New Jersey's gubernatorial primary is exactly four weeks from today, but the race for the Republican nomination may have been settled Monday night, when President Donald Trump endorsed Jack Ciattarelli.
Ciattarelli, the party's 2021 nominee for governor, was already well ahead in the GOP race. A recent Rutgers/Eagleton poll put him 30 points up on his main rival, Bill Spadea. But Spadea, a talk radio host who last year received praise from Trump on his show, had been angling hard for a game-changing presidential endorsement. And if not that, he'd hoped at least for Trump to remain neutral.
The same Rutgers-Eagleton poll found that nearly half of GOP primary voters said they'd be more likely to vote for a candidate who has Trump's backing. Now that Ciattarelli does, it's hard to see how Spadea could gain meaningful late momentum.
There is far less clarity, however, when it comes to the Democratic race in New Jersey.
The favorite remains Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who has built the kind of campaign that has traditionally been successful in Democratic primaries, locking down support from all but one of the party's major county organizations in north and central Jersey, where most of the votes come from. She's notched endorsements from prominent party leaders and interest groups as well, and could also benefit from being the lone female candidate in a field of six.
But the value of that county machine support is in question. In the past, it meant that an endorsed candidate's name would appear atop the county party's ballot column, making it very official-looking and impossible for voters to miss: Having "the line" in a county translated into victory the vast majority of the time. But a successful lawsuit last year eliminated that special ballot status and this will be the first contested Democratic primary without one in decades.
And while Sherrill did lead the Democratic primary in the Rutgers-Eagleton poll, it was with just 17% support, with her five rivals all garnering between 7% and 12% each. Adding to the uncertainty is that public polling itself has been scarce. The daily newspapers that would have sponsored them in the past have either shut down or are dramatically contracting. And what had been the state's premier polling outfit, Monmouth University, has pulled the plug on its entire operation.
But the most intriguing wild card involves Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, whose arrest last Friday outside an immigration detention center generated a level of media attention that none of his opponents have come close to attaining during their campaigns. Just as support from Trump will bolster Ciattarelli in the GOP race, being seen as a target of Trump's administration can only help Baraka with Democratic primary voters.
A Baraka surge would be welcome news for Republicans, who see him as a more inviting general-election target than Sherrill. He has staked out positions far to the left and has only ever won elections in deeply blue Newark. In the Rutgers-Eagleton poll, he had a net-negative favorable rating with all voters. Sherrill, by contrast, was the only candidate from either party with a net-positive favorable rating. And she has already demonstrated an ability to appeal across party lines, flipping a longtime Republican seat when she was elected to Congress in 2018.
But no matter who they nominate, Democrats will have at least one advantage in the general election. New Jerseyans have a tendency to elect governors from the party that doesn't control the presidency:
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