Two candidates with significant legislative and electioneering experience are winding up their campaigns to become governor of New Jersey on Nov. 4.
The winner of the race between Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli, who seek to succeed two-term Gov. Phil Murphy, will confront significant problems that include energy policy, health care, housing, taxes and budget deficits.
Sherrill is a 53-year-old ex-Navy officer who won her first elective office as representative for the 11th Congressional District in North Jersey in 2018, and she has been reelected three time since. It is her first try for statewide office.
Ciattarelli is a 61-year-old successful businessman who last held elective office in 2018 as a member of the state Assembly. He twice before ran for governor, losing a close race to Murphy in 2021.
There is general agreement between the candidates and in the polls that the issue of affordability tops the list of issues the new governor must tackle. In the latest Rutgers-Eagleton poll from Oct. 17, voters identified taxes and affordability as the most important problems facing New Jersey.
Ciattarelli has worked hard to be seen as a supporter of President Donald Trump while trying to avoid the image of being a Trump clone. Trump endorsed Ciattarelli in the Republican primary but has not yet appeared in the Garden State to campaign for him. The president did speak at a Ciattarelli tele-rally in which he focused on energy issues and attacked Sherrill. Trump said he will campaign with Ciattarelli in New Jersey when he returns from his trip to Asia. Recently Ciattarelli said he gives Trump a grade of A for his actions 10 months into his second term.
Sherrill has the support of Gov. Phil Murphy, but in some circles that is not a big help. Murphy’s policies are taking a beating in the campaign, especially in areas of energy, public employee health care and state spending. Sherrill has the advantage of representing the party with 850,000 more registered voters than her opposition. Yet she is also seen as the heir, for good or bad, of that party’s run in the Garden State, where Democrats have controlled the governor’s chair for eight years and the Legislature for 25 years. She makes a point of saying she is “a Democrat but a New Jerseyan first.”
In Cape May County there seems little doubt that Ciattarelli will carry the county, where 45% of registered voters are Republican, compared with 24% Democrats. Three out of 10 voters remain unaffiliated. In 2021, when Ciattarelli ran against Murphy, he garnered close to two-thirds of the county vote, with Murphy winning only the three municipalities of Cape Island.
Ciattarelli on the Issues
Ciattarelli is a certified CPA who started and ran a successful medical publishing company before selling it in 2017. A native of Somerville, in Somerset County, he served in various elected positions prior to his first run for governor. He was a member of the Raritan Borough Council, served as a Somerset County freeholder from 2007 to 2011, and was elected to the state Assembly, where he served from 2011 to 2018.
He made his first run for the governor’s office in the 2017 primaries, where he finished second to Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, who ended up losing to Murphy in the general election. He won the Republican nomination in 2021 but lost the general election to Murphy, garnering 48% of the vote to Murphy’s 51%. He easily won the nomination in 2025 to make a third attempt at the governor’s chair.
Ciattarelli sees affordability as a major issue for New Jersey’s next chief executive.
He says he will “cut and cap” property taxes, expand the Senior Freeze program and consolidate tax brackets in the state income tax. He also says he will make student loan interest tax deductible and make the first two years in the workforce after high school or college tax-free.
On his website, he says he will cut state spending by 30%. Given that the current state budget has set spending at $58.8 billion, a 30% cut in spending would be $17.6 billion. Ciattarelli’s published plans do not detail where more than $17 billion in state spending would be cut.
The candidate does say he will establish an NJDOGE, modeled after the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency that was initially headed by Elon Musk. He says he will reduce the size and scope of state government, in part through aggressive use of the line-item veto.
On energy reform, Ciattarelli says he will be an “all-of-the-above” governor, meaning he supports a wide diversity of energy generation sources. He plans to “reopen power plants closed by Murphy” but he never mentions if that would entail a return to coal, which fueled some of those plants, as a source of power generation. He wants to end the state’s support for offshore wind initiatives and repeal the electric vehicle mandates of the Murphy administration. He claims he is a strong supporter of more natural gas and nuclear power generation.
On health care he says he is committed to fixing the problems with the State Health Benefits Plan. Many see the plan, especially the portion for local government employees, as on life support. Ciattarelli has mentioned beginning a shift of new teachers from a defined benefits plan that the state has now to a defined contribution plan, and he may see that has part of a more general fix to the problem.
He says he supports affordable housing goals but not mandated quotas in each municipality. That each municipality has a constitutional obligation to provide a realistic opportunity for the construction of its fair share of affordable housing is at the heart of a 1975 state Supreme Court decision known as Mount Laurel I, which he calls a failed court decision. Changing it means dealing with a court-defined constitutional issue.
He wants to reform the school funding formula that grew out of another court decision.
Ciattarelli says he will end the Immigrant Trust Directive, which deals with how local police interact with federal immigration enforcement personnel, stop the public reporting of major disciplining of police officers, reform the Board of Public Utilities, fix loopholes in bail reform, protect gun rights and require photo IDs for voting.
Much of his agenda is not something the governor can do without legislative support. The Senate will remain in Democratic hands since no Senate seats are up for election in 2025. The 52-28 Democratic advantage in the Assembly represents a very big lift for any Republican strategist who seeks to flip that body.
Ciattarelli married Melinda Ciattarelli and raised four now-adult children. He and his wife divorced in 2025.
Sherrill on the Issues
Sherrill is a graduate of the Naval Academy. Following graduation she had 10 years of active duty. While in the service she served as a Russian policy officer among her other postings.
An attorney, she worked in private practice and then gravitated to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, where she served briefly as a federal prosecutor. She ran for and won the race for representative for New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District in 2018. She was reelected in 2020, 2022 and 2024.
Sherrill put affordability at the top of her agenda, and her website has a six-page outline of her proposed actions to address it.
In that plan driving down the cost of housing for those who no longer can afford to live in New Jersey means streamlining permitting and engaging in innovative redevelopment opportunities, including involving the repurposing of abandoned commercial and retail properties. She says she will increase assistance programs to first-time home buyers.
Sherrill says she will use emergency powers to declare a freeze on electricity rates immediately upon taking office; the rates would be frozen for a year. She sees the present energy crisis as a “classic supply and demand” problem and promises to move quickly to address it with new power generation involving a “massive increase” of in-state generation involving solar and battery technology, as well as upgrades to existing natural gas plants and through modernization of nuclear facilities.
Throughout the last several months of crisis in electricity pricing, expert panels run by universities and even the BPU have pointed to the high cost of increasing energy supply in New Jersey. Both Ciattarelli and Sherrill say they will lead significant growth in the energy supply, but neither candidate has explained how the increase in power generation will be paid for; this is especially at issue if they link their promises of added supply to a lowering of the prices paid by ratepayers. With more capital needed and ratepayers not the chief source of revenue, the candidates fail to explain where the revenue will come from.
Sherrill has not disowned the current state mandate on electric vehicles, but she introduces doubt about how aggressive she will be in pushing the move to EVs. She says she supports an increase in EVs but is not sure the “infrastructure is there yet” to support an aggressive mandate.
Health-care costs are central to her affordability agenda. She wants greater transparency on health services pricing, along with published justifications for prices. One area of attack on the pricing spiral in health care for Sherrill is better oversight of pharmacy benefit managers, who she feels inflate drug prices to benefit big pharma and themselves.
Like Ciattarelli, Sherrill is concerned about New Jersey property taxes. She sees the taxpayer burden for education as central to rising property taxes. She presents a classic carrot-and-stick strategy in which she would encourage consolidation of the state’s more than 600 school districts and as a last resort have the state force certain consolidations. She is particularly concerned about districts that are not K-12.
Leaving off the Cape May County technical school and special services school districts, the county has four K-12 districts, with one of those already part of a regional district. There are a total of 16 municipal school districts in the county, making the county an example of the need for consolidation efforts Sherrill says she favors.
With respect to state spending, she makes no promise to cut 30% or some other figure, as Ciattarelli does. Her strategy instead depends on letting the public have more information on spending and results. She proposes a state “Report Card” with an online site easily accessible to the public where all state spending would be posted, where online budget tools would make searching and understanding the budget possible, and where all state contracts would be listed.
The details of the site are not fleshed out, but it presupposes a different environment than the one that plays itself out each June when the Legislature passes a last-minute budget that many of those who vote on it have not yet fully seen themselves.
Ciattarelli addresses that latter problem as well with his proposal of a two-week “cooling off period” for major spending bills when the public could see what is moving toward imminent passage.
Sherrill would take on inefficiencies and costs in other ways as well with incentives for local groceries to open more stores in order to put pressure on food costs, cutting red tape for small businesses so they can be up and running sooner and more effective auditing of potential state overpayments in health care as part of dealing with the rising costs of the employee health plans.
Sherrill was born in Alexandria, Virginia, and is married to another Annapolis graduate, Jason Hedberg. They have four children and live in Montclair.
Two Other Candidates
There are two other candidates on the ballot. Neither is expected to garner enough votes affect the race between the two major party candidates.
Vic Kaplan is the candidate of the Libertarian Party. He self-describes as an anti-tax candidate who believes in the need for immigration reform, making New Jersey a welcome destination for undocumented immigrants. A high priority for Kaplan is changing zoning laws to allow for more flexibility for “tiny houses” and other adjustments for inexpensive living space.
Joanne Kuniansky is not new to running for public office as a representative of the Socialist Workers Party. She argues that most of the problems of American life can be traced to capitalism, that capitalism cannot be reformed, and that a united front of workers is the requirement for positive change. She sees her campaign as building momentum for worker-led change, with a top priority being making New Jersey more affordable.
Contact the reporter, Vince Conti, at vconti@cmcherald.com.
