Typically, the first indication of how a national vote like last November’s will reshape the political landscape emerges in the next midterm elections, still 18 months away. But we may get an early preview in New Jersey, one of only two states holding gubernatorial and legislative elections this year. With Governor Phil Murphy term-limited, the race to succeed him has brought out a half dozen Democratic candidates, spanning the political spectrum. Unlike in Virginia, where only one candidate from each party has qualified to succeed Republican governor Glenn Youngkin, New Jersey’s June 10 Democratic primary is shaping up as a preview of the political struggles we’ll see around the country next year between progressive and moderate candidates. The winner will face off in November against a Republican who must carefully align with Donald Trump without alienating New Jersey’s substantial bloc of independent voters. Mine fields are buried across this political landscape.
What makes the Democratic primary in New Jersey so intriguing is the absence of a clear early leader. Polling shows that any of three or four candidates, representing different Democratic factions, could capture the nomination. One decisive factor may be the composition of the primary electorate. According to polling by Fairleigh Dickenson University, liberals outnumber moderates in New Jersey’s Democratic Party by about eight percentage points—a gap that helps explain why two progressive mayors—Newark’s Ras Baraka and Jersey City’s Steve Fulop—have emerged as early contenders.
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Baraka grew up in Newark, the son of the poet LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka—a controversial figure who moved from black cultural nationalism to Marxist-Leninism. In 2003, while serving as New Jersey’s poet laureate, Amiri Baraka sparked outrage with his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” which insinuated that Israel had advance knowledge of the World Trade Center attacks. When he refused to resign, the New Jersey legislature voted to abolish the post altogether.
Though Ras Baraka has lived a more conventional life—earning a master’s degree in education and serving as principal of a Newark high school—he has courted his own share of controversy. In 2004, while serving as a Newark deputy mayor, he introduced Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan at an event and praised him as an inspiration, despite Farrakhan’s long history of anti-white and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Defending himself recently, Baraka said that he’s not anti-Semitic and attended the event because it was focused on ending violence among warring street gangs.
Baraka first won a seat on Newark’s city council position and, in 2014, was elected to replace Cory Booker as mayor. Much of his mayoral campaign was built around criticism of Booker’s record, including pledges to reverse school reforms that Booker had championed. Among other positions, Baraka opposed the expansion of charter schools, arguing that they diverted resources from traditional public schools.
Baraka’s gubernatorial platform reflects his progressivism, advocating for programs like universal basic income and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations, while celebrating New Jersey’s reputation as an immigrant sanctuary. But Baraka hasn’t always been a predictable progressive. After the Black Lives Matter riots following George Floyd’s death in May 2020, he refused to endorse the “defund the police” movement, dismissing it as a “bourgeois liberal” idea. Instead, he has focused on police reforms, including establishing a civilian complaint board and funding community anti-violence initiatives. The result has been a mixed record on crime: violence in Newark hasn’t surged as sharply as in other urban areas, but it remains volatile.
Jersey City’s Steve Fulop is a different kind of progressive, shaped in part by the city he leads. Once a blue-collar industrial and port hub along the Hudson River, Jersey City has transformed over the past two decades into a commuter haven for New York workers. Today, more than half of its adults hold college degrees, and the median household income is about $95,000. Reflecting his constituency, much of Fulop’s agenda as mayor has targeted urban issues tied to mass transit. While championing fashionable urbanist ideas like bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly streetscapes, he has also tapped into broader anger over commuting woes across the Garden State. He has broken with his party’s leaders by backing New York’s controversial congestion pricing plan, which levies a fee on drivers entering Manhattan from New Jersey—and proposed taxing New York drivers who cross over into the Garden State in the same manner. He has also proposed hiking corporate taxes by $1 billion to fund the state’s chronically underperforming NJ Transit system.
Mikie Sherrill, who represents New Jersey’s 11th congressional district—covering suburban Essex County and much of Morris County—comes from the party’s more moderate wing. Part of the congressional New Democrat Coalition, she positions herself as a pro-business Democrat. A Naval Academy graduate with a Georgetown law degree, Sherrill is campaigning on bread-and-butter issues, especially New Jersey’s high cost of living. Rather than calling for higher taxes on the wealthy or government subsidies to cut costs, she proposes slashing regulations and rezoning unused commercial space to spur more residential building. She also wants to expand tax credits for households with kids and low-income earners, while making government more efficient. On health care, she argues that greater price transparency could reduce costs. “These are the struggles that keep families up at night, and for far too long, career politicians have promised to fix them, but nothing seems to change in New Jersey—and I’ve had enough,” she says.
To Sherrill’s right is former New Jersey Senate president Steve Sweeney, a trade union official who often worked across the aisle with Republican governor Chris Christie to enact reforms, including cutting pension costs and trimming employee benefits. “New Jersey has a government that we can’t afford any longer,” Sweeney once said, explaining his cooperation with Christie. His pragmatism earned him the ire of public-sector unions, which heavily backed primary challengers against him. Though Sweeney survived those contests for a time, he ultimately lost his South Jersey Senate seat four years ago to Republican newcomer Ed Durr, a truck driver, amid growing anger over Democratic governance. Now, Sweeney is banking on traditional blue-collar labor support to vault him to victory in a primary where other candidates are splitting the progressive vote. But while he retains high name recognition among Democrats, his unfavorable ratings remain elevated—a legacy of his battles with public-sector unions.
Whoever emerges from the Democratic scrum will likely face a formidable opponent on the Republican side. Former state representative Jack Ciattarelli, who ran an unexpectedly close race four years ago against Murphy, polls well ahead of several other candidates for the Republican nomination in name recognition and favorability. He appears especially well-positioned to withstand the favored Democratic tactic of running against Donald Trump. Murphy tried that approach in 2021, when Trump’s favorability ratings were at their lowest, but Ciattarelli successfully kept the focus on voter discontent. If anything, this year’s Democratic candidates seem even more determined to campaign against Trump, suggesting a likely repeat of 2021’s dynamics in the general election. The bad news for the Democrats, however, is that a recent poll shows Trump as relatively popular in the Garden State, with higher favorability than Governor Murphy. If that holds through the fall, Democrats could be in serious trouble.
Ciattarelli’s challenge will be to inspire enthusiasm among both traditional New Jersey Republicans and the substantial MAGA contingent. Among older Republicans in the state, polling shows that he’s widely liked. MAGA and younger voters are less enthusiastic, though, with fewer than half giving Ciattarelli a thumbs up, while many remain undecided. Motivating them to turn out for the general election might be the former state representative’s biggest hurdle. Doing that without turning off the state’s large independent voter bloc, which accounts for 37 percent of registered voters, will be a tough task for any Republican. The good news for the GOP is that an aggressive voter-registration drive has added some 185,000 Republicans to the rolls over the last four years.
Though New Jersey has been reliably blue in recent years, its voters remain more liberal-moderate than those in states with more radicalized governments, like California or New York. That moderation is why New Jersey has been inching closer to political competitiveness. While Trump has lost the state three times, he made his best showing there last November. That performance, combined with Ciattarelli’s close run in 2021, has given new momentum to GOP efforts. Republicans are also betting that state Democrats will keep drifting leftward with the national party—and they may get their wish.
Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images
