Bad headlines and a rough poll for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill suggest that the Republican has a chance in New Jersey.
I t’s been a while since New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill could say that her campaign has enjoyed an objectively good news cycle. And it will be a while still from the looks of it.
On Thursday, Emerson College found that the race for governor in the Garden State is a bona fide toss-up. New Jersey voters are split down the middle, with 43 percent backing U.S. Congresswoman Sherrill, who represents New Jersey’s eleventh district, and 43 percent supporting GOP nominee Jack Ciattarelli, who was a New Jersey state representative from 2012 to 2018; 11 percent are undecided. According to Emerson’s polling director, Spencer Kimball, the race would be Sherrill’s to lose if the election were limited to voters younger than 50. But “Ciattarelli flips the script among voters over 50,” he said, “leading Sherrill 52% to 36% among this group.”
All things considered, most campaigns would rather be leading with older voters than younger voters, in part because older voters are far more reliable voters — especially in an off-year race with no federal offices on the ballot. And Ciattarelli’s 16-point lead over his Democratic opponent with this demographic is nothing to sneeze at.
What is Sherrill to do? Her best course of action might be to attempt to depress the vote among older New Jerseyans and juice turnout among younger progressives. A late-Friday-night statement — one she probably hoped would go largely unnoticed by all but her intended audience — explaining her vote against a House resolution honoring Charlie Kirk was surely a gesture in that direction. “Charlie Kirk was advocating for a Christian nationalist government and to roll back the rights of women and Black people,” the congresswoman intoned.
But as fate would have it, a story that is far more likely to catch the attention of older voters seems set to overwhelm these efforts.
On Thursday, New Jersey Globe reporter David Wildstein revealed that Sherrill “was barred from walking with her class at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1994 as a punishment connected to the massive cheating scandal that implicated over 130 midshipmen in her class.” In a statement, Sherrill defended her actions. “I didn’t turn in some of my classmates, so I didn’t walk,” she said. Yet the congresswoman’s campaign refused to permit inspection of her disciplinary records, which only Sherrill herself could unseal.
Sherrill is crying foul, and not without reason. As CBS News reported on Thursday, “The National Archives released a mostly unredacted version of Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s military records” to a Ciattarelli campaign ally, in a potential violation of the 1974 Privacy Act. “The documents included Sherrill’s Social Security number, which appears on almost every page,” the report continued, “home addresses for her and her parents, life insurance information, Sherrill’s performance evaluations and the nondisclosure agreement between her and the U.S. government to safeguard classified information.”
The disclosure represents, at the very least, a violation of Sherrill’s privacy. It would be a journalistic scandal if those personal details were reproduced in the media, which they have not been. Nevertheless, Sherrill is protesting. “This is an illegal and dangerous weaponization of the federal government,” she exclaimed. “That [Ciattarelli] and the Trump admin are breaking the law and exposing private records for political gain is a violation of anyone who has ever served. No veteran’s record is safe.”
Perhaps Sherrill’s claim that she has been victimized by the federal bureaucracy will highlight the themes her campaign has already been promoting. She has tried to nationalize the race for governor, avoiding local issues and tethering her opponent to Donald Trump in the effort to turn the race into a referendum on the president, who is, unsurprisingly, not especially popular in blue New Jersey. But the questions about her service record that this release raises pulls the rug out from a pillar of her campaign, which has leaned heavily into Sherrill’s status as a veteran.
“The Navy taught me, in a crisis, you either find a way, or make one,” Sherrill says into the camera in her first major televised ad of the general election campaign — a flourish of bravado she delivered from behind the controls of a Navy helicopter. Over footage of Sherrill clad in a jumpsuit and flight helmet, the spot’s narrator promises that she will deliver “bold leadership” to address New Jersey’s skyrocketing power bills (a plan that consists of declaring a statewide emergency to freeze prices). The aesthetics are hardly subtle.
Will the candidate benefit more from voters’ sympathy than Ciattarelli benefits from this assault on the integrity of Sherrill’s primary biographical asset? Time will tell. But given the trajectory of the race in the polls, the Sherrill campaign’s bad breaks, and the fact that Democrats have not secured three consecutive terms in the New Jersey statehouse since the 1960s, maybe you’d rather be Ciattarelli.