A week later, Cheryl attributed the skepticism to the political atmosphere when the race got going in earnest earlier this year. “Trump acted very quickly, so there was a toxic mixture of despair and panic.” The result, she continued, was constant doubt. “When we talked about accessibility, people said we didn't understand what was going on. When we talked about Trump, always in relation to accessibility, people said we talk about Trump too much.” As a result, Sherrill vowed to freeze utility rates as Ciattarelli blamed Murphy, who was finishing his eighth year in office, and Democrats for high prices. (It had been six decades since New Jersey voted for the same party at the governor's mansion in three straight elections.) The contest remained somewhat on hold until the fall, when Ciattarelli reported that Cheryl had not been allowed to attend her Naval Academy graduation. She claimed this was because she failed to rat out classmates who were involved in a cheating scandal, and then criticized the Trump administration for including her personal information, such as her Social Security number, when releasing her military ID. In October, Sherrill accused Ciattarelli, the former owner of a medical publishing company, of “killing tens of thousands of people” by publishing “propaganda” about the safety of opioids. (Ciattarelli said he would sue Cheryl over the suit. She continued to criticize his work on opioids but did not repeat the allegations further.)
It was hardly inspiring, but from the Democrats' point of view it shouldn't have been as long as Trump's approval rating continued to fall and Cheryl continued to flaunt the connection between Ciattarelli and the president. Ciattarelli never overtly based his campaign on Trump, instead focusing on local issues such as property taxes and school funding. But he welcomed the national MAGA influential figures such as Vivek Ramaswamy stymied him and repeatedly refused to distance themselves from the president. At one debate, Ciattarelli said he would give Trump an “A”; nor would he criticize Trump's sudden decision to cut off funding for the $16 billion Gateway program, a rail infrastructure project that would have eased travel between New Jersey and New York for hundreds of thousands of passengers. He tried to argue that he would have an easier time negotiating with the Trump administration and complained that Cheryl was too focused on the White House. “If you get a flat tire on the way home tonight, she’ll blame it on President Trump,” he said at rallies.
However, Trump was a hot topic for the voters Cheryl was pursuing. Josh Gottheimer, a northern New Jersey congressman who ran against Sherrill in the primary because of his bipartisan record in the Legislature, spent much of the summer and fall campaigning for her and found talk of the president's policies inevitable. Gottheimer often heard from voters about Trump's tariffs, but their concerns about the shutdown were even more pressing, he said. “He campaigned so much for working-class people, and then he just gave them the finger,” Gottheimer told me.
“What you're looking at is a state that's no longer necessarily Democratic because it's been nationalized,” said Julie Roginsky, a longtime Democratic strategist in New Jersey. The size of Sherrill's victory impressed politicians from Mahwah to Cape May, but within days I began to hear an alternative view. Trump's approval numbers were in the low forties nationwide and mid-thirties in New Jersey, and the suspension was even less popular. Cheryl's victory may provide some inspiration to a national party that needs it. But Roginsky, a staunch Sherrill supporter, said: “I hope she doesn't think she won by fourteen points only because of Mikie Sherrill. I hope she realizes she won by fourteen points also because of Donald Trump.”
Montclair, where Sherrill lives, is an upscale suburban town known for its yuppie suburban politics. When she walked into the nearly empty diner where we met, the waiter hugged her and asked her to take a photo, and a few minutes later another woman flinched when she saw her through the window and gave her a thumbs up. I asked Cheryl if she gets greeted like that more often after a win, and she arched an eyebrow: “Yeah, it's Montclair,” she said. Last week she won the Essex district, which includes Newark, by fifty-four points.
Cheryl announced her mandate as soon as the size of her victory became known, but she largely avoided going into detail about what it was for. The first day would entail “declaring a state of emergency on utility costs and freezing rate increases,” she has said repeatedly. “The reason I took this on was because I needed a way to communicate with people: I didn’t just wow-wow-wow-wow“I'm not going to just go down to Trenton, into the bowels of the statehouse, and talk about a 10-year plan. That's not going to help people and what they're feeling right now.” She also talked about going after drug-pricing middlemen, increasing aid for first-time homebuyers, and working to restore Gateway funding. But if the first question Cheryl faces is what exactly she hopes to do, the second is a more pressing one. — how she plans to do it. Although Trenton is largely Democratic, the state legislature remains divided between regional and labor factions and is littered with entrenched power brokers who are not afraid—even eager—to boast and publicly wield their influence, even when it makes life difficult for their own party's leaders (South Jersey boss George Norcross, for example, effectively stalled Murphy's first-term agenda for several months when Murphy tried to overhaul a tax cut program that Norcross supported in Camden and the surrounding area.) When I pointed out that the real work would probably require at least some work in the bowels of Trenton and some time spent negotiating, Cheryl seemed unmoved. “I just don’t think the sentiment of ‘this is really time-consuming’ is working for anyone right now, because Trump has shown that if we’re not willing to act quickly, if we’re not willing to deal with complex structural problems, we’re going to be played.”
