Democrat Mikie Sherrill won the New Jersey governor’s race on Tuesday night, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli, whom President Donald Trump endorsed.
Sherrill made the race a referendum on the president, saying Ciattarelli is a Trump loyalist who would do Trump’s bidding if he won the election.
“He’ll do whatever Trump tells him to do, and I will fight anybody to work for you,” Sherrill said in their first debate.
Trump lost New Jersey by 6 points last year, a 10-point improvement over his margin in the 2020 election.
The race drew more than $100 million in ad spending from both parties, according to AdImpact.
Trump was also a factor for a slim majority of New Jersey voters, with Sherrill winning virtually all of the 38% of voters who said they voted to oppose the president.
A majority of New Jersey voters (54%) disapproved of Trump’s job as president and nearly two-thirds were dissatisfied or angry about the direction of the country, according to the NBC News exit poll.
On the campaign trail, Sherrill said the Trump administration’s policies were “raising costs on everything from a cup of coffee to your groceries,” pledging to join a lawsuit against Trump’s tariff policies on her first day in office.
Sherrill also won over independents as well as Latino voters, despite Trump’s gains in heavily Latino parts of the state last year.
The four-term congresswoman also pledged to fight the Trump administration over federal funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project, a massive project to add rail tunnels between New York and New Jersey.
