Sherrill leading Ciattarelli by 8 points in New Jersey governor race: Survey
Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) leads Republican Jack Ciattarelli by 8 points in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race in one of the first independent polls of the general election.
The Fairleigh Dickinson University poll released on Tuesday showed Sherrill leading with 45 percent support to Ciattarelli’s 37 percent, with 16 percent of survey respondents undecided. The race could be a key indicator of political parties’ strength ahead of next year’s midterms as Republicans seek to build on gains that the party made in the state in the November election and Democrats try to keep the Garden State blue.
Pollsters found Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly lining up behind their parties’ nominees, with 87 percent of Democrats saying they’ll support Sherrill and 86 percent of Republicans planning to back Ciattarelli.
But with voter registration in the state clearly favoring Democrats, Ciattarelli will likely need to pull some independent and Democratic support to notch an upset win.
“Unless something goes horribly awry, partisans are going to vote for their party’s candidate,” said Dan Cassino, the executive director of the FDU Poll, in a release. “While Republicans have been narrowing the gap, there are still more Democrats than Republicans in the state, and Ciattarelli needs to start pulling in more independents and Democrats if he wants to win.”
The poll showed Sherrill leading Ciattarelli among independents by 7 points, with 30 percent support to his 23 percent, but with a plurality of 41 percent of respondents undecided.
The survey also showed whether the race hinges on local or national issues could be critical to determining the winner.
Respondents in the poll were first asked about their preference in the governor’s race and then about a series of local or national issues. Democrats’ and Republicans’ support for each candidate stayed mostly the same after, but independents’ support for the GOP candidate rose by 7 points among those asked about local issues and dropped by 4 points among those asked about national issues.
“Ciattarelli is walking a fine line with Trump: He needs to consolidate Trump supporters, but do so without making the race too national, or turning off voters who don’t like what’s happening in Washington,” Cassino said. “For Sherrill, on the other hand, there’s no downside to bashing Trump as much as she likes.”
The results come after another independent general election poll from the Rutgers University Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling last month that found Sherrill ahead by a much larger margin of 20 points. But Ciattarelli’s top strategist slammed the result as an outlier and pointed to recent polling misses in New Jersey that underestimated Republicans.
This included the 2021 gubernatorial race, in which Ciattarelli was the Republican nominee for the first time and only lost to Gov. Phil Murphy (D) by 3 points, much closer than polls indicated. President Trump also outperformed expectations in the November election, only losing the state by about 6 points.
The Fairleigh Dickinson poll was conducted July 17-23 among 806 registered voters. The standard sampling error was 3.4 percentage points.