As New Jersey’s next governor, Mikie Sherrill will mostly continue business as usual—but with the possibility of some regulatory reform
Mikie Sherrill is an establishment Democrat made in a lab. A retired Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor, she was so alarmed by the election of Donald Trump in 2017 that she decided to run for Congress in suburban New Jersey with the help of the pro-choice group EMILYs List. When she threw her hat in the ring for this year’s gubernatorial race, Politico called her strategy „the most traditional machine campaign possible.“
And it has paid off: Sherrill has been elected governor of New Jersey. Sherrill’s Republican opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, was hoping that the post-Trump realignment (particularly among Latinos) would allow him to take a traditionally Democratic state. But Ciattarelli’s association with Trump turned out to be a liability, especially after Trump cancelled a major infrastructure project and many Latino voters were alienated by the administration’s immigration crackdown. In a poll published a week before the election, a majority of voters, including 78 percent of Democrats, said that Trump was a major factor in their decision.
Sherrill, on the other hand, offered a continuation of incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration. Many of her campaign statements were promises to let voters have their cake and eat it too—“What we have to do is put an immense amount of power in, but we also have to drive down carbon emissions as we do so“, she told WHYY—or new versions of familiar platitudes about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse.
