The message from New Jersey: Democracy is alive and well

The election featured good candidates, and a lesson for 2026.

U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.) in a 2022 meeting with a Ukrainian delegation. Sherrill won the gubernatorial election in New Jersey on Tuesday by emphasizing her experience and the issues facing residents of her state.

For years now, I’ve felt like part of my job is to provide psychological counseling—unpaid, unfortunately—to Democrats. My services were in demand in New Jersey the past few months.

There were rational reasons for Democrats (and for my anti-Trump Republican friends) to worry about the New Jersey governor’s race. A Democrat, Phil Murphy, was finishing his second term in the governor’s mansion, and the last time the state had elected a governor of the same party three times in a row was in 1961. A handful of polls showed the race between Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill and Republican Jack Ciattarelli in a dead heat, and four years ago, most polls exaggerated Democratic support. Murphy won by only 3 percentage points.

Leading up to last night, I got countless calls and texts from people saying things such as, “Mikie needs to talk less (or more) about Trump and more (or less) about local issues.” Or “Jack’s ads are better than hers.” Or “we haven’t seen Mikie in our town, and Jack just shook every hand at the bridge club meeting.” Some of this was a function of the stakes—the mere possibility of New Jerseyans handing their state to a Trump lackey induced panic. It was as if a giant asteroid were hurtling toward earth, with a 10% chance of crashing and destroying all life on the planet—we wouldn’t say “whatever, it’s just 10%.”

Then there was the factor everyone was aware of: New Jersey—not Virginia or New York—was the battleground where national Republicans had chosen to place their army and fight to win. This is where they invested their millions behind a candidate they believed in, and where they thought anti-Trump momentum would be stopped dead in its tracks.

In the end, the polls were wrong, but not in the direction Republicans had hoped. Sherrill won a stunning 13-point victory. Democrats flipped seats in the State Assembly they had not won in a long time—or ever. Turnout was high in urban areas—exactly the opposite of what pundits were predicting—and heavily Hispanic and African American precincts swung back to overwhelming support for Democratic candidates. In rural, red Hunterdon County (where I’ve been the Democratic chair), Sherrill did 14 points better than Murphy in 2021; Democrats flipped several local seats; and book banning extremists were booted from school boards.

Watch this space, too: South Asian voters, many of whom had voted for Donald Trump in 2024, seemed to swing heavily back to Democrats. Perhaps imposing massive tariffs on India while MAGA influencers spew racist vitriol against Indian-Americans online is politically stupid in addition to morally indefensible.

So, what happened?

First, Sherrill was a good candidate who got only better as the campaign went on. Her basic story of service to the country as a helicopter pilot in the Navy and as a prosecutor has always worked and did again (even if members of the professional political class had heard it a thousand times and wanted something new). She had a simple and forceful message on freezing utility rate hikes. Democrats ran a great get-out-the-vote operation.

But let’s be clear—the most important factor was Trump. That’s not to say that every New Jerseyan is a No-Kings-Rally-attending Contrarian reader who loses sleep every night over the independence of the Justice Department. But I’m confident there were a lot of voters who weren’t fully sold on Sherrill or on how Democrats have run New Jersey for the past eight years but who also felt in their gut that there is something not right in America right now—with the crazy tariffs, vindictive prosecutions, out-of-control Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and women dancing in champagne glasses at Mar-a-Lago while food stamps were being cut—that things have gone too far, and that a corrective message needed to be sent.

One of the pivotal moments in the campaign came when Trump said he was terminating work on a new railway tunnel linking New Jersey and New York—not because he thought it wasn’t needed but to punish Democrats politically. Sherrill said she’d fight tooth and nail for the funding, which had been approved by Congress and which Trump had no legal right to cancel. Ciattarelli, who’d said previously that he could think of no Trump policy he disagreed with, acted like it was no big deal. His basic argument in the campaign was that if New Jerseyans wanted the federal programs and services to which they were entitled by law, they should elect a governor who would be nice to the president. Did that mean we would have to kiss Trump’s ass for seniors to get their Social Security or for veterans to get their health care?

The message New Jersey has sent is clear. Democracy is alive and well in America. Voters still embrace good candidates who speak to their concerns. There is a limit to what they will tolerate from Trump. Nothing is written or certain about our future, and there is no need to give in to fear.

Big wins in state and local races also create a huge opportunity for Democrats to govern over the next three years as Washington is paralyzed.

An alliance of Democratic states is already countering public health disinformation from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Imagine if states run by Democratic governors, which generate 56% of America’s GDP, coordinated on passing legislation to increase housing stock, to control skyrocketing healthcare costs, to expand clean power, and to take on the causes of high energy prices? What if they got together to require large retailers to display the tariff tax on every product they sell, just as they display the sales tax?

In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill ran on an ambitious plan to confront Big Tech companies and the addictive algorithms that hurt our children and divide Americans while regulating artificial intelligence to protect workers, human creativity, and our sense of reality. This could be the most important issue that our corrupt, billionaire-bought federal executive branch and cowardly Congress is not addressing. What if states filled the void—not with studies or commissions but with bold “I dare you to stop me” action?

I’d love to hear more suggestions along these lines from Contrarian readers!

Meanwhile, I hope you’re feeling better about our country this morning. Yesterday’s elections could mean for next year’s midterms what the New Jersey and Virginia races in Trump’s first term meant for the 2018 Blue Wave. We have work to do, but the work is worth it.

Tom Malinowski is a former member of Congress from New Jersey who was an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration.

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