressional campaigns from a political action committee tied to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Sherrill’s campaign donated money equal to the funds she received from the SpaceX PAC to a food bank in March, according to campaign finance reports.
She has won the endorsement of about half the state’s Democratic county parties, which in the past might have guaranteed her victory. But Tuesday’s elections are the first gubernatorial contests to take place under a new ballot design that has created vastly more competitive primaries.
For decades, New Jersey’s ballot included a so-called “county line,” which put the candidates who had earned the backing of county party leaders in a leading column on the ballot. Other candidates’ names appeared off to the side, in practice all but guaranteeing that party bosses could choose the eventual nominees for state offices.
A federal judge last year ruled that the old ballot was unconstitutional after Democratic Senator Andy Kim, who was running for a Senate seat, sued over the practice.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; editing by Paul Thomasch and Alistair Bell)
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