A former Navy pilot, first elected to Congress in 2018, will be New Jersey's next governor.
Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill defeated former Republican Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli, according to a race call by The Associated Press, capping a closely-watched gubernatorial election that some polls predicted would be a coin flip.
Sherrill's victory marks the first time since the 1960s that New Jersey voters have elected a governor from the same party three terms in a row. Her victory is also the second major win for Democrats on Tuesday, following Abigail Spanberger's win for Virginia governor.
The race was also one of the first statewide votes since President Trump began his second term. Trump endorsed Ciattarelli in May ahead of the Republican primary.
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The tight race has surprised some in the traditionally blue state, which has had a Democratic governor for the past eight years and a legislature controlled by Democrats for even longer.
But the possibility that the governorship could flip to a Republican — along with the statewide contest being seen as an indicator of public opinion on Trump's second term — put the election in the national spotlight and drew nearly $200 million in spending.
Trump endorsed Ciattarelli earlier this year, saying that after Ciattarelli got to "know and understand MAGA" he went "ALL IN, and is now 100% (PLUS!)." Ciattarelli had previously criticized the president. Meanwhile, former President Obama endorsed Sherrill in an online video message and later joined her on the campaign trail.
Sherrill, also a former federal prosecutor and attorney, entered politics less than a decade ago when she was elected to Congress in 2018. This was the third time Ciattarelli, a former CPA and small business owner, had run for governor.
But even though Democrats hold an advantage over Republicans on the voter rolls, New Jersey residents have chosen governors from both parties.
"As blue as New Jersey might be in presidential races and U.S. Senate races too, the state is decidedly purple when it comes to gubernatorial elections," Ben Dworkin, director of the Rowan Institute for Public Policy & Citizenship at Rowan University, told NPR in October.
Affordability has been perhaps the most prominent issue of the campaign. Both candidates have bemoaned the state's high cost of living and surging energy prices, with Ciattarelli vowing to lower New Jersey's high property taxes and Sherrill promising to freeze electricity bills.
But in the final weeks of the race, both campaigns traded personal attacks. Ciattarelli repeatedly questioned Sherrill's involvement in a cheating scandal at the Naval Academy in 1994. She said she was prohibited from walking at her graduation because she failed to turn in her classmates, and blasted the Trump administration for releasing her mostly unredacted military records to an ally of Ciattarelli's campaign.
For her part, Sherrill accused Ciattarelli's former publishing company of producing materials that downplayed the dangers of opioids, saying in one of the televised debates between the pair that her opponent was responsible for killing tens of thousands of people in New Jersey. Ciattarelli said Sherrill was lying and threatened to sue her for defamation.
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