It had been 11 days since President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s disastrous debate performance, and the Democratic Party was working hard to shore up its jittery base. Only a half-dozen Washington lawmakers had dared to suggest that it was time for Mr. Biden to step aside.
On July 9, 2024, Representative Mikie Sherrill, now a candidate for New Jersey governor, became the seventh.
“I think I might have just ruined my political career,” Ms. Sherrill told a progressive activist soon after she urged Mr. Biden, then 81, to end his campaign for re-election.
“I can’t not speak up,” she said to Jessica James, then the head of a left-leaning grass-roots group who described the telephone conversation. Doing so, Ms. Sherrill reasoned, would give Democrats better odds of beating Donald J. Trump.
It was a moment of risk for a Democrat in a state where Mr. Biden trounced Mr. Trump in 2020 by 16 points. It would be nearly two weeks before Mr. Biden dropped out, and only 30 other Democratic members of Congress — none from New Jersey — ever joined the chorus of people suggesting he should.
“There were people who were very upset by it,” said Mara Novak, who leads NJ 11th for Change, a group whose support in 2018 propelled Ms. Sherrill to Congress as a first-time candidate.
Ms. Sherrill’s decision embodied the seemingly contradictory impulses of a politician whose résumé is studded with acts of courage, yet has maintained a middle-of-the-road vision for New Jersey. Her campaign for governor has been criticized as too choreographed, too careful, even as its most memorable moments have been unscripted, sometimes startlingly so.
As Democrats flock to populist fighters like Zohran Mamdani, who has promised to upend the status quo as he runs for mayor of New York City, Ms. Sherrill is charting a centrist course that has worked for Democrats before, but is now a source of tension within the party.
Her platform — firmly anti-Trump but with largely moderate policy prescriptions — illustrates one of the central riddles facing the Democratic Party: Mikie or Mamdani?
Ms. Sherrill, 53, first drew national attention after flipping a northern New Jersey congressional seat that for three decades had been held by Republicans. She immediately began talking pragmatically about how to appeal to voters not necessarily inclined to support a Democrat, adopting a saying still quoted by former staff members. “She’d say, ‘We’re just going to win them over with ruthless competence,’” said Kellie Doucette, one of Ms. Sherrill’s former legislative directors.
“The point was that we couldn’t expect to just show up and have everybody love us. We had to show that we were going to work for them.”
‘What can I do?’
In July 2023, an enormous fire erupted on an Italian cargo ship carrying used cars headed for West Africa. The blaze had spread to three decks of the towering ship docked in Newark’s port, and firefighters were in trouble.
Mayday alerts had just gone out when Eddie Donnelly, the president of the New Jersey Firefighters Mutual Benevolent Association, got a call from Ms. Sherrill. “What can I do? What do you need?” she asked, Mr. Donnelly recalled. In the weeks after the fire that killed two Newark firefighters, he said they met multiple times to discuss funding for extra training and port security.
The outreach dovetailed with Ms. Sherrill’s efforts to beef up her office’s constituent services apparatus by assigning legislative directors to each half of the district, increasing staff responsiveness.
In the House, she has become known for picking her legislative battles carefully, aligning herself with moderates and bringing her expertise as a former Navy helicopter pilot to the work of the Armed Services Committee.
“Very thoughtful about where and when and how she exerts her influence,” said Jean Roehrenbeck, her former chief of staff. “She’s not one of those people who needs her name on every bill.”
Ms. Sherrill’s center-lane approach helped her win a commanding victory in the June Democratic primary in the governor’s race, which pitted her against the mayors of the state’s two largest cities, two prominent union leaders and another member of Congress.
But her campaign has frustrated left-leaning activists, who complain that Ms. Sherrill has avoided taking clear positions on hot-button issues like the deportation of migrants and transgender rights. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a national group, branded her as “milquetoast.”
“It is frustrating and disappointing to see her ignore us,” said Karol Ruiz, who helps to lead a statewide immigrant resource center, Wind of the Spirit.
In the general election, a central tenet of her neck-and-neck race against Jack Ciattarelli, a Republican endorsed by Mr. Trump, is that the president poses an existential threat to a nation she has taken oaths to defend — in the Navy, as a federal prosecutor and now as a member of Congress.
In advertising and on the campaign trail, she emphasizes her military career and her willingness to stand up to Mr. Trump.
“I talk a lot about how I was a Navy helicopter pilot — you might have heard it,” she said at a recent event, in a laugh line that worked. “When we have a president of the United States who is basically driving up costs for every single person in America as he pockets $5 billion, we in New Jersey are going to take a different path,” she added, referring to Mr. Trump’s cryptocurrency venture.
Even those on the left who might be inclined to support Ms. Sherrill say they worry the messaging is not enough to energize voters.
“They’re tired of hearing about Trump,” said Satenik Margaryan, a criminal justice professor who lives in Ms. Sherrill’s congressional district. “What are you going to do for me here in New Jersey?”
Still, there is no way to avoid the president’s looming presence in the race. He maintains a residence at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., and visits regularly. He has also weighed in on the race online.
Last week, as Ms. Sherrill was driving the youngest of her four children to soccer practice, Mr. Trump singled her out for derision. “Very Fake and Corrupt,” he said in a social media post that praised Mr. Ciattarelli and took a swipe at Ms. Sherrill’s nickname, Mikie — “perhaps,” the president wrote, “her only asset.”
‘Mikie’
Born Rebecca Michelle Sherrill in Alexandria, Va., she is now known only by the moniker her father gave her as a young girl. It is the name that appears in yearbook photos from her high school in Reston, Va., where she was raised, the eldest of three daughters.
She likes to tell audiences that she was in fifth grade when she began talking about being a pilot, as her grandfather was. During a rally in Newark, she deviated from her typical stump speech and shared the name she chose for confirmation in the Roman Catholic faith: Joan of Arc. It had more to do with the young saint’s willingness to lead troops into battle, she later explained, than her grim demise.
“I remain to this minute fascinated that a young woman could lead armies,” she said in an interview.
In 1994, Ms. Sherrill realized her dream of graduating from the United States Naval Academy with the first class of female pilots allowed to perform all combat roles. She rowed crew and played club lacrosse at the elite school.
But she did not participate in commencement exercises — a punishment that came amid one of the largest cheating scandals in military history.
Ms. Sherrill has said that her absence from graduation stemmed from her failure to report classmates caught up in honor code investigations into how some students had gotten advance information about an engineering test. “I didn’t turn in some of my classmates, so I didn’t walk at graduation because I come from an incredibly accountable place,” she said in a debate.
Mr. Ciattarelli has questioned her story and pressed her to release any disciplinary records. She has refused and attacked what she called his “witch hunt” against veterans. Mr. Ciattarelli, Ms. Sherrill has noted tartly, is not a veteran himself.
The revelations about Ms. Sherrill’s graduation ceremony — and a twin controversy over the Ciattarelli campaign’s release of separate military records that revealed her Social Security number and performance evaluations — rocked what had been a relatively staid campaign.
The race was shaken up even more by off-the-cuff comments she made in a debate about the role of Mr. Ciattarelli’s former company in the opioid crisis. She blamed him for killing “tens of thousands of people in New Jersey” — claims quickly challenged by editorial writers.
What is not in dispute is Ms. Sherrill’s distinguished Navy service record. She served for more than nine years, completing active-duty missions in Europe and as a Russian-policy officer.
Women comprised only about 12 percent of students at the academy while Ms. Sherrill was there.
But it was something else altogether that led her to stand out as an undergraduate. In June 1991, she and roughly 100 classmates were off the coast of North Carolina aboard Navy training vessels when a storm hit. Many of the midshipmen became seasick, including a young woman who fell and hit her head, according to several classmates. The woman stopped breathing and had “no discernible heartbeat,” according to a naval record.
Another vessel tried to get close enough to allow a trained medic to board, but the crafts collided. A medical helicopter was delayed for two hours by severe wind and sea conditions.
Ms. Sherrill, then 19, performed CPR five times, earning one of 10 service medals she received during her time in the Navy. The woman who had hit her head survived and went on to serve for 15 years in the Navy.
Ms. Sherrill downplayed her role, noting that the academy prepares students for all types of emergencies. “You just have to almost be like — OK, I’m just going to handle it.”
‘Badasses’
Ms. Sherrill said her concern about the treatment of combatants at Guantánamo Bay had led her to study law at Georgetown University after leaving the Navy.
She spent several years at a private law firm in New York City, where she and her husband, Jason Hedberg, an investment banker, lived on the Upper West Side. In 2010, the couple purchased a seven-bedroom home in Montclair, N.J.
In 2012, Ms. Sherrill began working as a community outreach specialist at the U.S. attorney’s office in Newark. She was hired as a prosecutor in 2015 and handled scores of mostly low-level drug and immigration cases. She remained a prosecutor for just about a year, leaving the office in 2016, when she began looking for a new job.
Mr. Trump, then running for president for the first time, was ascendant. And women from the suburbs of New Jersey were coalescing into a powerful new force. In November 2018, four of the state’s congressional districts flipped from red to blue as Democrats, with Ms. Sherrill among them, regained a majority in the House.
In Washington, Ms. Sherrill forged alliances with other veterans and former C.I.A. officers who were new to the House. The women in the group called themselves the “badasses,” said Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat who worked as an analyst with the intelligence agency, served three tours in Iraq and has since been elected to the Senate.
As centrists, they were also known as the “mod squad” and represented an explicit counterweight to the Squad, a contingent of left-leaning House members.
Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat and a former Army Ranger, said he had gotten to know Ms. Sherrill through their work on the Armed Services Committee. He described her as “damn smart” and attentive to detail, particularly during bill markups that sometimes ran all night.
“At 2 a.m. either you know what you’re talking about, or you don’t,” he said. “You can’t fake it.”
But Ms. Sherrill’s televised campaign flubs, in which she did not have ready answers to basic questions, have also been memorable.
She has said that neither she nor her husband own or trade individual stocks; they invest in exchange-traded funds. Her financial disclosure forms show that the couple’s assets are valued at roughly $9 million. But when she was asked by a radio host about increases in their wealth, she grew flustered and gave a vague answer — an exchange that Mr. Ciattarelli has used extensively in advertising.
Another Ciattarelli ad shows her puzzling over a question — “If you could pass one piece of legislation, what would it be?” — lobbed by a New York television news correspondent.
If she prevails next Tuesday, Ms. Sherrill would be New Jersey’s second female governor. The first, Christine Todd Whitman, who was elected as a Republican, gave Ms. Sherrill one of her earliest endorsements after her 13-point win in the Democratic primary.
A vocal critic of Mr. Trump who is no longer aligned with the Republican Party, Ms. Whitman said Ms. Sherrill had proved “to be someone who works across the aisle.”
“She’s more interested in getting things done,” Ms. Whitman said, “than getting credit.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Tracey Tully is a reporter for The Times who covers New Jersey, where she has lived for more than 20 years.
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