Mikie Sherrill elected governor of New Jersey, defeating Republican Jack Ciattarelli

Mikie Sherrill will be the next governor of New Jersey. The Associated Press called the race just after 9:20 p.m.

The four-time Democratic congressmember from Montclair defeated Republican Jack Ciattarelli in a closely-watched election that most experts agree sets the tone for next year’s congressional midterms.

This was Sherrill’s first attempt at the highest office in the Garden State. Ciattarelli has now tried and failed to become the state’s governor three times.

Votes are still being counted, but election night tabulations show Sherrill leading Ciattarelli with over 56% of the vote.

A crowd of Sherrill’s supporters reacted with jubilation when the results were announced at Sherrill’s election night event at the Hilton hotel in East Brunswick, NJ.

Sherrill took to the stage at around 10:00 p.m. Tuesday, pledging to drive down utility costs in the state and address several other key affordability issues.

“Governors have never mattered more, and in this state, I’m determined to build prosperity for all of our citizens,” she said.

At Ciattarelli’s campaign event in Bridgewater, supporters mingled in the main ballroom at the Marriott Hotel, but live election results were not streamed on the screen. Ciattarelli addressed the crowd, saying he'd called Sherrill to concede.

“I’m proud of the efforts of my team. I’m proud of the message we communicated each and every day,” he said, adding he visited all 600 New Jersey diners. “I had more BLTS and onion soups than anyone on record.”

New Jersey voters headed to the polls in droves during the 10 days of early voting and Election Day. Nearly 600,000 voters cast ballots by mail in the lead-up to the election, with registered Democrats accounting for about 62% of the total, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan election firm VoteHub.

Another roughly 742,000 people voted early at polling places across the state. About 23% of them were registered as unaffiliated with either major political party.

“Democrats are energized, and they voted today. And they voted to elect Mikie Sherrill the next governor of New Jersey,” said Patricia Campos-Medina, vice chair for the Sherrill campaign, adding that Ciattarelli didn’t offer solutions to the state’s problems.

Sherrill’s campaign spokesperson Sean Higgins credited high turnout in traditionally Democratic cities, as well as Republican strongholds of South Jersey, for the victory and said the campaign had built a “firewall” of support heading into Election Day.

"It's disappointing," said Dimitri Hirschman, 20, of Ciattarelli's loss. "The problem is how divisive we are in our politics and how, when you see an R or D next to a name, you automatically shut them off as opposed to listening.”

A mom of four and former Navy helicopter pilot, Sherrill pitched herself to voters as a fighter who would stand up to President Donald Trump, whose approval rating has been sinking in New Jersey since he started his second term.

Sherrill worked hard to link Ciattarelli to the president, who endorsed the Republican nominee both after he won the primary and during the general election race. Throughout the campaign, Sherrill referred to her opponent as "MAGA Jack" and said he was “100% MAGA.”

When she takes the oath of office in January, Sherrill will succeed fellow Democrat Phil Murphy, who leaves office after eight years as governor. She’ll immediately face an affordability crisis marked by skyrocketing housing prices and electric bills. Sherrill will also confront fiscal difficulties with the state budget, brought on in part by multi-billion-dollar cuts to federal subsidies for New Jersey by the Trump administration.

Who is Mikie Sherrill?

After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1994, Mikie Sherrill spent almost 10 years in active duty. As a Navy helicopter pilot, she flew missions throughout Europe and the Middle East, according to her Congressional biography. She also served as a Russian policy officer while based in the U.S.

She left the Navy in 2003 after receiving several commendations and achievement medals. She next attended law school at Georgetown University. As a lawyer, Sherrill worked as a prosecutor in New Jersey’s U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Sherrill was first elected to Congress as part of a surge of women candidates who came into office in the 2018 midterms during Trump’s first term, flipping the 11th Congressional District in northern New Jersey blue for the first time in more than three decades.

While Ciattarelli worked diligently to paint her as dangerously liberal, Sherrill has more often been pegged as a moderate during her political career. Her congressional district is centered in Morris County, a historically conservative area where polling shows she’s remained popular.

A bruising campaign

Both Sherrill and Ciattarelli emerged as nominees from crowded and hard-fought party primaries in June 2025.

The state’s rising cost of living and taxes dominated much of the race. Ciattarelli accused Sherrill of driving up electricity bills by supporting clean energy policies. She charged him with planning to raise the state’s sales tax to 10%. Both candidates denied the claims and said their comments had been taken out of context.

In September, the New Jersey Globe reported that it obtained a copy of the program from the 1994 Naval Academy graduation ceremony that showed Sherrill’s name missing. Sherrill explained that she wasn’t allowed to walk at graduation because she failed to turn in fellow students who were caught cheating on an exam in a scandal that rocked the academy at the time. Sherrill has maintained that she was not implicated in the cheating scandal herself.

Ciattarelli expressed doubt about her explanation and called on her to release her disciplinary records.

Sherrill declined to do so, but that same week, CBS News reported that the National Archives had mistakenly released unredacted records from Sherrill’s time in the Naval Academy to an ally of the Ciattarelli campaign. The records contained her social security number, home address and parents' address.

Ciattarelli’s campaign said it had nothing to do with obtaining the records. His attorneys threatened a defamation lawsuit against Sherrill and her campaign over the suggestion that Ciattarelli was part of a conspiracy to smear her with the unredacted documents.

Ciattarelli threatened another defamation lawsuit in October when Sherrill accused him in the second gubernatorial debate of “killing tens of thousands” of New Jerseyans by publishing what she called misinformation for the opioid industry.

Sherrill’s attack referenced the former state assemblymember's medical publishing company, Galen Publishing, which he founded before he entered politics and sold for more than $12 million in 2017. Sherrill accused Galen of producing “opioid propaganda” that contributed to the opioid crisis in New Jersey.

Ciattarelli’s company published education materials for the medical industry, which critics said downplayed the dangers of opiates, according to reporting by NJ.com in 2021, when Ciattarelli last ran for governor.

Ciattarelli has yet to file any lawsuit in a New Jersey court.

What happens now…

Sherrill will enter office with a healthy Democratic majority in both the state Assembly and Senate. Her supporters will likely expect her to quickly tackle pocketbook issues.

A July 2025 Rutgers-Eagleton poll found that 85% of New Jersey residents were dissatisfied with the state's handling of affordability and the cost of living. Electricity bills in the state spiked a whopping 20% in June. And New Jersey remains one of the most expensive places in the country to buy a house.

Sherrill vowed to combat energy prices as soon as she enters office by declaring a state of emergency and “freezing” electricity rates, but her plan has been met with some trepidation, even from fellow Democrats. Gov. Murphy told reporters he wasn’t sure how a governor would actually do what Sherrill has proposed.

This is a developing story that will be updated.