The Bellwether State This Year Isn’t Ohio. It’s New Jersey.

​New Jersey’s 2025 governor’s race has emerged as the most nationally watched state-level contest in the United States this year, as both parties treat the election as the first real test of voter sentiment in the early phase of the post-2024 political landscape. With few major executive races on the calendar in 2025, political strategists and national donors are treating the New Jersey contest as the closest available barometer for suburban political direction ahead of the 2026 midterms.

As Kristoffer Shields, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University, put it, “This is the first big opportunity for voters to go to the polls and register their feelings about the new presidential administration.”

The race pits Democrat Mikie Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor and current congresswoman from New Jersey’s 11th District, against Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a former state assemblyman and the GOP nominee for governor in 2021. Sherrill enters the race with a modest structural advantage in a state that leans Democratic in most statewide contests. But the narrowing polling margins, and the nationalization of off year politics, have convinced Republican strategists that the race is winnable under the right turnout scenario.

“The Republican party is feeling energized in New Jersey, specifically after two close showings here in the state,” said Daniel Bowen, an associate professor of public policy at the College of New Jersey.

New Jersey remains a reliably blue state at the federal level. However, statewide Republican candidates have remained competitive in certain cycles, particularly when cost of living concerns dominate the agenda. That became especially clear in the 2021 governor’s race, where Ciattarelli lost to incumbent Democrat Phil Murphy by just over three points, far closer than most pre-election polling suggested.

That result continues to shape Republican enthusiasm in the current contest, and has reinforced Democratic messaging that 2021 was an aberration rather than an ongoing trend. For outside observers, the 2025 race has become a test of which of those two interpretations more accurately reflects the direction of suburban voters.

Recent polling shows the race within single digits, and in some surveys within the margin of error. “Sherrill definitely has a lead, but it is not an insurmountable one,” said Micah Rasmussen, director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University. “Either Sherrill or Ciattarelli could win.”

A Quinnipiac University survey in late October found Sherrill ahead by eight points among voters, while an Emerson College/Pix 11/The Hill poll conducted in the final stretch of the campaign showed the race essentially even at 49 percent to 48 percent in Sherrill’s favor. Earlier in the summer, Sherrill’s advantage was significantly larger, with some surveys placing her more than 20 points ahead, suggesting that Ciattarelli has significantly closed the gap as the race enters its final phase.

While the candidates differ substantially in style, both campaigns are emphasizing issues that polling suggests remain top of mind among suburban voters: taxes and affordability, crime and public safety, and immigration.

The state’s comparatively high tax burden has long been one of the central friction points in New Jersey politics, and this cycle is no exception. Ciattarelli has pledged to reduce New Jersey’s corporate business tax rates by five points over as many years. Sherrill has responded with her own affordability proposals, as well as a promise to create a new Department of Commerce to consolidate and coordinate economic development policy. Neither candidate appears interested in downplaying economic anxiety, particularly given the way post pandemic inflation has reordered voter priorities in wealthy commuter counties.

Crime and public safety are also playing an unusually prominent role in a state whose two largest population centers, Newark and Jersey City, have experienced fluctuations in violent crime trends. Ciattarelli blames the current bail reform for repeat offenders, stating he would appoint conservative judges and prosecutors and fix “loopholes” to guarantee more defendants are jailed pretrial. Mikie Sherrill stated her support of the current system’s concept but has concerns about defendants not appearing in court, with those accused of violent crimes not being detained before trial. Either way, both campaigns are clearly aware that public safety anxiety is no longer a city only issue, and that suburban voters increasingly see crime trends as connected to quality of life concerns.

The third major issue shaping campaign rhetoric is immigration. While New Jersey is not a border state, national immigration debates have had a visible downstream effect on state and municipal policymaking, including sanctuary protections, state spending on migrant services, and cooperation between state law enforcement and federal agencies. Being a sanctuary state, Ciattarelli has vowed to repeal all sanctuary state policies on the first day of office, allowing both federal and local law enforcement to collaborate in operations. Sherrill aligns with national Democratic preferences, while attempting to approach the matter in a pragmatic and moderate sense, rather than ideological.

For national strategists, however, the race may ultimately turn less on discrete policy debates and more on turnout patterns. Republican victories in blue leaning states typically require not only gains in the outer ring suburbs but also unusually high participation from right leaning irregular voters. “The greatest variable is whether or not Jack can get some of these Trump voters to come out in a non-presidential year,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who advised former Governor Chris Christie’s campaigns. “Will those voters vote for someone who’s not Donald Trump?”

That question, the behavior of the post Trump right in lower salience elections, has become one of the defining unknowns of the early post 2024 cycle and may be the single most nationally relevant data point this race can produce. “It’s a cliché, but it’s true, this race is all about turnout, so the big question is whether Trump supporters show up when he’s not on the ballot,” said Daron Shaw, a Republican pollster who conducts the Fox News Poll with Democrat Chris Anderson. “Sherrill’s supporters seem like they are going to turn out, but the evidence is mixed for those backing Ciattarelli. If the MAGA base comes around during this final weekend, the Democratic advantage narrows considerably.”

As the final phase of the campaign approaches, both parties see the New Jersey race not simply as a state level contest but as a diagnostic instrument, a real time dataset about the political mood of American suburban voters entering the next cycle. If Sherrill wins comfortably, Democrats will argue that 2021 was an outlier and that the Biden to post Biden transition has not meaningfully weakened their suburban advantage. If Ciattarelli wins, or loses narrowly, Republicans will argue that the suburbs have now reopened as a competitive frontier.