Five takeaways from New Jersey's primaries for governor: How the candidates are handling Trump and more

The matchup in New Jersey's race for governor is officially set — and Tuesday's primaries also laid down big indicators about the state of both political parties after the first major intraparty contests since the 2024 election.
Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a former state legislator, easily won his party's primary with President Donald Trump's endorsement, underscoring Trump's significant sway over the GOP electorate.
U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the crowded Democratic primary, pitching herself as the candidate with the best shot at holding on to the governorship and steering past ideological and antiestablishment sentiment simmering in her party. She defeated candidates who were to her left and to her right.
The race to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, one of two governor's races this year, is expected to be competitive. Trump lost the state by 6 percentage points in November, a 10-point swing in his direction compared with his 2020 margin.
Here are five takeaways from Tuesday's primaries:
Democrats revive 2018 playbook
Sherrill won as many Democratic voters were weighing which candidate would be most electable and as each Democratic candidate pitched a different path forward for the party.
Sherrill's victory suggests some Democratic voters want to dust off the party's successful playbook from the 2018 midterm elections, when she flipped a longtime Republican-held House seat. In that campaign and in her primary run this year, Sherrill stressed her background as a Navy helicopter pilot and a former federal prosecutor and pitched 'ruthless competence' as a counter to Trump.
'It just seems so obvious to me what the path forward is. It's effectively govern,' Sherrill recently told NBC News. 'And this is what I've been doing since 2018 when I first ran, right? ... I say to people, 'What's keeping you up at night?''
'I tell people it's not maybe the sexiest tagline, but ruthless competence is what people in New Jersey want to see in government,' Sherrill added later. 'And that's what I've always provided, and that's what I think stands in stark contrast to the most incompetent federal government we've probably ever seen in this nation.'
Still, while Sherrill won with over a third of the vote, the results revealed a fractured party.
Two candidates who pitched themselves as more progressive, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, won a combined 36% of the vote. Two of the more moderate candidates, U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer and former state Senate President Steve Sweeney, got 20% combined, while teachers union president Sean Spiller won 10%.
Trump boosts Ciattarelli with the MAGA faithful and shows his hold on the GOP
After having come just 3 percentage points shy of defeating Murphy in 2021, Ciattarelli made one thing clear in his bid four years later: He's all in on Trump.
Like many prominent Republicans, Ciattarelli wasn't always on board — he criticized Trump as a 'charlatan' in 2015. And while he embraced Trump during his previous bid for governor, he didn't campaign with him.
That led Ciattarelli's opponents, including his top competitor, former radio host Bill Spadea, to try to frame him as insufficiently loyal to Trump. (Spadea had voiced criticism of Trump before he fell back in line.)
But Trump's endorsement of Ciattarelli cemented his front-runner status, helping hasten the end of the campaign. And in a nod to Ciattarelli's past criticism, Trump tried to inoculate him from any attempt to undercut his Trump bona fides.
'Jack, who after getting to know and understand MAGA, has gone ALL IN, and is now 100% (PLUS!),' Trump wrote in a Truth Social post announcing his backing.
Tuesday's result suggests that Trump's seal of approval was good enough for most GOP primary voters. By late Tuesday evening, Ciattarelli was carrying all of the state's 21 counties.
Ciattarelli's vote share was at 67% by late Tuesday evening, compared with just 22% for Spadea. State Sen. Jon Bramnick, who had been critical of Trump, had won just 6%, followed by two other candidates who had each won less than 3% of the vote.
Ciattarelli thanked Trump in his victory speech for his 'endorsement and strong support,' making a joke about his being a 'part-time New Jersey resident.' (Trump owns a home and a golf course in Bedminster.)
But Ciattarelli spent most of his speech focused on a general election argument, not on shoring up his base — indicative of the line he'll have to walk in a state Trump lost three times, even after the improvement he showed last year.
Old-school political machines still have some sway
Both parties are grappling with antiestablishment sentiment, wondering how to handle it, channel it or just avoid getting run over by it. But Tuesday's results were also a reminder that political institutions still have some staying power.
New Jersey's traditional political machines were dealt a blow last year following a lawsuit from Democrat Andy Kim during his Senate run, when a court ordered that county parties could no longer give advantageous ballot positions to their preferred candidates.
That diminished the sway those parties had Tuesday, but they still demonstrated some power.
Ciattarelli was the only Republican who competed for county party endorsements. Fulop didn't compete for Democratic county party endorsements, and Gottheimer sat some out, as well. Some county parties split between the candidates, with Sherrill earning the most endorsements from 10 of the 21 counties.
While Sherrill was carrying 15 of the state's 21 counties late Tuesday, Gottheimer was winning his home county, Bergen, which endorsed him. Sweeney, the only candidate from South Jersey, fared far better in the six counties that backed him. He was winning 40% of the vote in Gloucester County while garnering 7% of the statewide vote.
The county party endorsements were no guarantee of victory: The Essex County Democrats, for example, endorsed Sherrill. But as of late Tuesday evening, she was trailing Baraka in Essex County, where he is mayor of Newark, the state's largest city.
Even in that instance, though, the party endorsement may have helped Sherrill cut Baraka's margins in his home base.
Both parties frame the November fight
Tuesday night's victory speeches were also important table-setters, indicative of how each party is looking to frame the general election. And New Jersey's general election this year may foreshadow much of what we see on the campaign trail around the country in the 2026 midterms.
Outside of a quick thanks to Trump, Ciattarelli kept his focus tightly on Sherrill and New Jersey Democrats in his victory speech. He criticized her as 'Phil Murphy 2.0,' arguing that she has 'enabled every extremist and costly idea Phil Murphy has put forth,' and he even revived a key criticism of Murphy from his 2021 campaign.
He also criticized Sherrill's focus on Trump as a deflection.
'Mark my words: While we focus on these key New Jersey issues, my Democratic opponent will do everything in her power. Trust me ... if you took a shot every time Mikie Sherrill says 'Trump,' you'd be drunk off your ass every day between now and Nov. 4,' he said.
'But every time you hear her say 'Trump,' I want you to know what it really means: What it really means is Mikie doesn't have a plan to fix New Jersey,' he continued.
During her victory speech, Sherrill leaned heavily on her biography but also emphasized a dual mandate — a fight against New Jersey Republicans and also against Trump, a recipe that Democrats have successfully leaned on in past midterm elections.
Calling Ciattarelli a 'Trump lackey' who shouldn't lead the state, Sherrill criticized 'Trump and MAGA Republicans in D.C. [who] want to raise your taxes and take away your health care and education dollars.'
'This country is too beautiful to be beholden to the cruelty and self-interest that Jack and Trump are trying to hoist on her,' she said.
'The future is built on hard work and hope, and here in New Jersey, we're known for our grit, our tenacity — maybe a little bit for how loud we are — but it's going to take a strong voice to cut through the noise from Washington and deliver for the people,' she said. 'So I stand here tonight doing just that. And as a mom of four teenagers, you guys know I'm not going to put up with the incompetent, whiny nonsense coming from aggrieved MAGA Republicans.'
The power and limits of money
Tuesday's results showed how money matters in campaigns — and how it has its limits.
On the Democratic side, Sherrill won despite having been outspent by some of her opponents whose outside groups dropped millions of dollars on the race.
The largest outside spender was Working New Jersey, a super PAC funded by the state's teachers union, which Spiller leads. The group had spent a whopping $35 million on the race as of May 27, according to the latest campaign finance reports, while Spiller's campaign had spent $342,000. As of late Tuesday, Spiller had about 10% of the primary vote.
Gottheimer and Fulop were also boosted by outside groups that spent millions of dollars on the airwaves. (Gottheimer drained his congressional account to fund the outside group supporting him.) Sherrill got support on the airwaves from One Giant Leap PAC, which spent less than either Gottheimer's or Fulop's groups but spent most of its funds in the final weeks of the race.
Ciattarelli and an aligned outside group, Kitchen Table Conservatives, outspent the other Republicans. And Ciattarelli touted his strong fundraising as proof that he would be a formidable general election candidate.

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

NBC News

33 minutes ago

• NBC News

U.K.'s Starmer says it's important to 'de-escalate the situation' after U.S. strikes on Iran

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and other European leaders are calling for a resolution after the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities while also warning that Iran should not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. NBC News' Molly Hunter reports on how other nations, including China, are responding to the 23, 2025

Daily Mirror

36 minutes ago

• Daily Mirror

'Trump let Iran make nukes he's mad about - he's at war for a Nobel Peace Prize'

If there is one disease which lies behind the constant spasms of horror with which our days our currently blighted, it is the human race's inability to remember what happened five minutes ago. Once upon a time, journalists would go to the pub, and then bed. Sometimes they'd go to bed with each other, because they'd been to the pub. But they'd wake up in the morning and go "blimey, an earthquake in Japan. I had better find a good story of my own about this". And they would have to go deeper into a story and its origins. Today they don't drink, barely know their colleagues, and wake up to emails from a 24-rolling news ecosystem that demands constant feeding. Journalists think "blimey, everyone else is ahead of me" and scramble to catch up. No-one has time to think, which is why no-one has told you that Donald Trump just bombed Iran for making nuclear weapons that Donald Trump let them make. I wish I was making this stuff up, but no-one's got time for that. It's imperative people start remembering how we got to the cliff edge, because we did it by skipping about blindfold and if we don't stop soon we're going to go right over. America gave Iran nuclear technology in 1957. The aim was 'atoms for peace', to create wealth, and allies in the Middle East. After years of the world's greatest democracy propping up a cruel monarchy, the shah fell, the mullahs arose, and Iran was in less-friendly hands. The 1980s was taken up with a war against Iraq, but in the 1990s two Gulf Wars and continued US tinkering led the mullahs to the not-entirely-mad opinion that a nuclear weapon was the best way of keeping the Great Satan at bay. Israel, quite reasonably, was less than chuffed. And as technology sped up it became imperative to find ways of stopping Iran getting a weapon that apocalyptic fundamentalists would see very little reason not to detonate, slap-bang in the middle of a resource-rich, conflict-heavy trade route. And so in 2015, six countries signed a deal with Iran. In return for checks that it wasn't building The Bomb, everyone was open for business. And for three years the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action worked. Germany, China, Russia, France, the UK, China and the US lifted economic sanctions, and every 90 days would ratify everything was non-nuclear and tickety-boo. But such a vague agreement could not withstand the arrival of Donald Trump, whose tiny hands happily dismantled everything that made Barack Obama look good. In 2018 when Benjamin Netanyahu - yes it really is all the same people - gave a speech claiming his spy agency Mossad had stolen 100,000 documents showing Iran had lied and was enriching uranium, Trump saw a 30-second clip and decided it must be true. It might have been. The other nations in the deal didn't think so. But rather than renegotiate, send in inspectors, react as any sane human might, Trump just went "nah", and pulled out of the deal. The other countries tried to keep it going. The International Atomic Energy Authority said there was no enrichment. But the US whacked the regime with sanctions, and Iran said it too would pull out unless they were lifted. They were not. In 2020 the IAEA said Iran had tripled its uranium stockpile, a year later it blocked access to inspectors, and by 2023 it had weapons-grade material. Over the same period, Iran's population suffered. A third were ground into poverty. The economic woes weakened the regime just enough to make it lash out. Iran was behind terror attacks worldwide, former Republican Guards were linked to planned assassinations of ex-Trump officials, and it faced internal protests too. Then Iran funded the October 7 massacre by Hamas. Cue Netanyahu, who was leading a rickety coalition and facing jail the moment it fell, cue the war in Gaza, cue pro-Palestine protests, and cue a lot of blaming Iran. This isn't hard to figure out or remember. It's just that the constant churn of new things to hold our attention never scrolls back to the start of the liveblog, or delves into the third page of search results. Iran is definitely run by a bunch of rotten eggs who could well have been pulling the radioactive wool over the world's eyes in return for a financial boost to stabilise their rule. But the best way of fixing that wasn't walking away from the only half-arsed deal anyone had. It was making a better deal, and if Trump had actually written his own biography rather than paying someone else to make him look good, he might have known how to do it. Trump's withdrawal was supported by Israel and Saudi Arabia, with 63% of US voters, most of the planet and his own advisers screaming at him not to. It was "a horrible one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made", he insisted. "It didn't bring peace and it never will." And so he destabilised and raised the oil price with sanctions, screwed regional trade which meant the price of wheat rose and people starved across several countries, and gave fresh targets to jihadis. Back in office for a second time, Trump wants a legacy and more than anything he wants the Nobel Peace Prize that Obama got, largely for diplomatic efforts with the Muslim world. Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine "on day one" and it only got worse; he suggested building a golden beachside golf club in Gaza, and got laughed at. So his eye turned to Ayatollah Khameini, and the country which the US has done so much to make worse, for so long. Anyone with an ounce of realism in their body might wonder at the convenience with which the B-2 bombers and their bunker-busting payload were able to fly in unmolested, after the Israelis had suddenly switched attention from Gaza to take out the Iranian air defences a week earlier. It does seem odd that the imminent threat Netanyahu had predicted in 2018 bloomed 7 years later, 6 months after Trump returned to office and only after his other draft entries for the peace prize had evaporated. We might also ponder why the US president with the worst personal polls in history at this point in his leadership might be in want of some surgical strikes to appease his Muslim-hating base, and whether it would do him any harm if there were a couple of small terror attacks on US bases that would give an excuse to bomb the mullahs to the table. And having thought this far, we could ask ourselves how close to the edge of nuclear catastrophe Trump will allow the world to careen before he picks up the phone to "make a deal" which will be the bigliest, most beautiful peace deal of all time. And whether it will be worse than the one we used to have, before he ripped it to shreds out of petulance and exploited the disastrous consequences for the sake of vanity. With Iran alone, Trump has cost the world trillions. Now he is about to march an entire planet to the gates of hell, just so he can look good for marching everyone back again. And this plan works if he is a diplomatic genius able to unpick decades of crapola, and capable of remembering why and how it happened in the first place. But when all he watches is 24-hour rolling news, with constant updates about new stuff that isn't new at all, the best we can hope for is that the Nobel Committee gives him the prize now, just to make him stop.

The Independent

an hour ago

• The Independent

When US presidents talk of regime change, we must be careful what they wish for

US president Donald Trump once boasted that he was a 'stable genius'. Well, it never had much of a ring of truth to it. He is in fact, and probably always has been, extremely erratic, a trait lauded by his cult followers as a mystical style of instinctive leadership that all Maga disciples must simply trust, as if he were a latter-day Jesus Christ or, more likely, a tangerine Charles Manson. Either way, Trump is more dangerous than ever. Only a few days ago, we may recall, he was publicly taunting the Ayatollah Khamenei, head of the Iranian theocracy, an 86-year old mullah of unyielding, medievally cruel convictions. Trump took to social media to declare: 'We know exactly where the so-called 'Supreme Leader' is hiding. He is an easy target, but is safe there – we are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.' It's almost as if the guy had spent all his life in the gangsterish world of New York real estate, isn't it? Then, at the weekend, having bombed the hell out of some mountains (the experts say those crafty Iranians cheated by getting their precious enriched uranium out before the bunker busters dropped), Trump allowed his closest lieutenants to go and tell the world it's all about the nukes, and not the old monster who rules the country – Khamenei, not Trump. JD Vance, for example, rumoured to be sceptical about intervention, said that 'has been very clear that we don't want a regime change '. Marco Rubio, secretly still more of a George W Bush style neocon, and thus probably more sympathetic to the idea of getting rid of the 'regime', nonetheless sought to please his boss with what was supposed to be the collective line on Operation Midnight Hammer: 'It was not an attack on Iran, it was not an attack on the Iranian people. This wasn't a regime change move.' Now? Not so much. Trump has revived the idea, in his trademark menacing-playful way, in a post of Truth Social: 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!'. Trump apologists say he was only kidding; but how do we know when to take the guy seriously – apart from 'always and never'? Perhaps Trump dreams of the Iranian people rising up and creating a new pluralistic democracy – a country where elections are free and fair, where the losers always gracefully accept the result and participate in the ceremonial peaceful transfer of power, and would never incite a mob to storm the parliament building where the will of the people is being ratified, and deny the parliamentary authorities the use of troops to defend themselves and the overwhelmed police officers…? The Iranians, especially, are unlikely to be impressed by such talk from the Americans, and, indeed, the Israelis. If they're paranoid about the CIA and MI5, they have reason to be. On numerous occasions in the past, the 'Great Satan' of America – and before that, Little Satan (Britain) – have interfered in Iranian affairs, including deposing two shahs and a prime minister, Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had the temerity to want take control of Iran's oil riches away from 'British' Petroleum. The various coups engineered by the imperialists – a fair description – worked, but not indefinitely; and the seeds of their own eventual destruction were sown in Iran as elsewhere. A period of misrule by the last shah ended up with the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and all that has followed since. We should all be worried when an American president talks about regime change. To be fair, Trump is hardly the first, and it rarely ends well, whether it succeeds or not. Historically, the leader the Americans would most have loved to be rid of was their troublesome Communist neighbour Fidel Castro, parked from 1959 to his death in 2016 (natural causes) on what amounted to a giant Russian aircraft carrier 90 miles off the coast of Florida. The CIA considered all manner of ways to assassinate him, including, famously, an exploding cigar. Whether this was inspired by a trip to a joke shop is still classified. A more serious, but still bungled, attempt at an invasion and a coup d'etat in Cuba failed when the US-trained rebels were cornered in what came to be known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco. That was in 1961, and was hardly the first or the last time they tried to oust Fidel, but this failed plot merely made him even more popular and humiliated the Kennedy administration, who inherited the plan from President Eisenhower's team: regime change has always been a bit of a bipartisan affair. JFK went on, a couple of a years later, to at least acquiesce in the murder of the Diem brothers who ran South Vietnam, replacing them with a chap named Nguyen Van Thieu, who was more to American tastes but no more democratic, nor effective in resisting the Communist conquest of his country. It was an even greater American humbling when they lost that war. The regime change sideshow in that Indo-China conflict was Cambodia, where the Americans helped depose the jolly Prince Sihanouk with a more pro-American general, who was, inevitably, himself deposed when the Khmer Rouge took over and the killing fields were filled with the corpses of more than a million Cambodians. Such disastrous CIA escapades during the cold war were why Congress in the 1970s passed laws banning such covert activities – including the War Powers Act, to try to prevent presidents circumventing the Congressional power to declare war. That oversight didn't persist, and minor, US-inspired coups followed in Grenada (1984) and Nicaragua (1989). The greatest blunder in regime change was, of course, Iraq. To be fair to the second President Bush and Tony Blair, as people tend not to be, it's only right that we recall that their definition of regime change was more nuanced. Regime change could mean a change of policy under an existing dictator. So if Saddam Hussein had genuinely renounced weapons of mass destruction (instead of pretending he had them to scare people away), and allowed comprehensive inspections by the UN, he might still be in business now, albeit unlikely. The alternative, increasingly obvious, was that he'd be forcibly removed. That would also end the mortal threat to the stability of the region. Which it didn't; it just created new ones. As we all know, things didn't turn out any better for the West when Islamic State turned up in post-Saddam Iraq, and turned the Middle East upside down. Much the same may be said about post-Gadaffi Libya, and post-invasion Afghanistan. It all sounds wearily familiar, doesn't it? The Americans upturn one unsatisfactory regime and somehow contrive to make matters worse. Rather like when they re-elected Trump last year.