On Tuesday, November 11th—two days after eight Democratic senators split with their party and voted with Republicans to end the government shutdown—Mikie Sherrill, the governor-elect of New Jersey, was sitting in a diner in Montclair, in the northeast suburbs of the state. “Well, I’m really upset, so my take on it was, ‘What the actual fuck?’ ” she told me. Sherrill, a four-term Democratic congresswoman who was first elected when she flipped a conservative U.S. House district in the anti-Donald Trump wave of 2018, said she had campaigned all year to “say no” to the notion that Trump was leaving his opponents deflated and powerless. She went on to defeat her Republican rival, the former state legislator and three-time gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli, by fourteen points—and watched Democrats win by similarly large margins in Virginia, California, and New York. The idea behind her campaign, she continued, had been “to finally galvanize what I think of as Democrats, meaning the working-class suburbanites, working people in the cities, in a powerful way so we can actually fight back. And then, not even a week later, to see the Senate fuck that all up?”
Sherrill, a fifty-three-year-old former Navy helicopter pilot, litigator, and prosecutor, is not primarily known for provoking her own party. For months this year, the word about her campaign, which she oriented around promising to fight rising energy costs and relentlessly tying her opponent to Trump, was that it was “milquetoast,” as one national progressive activist called it this fall. She had a record of questioning the Party line—she repeatedly voted against Nancy Pelosi leading the Democrats in the House, arguing that the Party was ready for a new generation of leaders, and she was one of the first elected officials to call for Joe Biden to drop his reëlection campaign after his debate against Trump last year. But the concern was that Sherrill didn’t represent anything new in a state that was calling for change. Four years earlier, the Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, won reëlection by just three points; last year, Trump got within six points of Kamala Harris, the closest Presidential result the state had seen in more than thirty years. Sherrill was a compelling—and tough—character, but she had risen to prominence in Trump’s first term as a face of the suburban #Resistance.
After her win, Sherrill soaked in the positive feelings, at least until the news landed from Washington. When I asked how she proposed fixing her party’s evident problems, she looked at me as if it were obvious: “One presents a model of bold leadership and a take-no-prisoners attitude in serving people.” Her political operation has swiftly tried to insure that she is treated as a nationally important figure. The day after we talked, Sherrill’s campaign manager, Alex Ball, circulated a memo offering “advice for campaigns heading into the 2026 midterms,” which included, “Do not let the press and pundits write last year’s news without a challenge. At every juncture of this campaign, Mikie Sherrill was underestimated.” The bravado is, at some level, understandable. In the final days of the campaign, one of Sherrill’s vanquished primary opponents had touted a survey showing a basically even race, and Politico’s “New Jersey Playbook” newsletter author, Matt Friedman, wrote that, though his head foresaw a Sherrill victory, his “gut” was with Ciattarelli. Yet Sherrill shifted every county in the state to the left and even flipped traditional Republican strongholds such as Morris County. She also appeared to reverse Trump’s gains among Latino voters, winning heavily Hispanic Passaic County by fifteen points, after Trump had carried it by three points last year. When Sherrill won, Democrats flipped five Assembly seats, giving them a super-majority and extending the Party’s considerable control over state lawmaking.
A week later, Sherrill attributed the skepticism to the political atmosphere when the race got going in earnest early this year. “Trump moved really quickly, so there was this toxic brew of despair and panic.” The outcome, she continued, had been constant second-guessing. “When we talked about affordability, people said we didn’t get what was going on. When we talked about Trump, always with respect to affordability, people said we talked about Trump too much.” On the trail, Sherrill promised to freeze utility rates, as Ciattarelli blamed Murphy, who was concluding his eighth year in office, and Democrats for high prices. (It had been six decades since New Jersey had voted the same party into the governor’s mansion in three straight elections.) The contest remained in a sort of holding pattern until the fall, when Ciattarelli revealed that Sherrill hadn’t been allowed to walk at her Naval Academy graduation. She maintained that this was because she hadn’t turned in classmates who were involved in a cheating scandal, and she then criticized the Trump Administration for including her personal information like her Social Security number when releasing her military records. In October, Sherrill accused Ciattarelli, the former owner of a medical-publishing company, of having “killed tens of thousands of people” by printing “propaganda” about opioid safety. (Ciattarelli said he would sue Sherrill over the claim. She kept criticizing his work on opioids but didn’t repeat the accusation on the trail.)
It was hardly inspiring stuff, but from the Democratic perspective it didn’t have to be, as long as Trump’s approval rating continued to sink and Sherrill kept advertising the connection between Ciattarelli and the President. Ciattarelli never explicitly based his campaign on Trump, focussing instead on local issues such as property taxes and school funding. But he welcomed national MAGA influencers like Vivek Ramaswamy to stump for him and refused on multiple occasions to distance himself from the President. At one debate, Ciattarelli said that he would give Trump an “A grade”; he also would not criticize Trump’s abrupt decision to pull funding for the sixteen-billion-dollar Gateway Program, a railway-infrastructure project that would have eased travel between New Jersey and New York City for hundreds of thousands of commuters. He tried arguing that he would be in a better position to negotiate with the Trump Administration and complained that Sherrill was too focussed on the White House. “If you get a flat tire on the way home tonight, she’s going to blame it on President Trump,” he took to saying at rallies.
Trump, however, was a pressing topic for the voters whom Sherrill was pursuing. Josh Gottheimer, a northern New Jersey congressman who ran against Sherrill in the primary on the strength of his bipartisan legislative record, spent much of the summer and fall campaigning for her and found talk of the President’s policies unavoidable. Gottheimer heard often from voters about Trump’s tariffs, he said, but their concerns about the shutdown were even more immediate. “He campaigned so much on working-class people and then just gave them the finger,” Gottheimer told me.
“What you’re looking at is a state that’s not necessarily Democratic anymore, so much as it is nationalized,” Julie Roginsky, a longtime Democratic strategist in New Jersey, said. The size of Sherrill’s win impressed politicos from Mahwah to Cape May, but after a few days I started to hear an alternative view, too. Trump’s approval numbers were scraping the low forties nationally and mid-thirties in New Jersey, and the shutdown was even less popular. Sherrill’s win may be offering inspiration for a national party in need of it. But, Roginsky—a strong Sherrill supporter—said, “I hope she doesn’t think that she won by fourteen points just because of Mikie Sherrill. I hope she understands that she won by fourteen points also because of Donald Trump.”
Montclair, where Sherrill lives, is an upscale commuter town known locally for its suburban-yuppie politics. When she walked into the mostly empty diner where we met, the server hugged her and asked for a photo, and a few minutes later another woman started upon seeing her through the window, and gave her a thumbs-up. I asked Sherrill if she was being greeted like that more often since her win, and she arched an eyebrow: “Yeah, this is Montclair,” she said. She’d won Essex County, which includes Newark, by fifty-four points the previous week.
Sherrill claimed a mandate as soon as the size of her victory became clear, but she has largely avoided filling in the details of what it’s for. Day One will entail “declaring a state of emergency on utility costs and freezing rate hikes,” she has said repeatedly. “The reason I took that on was I needed a way to communicate to people: I’m not just wah-wah-wah-wah,” she told me, imitating a droning politician. “I’m not just going to go down into Trenton, in the bowels of the statehouse, and have some conversations about the ten-year plan. That’s not going to cut it for people and the way they’re feeling right now.” She has also talked about going after drug-pricing middlemen, increasing assistance for first-time homebuyers, and working to restore the Gateway funding. But if the first question Sherrill has faced is what, exactly, she hopes to do, the second—and more pointed—is how she intends to do it. Though Trenton is heavily Democratic, the statehouse remains divided by regional and labor factions and studded with entrenched power brokers who are unafraid—even eager—to show off and publicly leverage their influence, even when it makes life hard for their own party’s leaders. (The South Jersey boss George Norcross, for one, effectively stalled out Murphy’s first-term agenda for months when Murphy tried to overhaul a Norcross-favored tax-incentive program in and around Camden.) When I pointed out that the actual job likely required at least some work in Trenton’s bowels, and some time spent negotiating, Sherrill seemed unmoved. “I just don’t think the sense of ‘It’s really time-consuming’ is working for anybody right now, because Trump has shown it doesn’t have to be. If we’re not willing to move fast, if we’re not willing to take on tough structural issues, we’re going to get played.”
One worry of longtime pols in the state is that Sherrill’s ranks of advisers do not include many of the expected names—few have written bills or wrangled over bond issuances in New Jersey. Ball, a former national campaign operative and chief of staff to a Colorado congressman before she ran Sherrill’s office in D.C., is now her top staffer in Trenton. Ball suggested that their theory of making policy in the statehouse would simply look different from that of previous governors. “Obviously Mikie had really long coattails,” she said, so legislators will “understand that she’s coming in with this vision and agenda that the majority of the state is bought into.” Current officeholders, Ball continued, are “gonna have to figure out how to work with us, because we know that the voters are expecting progress, and I think, you know, people are going to be smart to join the team.” This includes, she said, Republicans, who hold a handful of state Senate seats that will be up for grabs in next fall’s election in areas that Sherrill won.
Sherrill has shown little patience for the idea that she needs to articulate a grand philosophical vision. Instead, her pragmatic, slightly ruthless conception of the job recalls the “get shit done” campaign that got Josh Shapiro elected in Pennsylvania, and Gretchen Whitmer’s “fix the damn roads” in Michigan. When I asked Sherrill which state executives she saw modelling her preferred approach, she immediately pointed to Shapiro, noting how, in 2023, he’d led the reconstruction of a stretch of I-95 in less than two weeks, rather than the predicted six months. The Massachusetts governor, Maura Healey, had also caught her eye by fighting back against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s attempts to release insurance companies from paying for vaccines. In practice, Healy’s maneuver looked less like picking a national fight than taking advantage of local rules: she ordered insurance carriers operating in Massachusetts to cover vaccines recommended by the state’s own health department. “I think there are a lot of governors who are making movements in a pretty critical time in a way that feels to me very different from what’s going on in Washington,” Sherrill said.
Outside the diner, it was starting to snow, and Sherrill was soon due at a Veterans Day event in nearby Livingston. She had to meet with local grandees, name a staff, and think about when she’d get back to Congress—to vote, to give one last speech encouraging her colleagues to embrace more forceful resistance against Trump, and to formally advise that she planned to resign her seat the following week. Her mind was clearly still on the coming end of the shutdown. “Washington just seems like they can’t get out of their own way. They can’t see beyond procedural tactics on the fucking floor,” she said. “When we’re in a time like this, to be, like, ‘Oh, I’m an appropriator, so I just need to make sure blah-blah-blah-blah’— if you want to be an accountant, be an accountant. If you want to be a leader, be a leader.” ♦
