Mikie Sherrill wins Democratic primary race for N.J. governor

Sean Higgins, Sherrill’s director of communications, said the campaign will focus on introducing Sherrill to the entire state over the next several months.

“She has dedicated her life to serving the people of this country, and the people of New Jersey,” he said., “Mikie is going to be a governor for everybody, she’s going to build more affordable housing and bring costs down, she’s going to deliver.”

Higgins said Sherrill is very different from Ciattarelli.

“Mikie is for New Jersey, and Ciattarelli is for Trump,” he said. “She’s ruthlessly focused on getting results, and I think that stands in stark contrast to Jack Ciattarelli, who is really the ghost of elections past and hasn’t really delivered a thing for New Jersey.”

At Sherrill’s headquarters, inside the ballroom of the Westin Governor Morris Hotel in Morristown, supporter Roman Hirniak, of Wharton, said he was happy that his candidate won.

“I am a proud member of the Ukrainian-American community in New Jersey,” he said. “Congresswoman Sherrill has been one of our loudest voices on Capitol Hill, she has earned my support because she is a decent human being that understands what leadership should be like on the gubernatorial level.”

Another supporter, David Genova, of Montclair, said he’s backed  Sherrill since she first ran for Congress.

“She’s been very supportive of Montclair, especially during the pandemic,” he said. “I think she’s on the right and practical side of most issues and I think she’s going to be a great governor., Mikie knows how to get things done.”

During the primary campaign the gubernatorial candidates spent more than $122 million, making it the most expensive primary race in state history.

Micah Rasmussen, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, said recent polling projected Rep. Sherrill as the frontrunner, but a winner was hard to predict.

“We just did away with the county ballot line [in New Jersey] which gave preferential treatment to candidates who had the [major political] endorsements,” he said. “This time candidates were on their own, they had to make their own case, and that meant we couldn’t really model how this election was going to turn out.”

He said voter turnout for primary elections in New Jersey is usually low, and in this race voters were choosing between six different candidates, making it harder to predict voting trends.

“That means that the number of votes it takes to win the race is pretty low, and that at least raised the possibility that any of them could have gotten across that finish line,” he said.

Four years ago in the primary election for governor, about 12% of registered Democrats voted. Less than 400,000 ballots were cast in that race.

The general election will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 4.