When you spend as much time around Democratic Party people as I do, you find that everybody is worried about something. The specter of 2024, and the reign of Trump terror that has followed, has the party on edge. The polls are mostly in Democrats’ favor, but, they worry, what are we not seeing? What are we not hearing? They’re worried they’ve lost their mojo in the face of MAGA.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the governor’s race in New Jersey. Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democrats’ great-on-paper centrist nominee, is ahead in the polls but still being second-guessed.
I felt this skittishness for myself when I attended a “No Kings” rally last weekend in the blue town of Montclair. It’s a community full of commuters but also the home of Ms. Sherrill, a former Navy helicopter pilot and federal prosecutor who flipped her reddish district in 2018. Her opponent is the suspiciously well-tanned Republican Jack Ciattarelli, who is running for governor for the third time in a row.
Ms. Sherrill is ahead in the polls, but that doesn’t quiet the doubters. The pollster G. Elliott Morris of Fifty Plus One put it best when he texted me, “It would be surprising if Ciattarelli won, but bigger upsets have happened before.”
New Jersey is a Rorschach test for a party in full freakout. This was clear to me as I milled around the area of the Montclair park cordoned off for speakers. Brendan Gill, an Essex County commissioner, wore a shirt defiantly emblazoned “New Jersey vs. Everybody.” Maybe it should have said “Democrats vs. Themselves” instead.
Ms. Sherrill has a reputation for being stilted, inauthentic or too rehearsed. Women of course often get critiqued in this way when they run for office. The not-at-all-sexist Republican talking point about Ms. Sherrill is that she is the Kamala Harris of New Jersey.
Before her hometown crowd, at least, Ms. Sherrill came alive, giving a compelling speech about the economic hardship her grandfather’s family endured during the Great Depression.
“His dad lost his job, he lost his house, they moved back to the farm, and yet after the war, my grandpa got a good union job. And with that job, he was able to raise his eight kids and when he got sick, he had benefits, he didn’t put our family back into poverty,” she said. The crowd — many of whom were her neighbors — delighted in the story. After the speech, people chased her to her S.U.V., where I joined her to go to her son’s football game. (Ms. Sherrill has four children.)
One of the biggest problems facing Mikie Sherrill’s bid for governor may have nothing to do with Mikie Sherrill and everything to do with a certain pundit-class miasma about the supposed unelectability of women. After all, this is a party that has run two supercompetent women for president on its ticket, and they both lost against Mr. Trump.
But Mr. Ciattarelli is no Donald Trump. He has been running for governor on a continuous loop since 2017, and gave the Trump administration an A grade in the final governor’s debate despite Mr. Trump having a 56 percent disapproval rating in the state. Mr. Trump’s decision to cancel funding to the long-delayed but well-underway Gateway rail tunnel under the Hudson doesn’t help him with the commuter vote either.
After the event, during the S.U.V. drive to her son’s football game, I asked Ms. Sherrill about having to navigate all this skepticism. In the front seat there were a bunch of sensible female politician tops hung on the passenger dashboard. Empty snack bags of dried fruits and nuts festooned the floor. It was the car you’d expect from a candidate for governor just weeks before the election.
She talks about the softness in an economy knocked around by tariffs, of recent graduates with job offers rescinded, of an executive branch that seems unpredictable, corrupt and out of control. “We are seeing attacks on everything,” she said.
One of the Democrats’ 2025 big bets is on the national security mom. There’s also an off-year election in Virginia, where Abigail Spanberger, a former House member and C.I.A. officer, checks similar competent, centrist boxes. Both are being asked to save the party while simultaneously being questioned about their electability. That’s code for: How sexist is the electorate?
Are Democrats too centrist? Progressives think so. Are Democrats too progressive? Centrists think so. Not populist enough, populists complain. Not online enough or perhaps, for some, too online? Or some combination of any of those things, thus bringing on a further inevitable electoral humiliation to the wily (if objectively on most issues entirely unpopular) forces of the Trumpist right.
Democrats of all varieties need to remember that they share more beliefs than they do differences.
“I know the national Democratic Party is stressed because of last year,” Ms. Sherrill told me. But, she added, “We’ve moved on. We’re in 2025, right?”
Molly Jong-Fast, a contributing Opinion writer, is the host of the “Fast Politics” podcast and the author of “How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir.”
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