New Poll: NJ GOP Candidate Within Striking Distance of Dem Favorite

It was supposed to be a quiet — and easy — 2025 for the Democrats.

For starters, I know nobody could have possibly ever guessed this when it happened — but apparently, electing witless anger-spigot David Hogg to the vice-chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee actually wasn’t a good idea. Now the old “Dems in disarray” headline appears to seriously be true, as Hogg is out, DNC chair Ken Martin looks to have a foot out the door, and the committee might need to borrow some money to pay its own bills even as it should be making bank over Resistance 2.0. You hate to see it.

But at least it’s an off-year with three elections that were pretty predictable, right? New York City’s mayorship was supposed to go to Andrew Cuomo until it wasn’t; now, the polls show him neck-and-neck in this month’s Democratic primary with crypto-commie Zohran Mamdani, who’s been busy explaining that the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t really what you think it is.

OK, but how about across the Hudson River in New Jersey? Surely things are better in the gubernatorial race there; the Democrats don’t have to worry about propping up wildly unpopular Gov. Phil Murphy for another term, and the state is usually blue despite the fact that Donald Trump came within six points of beating Kamala Harris in the Garden State.

That was a presidential election year, though — and this time, they have a moderate swing-district representative vs. a MAGA favorite in what should be the biggest show of Democratic strength in an off-year election cycle. It should be a slam dunk, by all measures.

And, at least according to a new poll, it isn’t.

A survey conducted by National Research Inc. on behalf of Republican Jack Ciattarelli’s campaign, conducted among 600 likely voters on June 11 and 12, found that Ciattarelli was only behind favored Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill by three points, 45 percent to 42 percent.

While the survey was conducted by a Republican polling firm and had a margin of error of +/- 4 percent, it was the first sign that — like the last gubernatorial election and presidential elections in New Jersey — this one will be uncomfortably close for a party that generally dominates state politics.

In the survey, unaffiliated voters broke heavily for the Trump-endorsed Ciattarelli, a former member of the New Jersey General Assembly who narrowly lost to Murphy in the governor’s 2021 re-election bid.

New message from the Boss!!🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/JIjvnks0Dz

— Susan Esposito (@Saveamericasue) June 7, 2025

By a margin of 44 percent to 36 percent, those who weren’t a member of either party favored him over Sherrill, a moderate-ish veteran who became the first Democrat since 1980 redistricting to carry New Jersey’s heavily Republican 11th Congressional District in 2018.

“Make no mistake that this is a ‘CHANGE’ election and Ciattarelli is the CHANGE candidate,” Ciattarelli’s campaign said in a news release earlier this week.

“A majority of New Jersey voters (54 percent) believe that the state is heading in the wrong direction, while only 33 percent believe things in New Jersey are going in the right direction. Notably, Ciattarelli leads Sherrill by a whopping 72 percent -14 percent margin among those wrong track voters, and an even stronger 87 percent -6 percent among voters who want a governor who will ‘shake up Trenton.’

“It is beyond dispute that Congresswoman Sherrill is the status quo candidate — aka Phil Murphy 2.0 on steroids,” the release added.

Moreover, like her Democratic rivals in the primary election, Ciattarelli’s campaign has been making hay off of Sherrill’s husband’s dubiously timed stock trades while in Congress — which, mirabile dictu, have increased her net worth significantly since 2018.

As Semafor noted in the closing days of the Democratic campaign earlier this month, she flailed during an interview on the syndicated radio program “The Breakfast Club” when asked about allegations she had made $7 million on a congressional salary of $174,000.

“I, I haven’t — I don’t believe I did, but I’d have to go see what that was alluding to,” she responded when host Charlamagne tha God asked her about it.

“Mikie Sherrill tripling her net worth in Congress via millions of dollars in stock trades – for which she broke federal law and was fined – is a major issue with key groups that will have a big say in deciding the election,” Ciattarelli consultant Chris Russell said.

“Her disastrous ‘Breakfast Club’ interview is already being featured on a Ciattarelli campaign website and web ads detailing news reports on the issue.”

And that’s not the only interview she’s flubbed, as Ciattarelli’s campaign has been fond of noting:

Forget not having solutions to our state’s problems—Mikie doesn’t even know what they are. pic.twitter.com/udFzv5943G

— Jack Ciattarelli (@Jack4NJ) June 18, 2025

You halfway expect her to say that she can’t think of a single thing she’d do differently than Joe Biden.

It’s early days, and this is an internal Ciattarelli poll, but this race is far from in the bag — and that’s a problem for Democrats, who’d counted on an easy 2025. Sure, they may get the NYC mayoralty, but that’s just because any candidate they nominate in the biggest city in America is almost guaranteed to win. Not so much in New Jersey, it seems. That could mean a bigger problem for disarrayed Dems: One of the most reliably blue states in America may be slowly but surely turning purple.

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