Jack Ciattarelli stood in the corner of Element Restaurant & Bar, just off the causeway to the Jersey Shore, and reflected on a line that has gotten a rise out of voters as he has crisscrossed the state.
“I can say, ‘I’m going to lower taxes,’ and I get a nice round of applause,” said Mr. Ciattarelli, the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey. “But I say, ‘I’m bringing back the plastic bags,’ and it brings down the house, every time.”
It was a brief aside in a rapid-fire, 20-minute stump speech that prioritized divisive, hot button issues — immigration and culture war battles — ahead of Mr. Ciattarelli’s long obsession with school funding and economic concerns.
But the quip, referring to the state’s five-year-old ban on single-use plastic bags, revealed a candidate who is steadily learning over the course of three campaigns for governor how to run as a Republican during the Trump era in a deeply blue state like New Jersey.
An unequivocal embrace of the MAGA movement by Mr. Ciattarelli most likely would alienate a majority of voters in New Jersey, which Mr. Trump lost by 250,000 votes in 2024. Instead, Mr. Ciattarelli has shoehorned some policies and rhetoric popular with President Trump’s base into his own long-held message about the financial ills of the state.
Mr. Ciattarelli’s current pitch to voters includes many themes from his first gubernatorial campaign eight years ago, including his emphasis on lowering property taxes and a school funding formula he sees as harming suburban and rural communities.
But they are now accompanied by Trumpian flourishes, decrying “open borders” and “sanctuary cities” and praising the president’s signature legislative achievement, the One Big Beautiful Bill. He has appeared with vaccine skeptics and ridiculed transgender athletes. He has campaigned with Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump-emulating Republican candidate for governor in Ohio, and far-right media luminaries like Jack Posobeic.
He studiously avoids making the president a key character in his pitch to voters, and largely avoids referring to Mr. Trump by name. But asked in a debate to grade Mr. Trump on his tenure so far, he gave him an “A.”
It is a dramatic departure from Mr. Ciattarelli’s first campaign for governor. That effort featured a wonky, statistics-driven stump speech on economic issues, accompanied by a plain-text PowerPoint presentation and occasional open criticism of Mr. Trump, whom he had earlier called a “charlatan” and “not fit to be president.”
Four years later, when he ran for a second time, Mr. Ciattarelli railed against the shutdown policies of the Covid pandemic, tiptoeing closer to the MAGA wing of the Republican Party, though he remained critical of Mr. Trump’s actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
“He’s 180 degrees from where he was in ’17,” said Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who ran some of former Gov. Chris Christie’s campaigns. “Jack has done a good job of understanding that there are certain things that are out of your control. And one of the things that’s out of your control is how other people feel about Donald Trump. And so what he’s trying to do is make sure people know that he agrees with Trump on certain things, but has a different style.”
Such an approach amounts to a bet not yet tested in a competitive election since Mr. Trump’s return to power last year: that the margins in a close race can be made up by tacking closer to the Republican base in a general election, and that Trump supporters will turn out even without Mr. Trump atop the ticket.
Unsurprisingly, the shift is endorsed by the president.
In pledging his support for Mr. Ciattarelli this year, Mr. Trump recognized his change. “Jack, who after getting to know and understand MAGA, has gone ALL IN, and is now 100% (PLUS!),” the president wrote on social media.
Of course, in his race against Representative Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic nominee, Mr. Ciattarelli is not simply playing to the president’s base. Earlier this month, he received the endorsement of Nicholas Sacco, the Democratic mayor of North Bergen, the latest in a string of Democratic mayors breaking with their party to side with the Republican candidate.
Navigating the Trump administration has not always been simple. Over the past few weeks, the president promoted a conspiracy theory about Tylenol, causing Mr. Ciattarelli to distance himself from that report. Then, Mr. Trump announced he had “terminated” the Gateway Project, the most critical and expensive infrastructure project in modern New Jersey history.
Mr. Ciattarelli’s close-but-not-too-close-to-Trump strategy was on display last week on the eve of the start of early voting.
With the Democratic cavalry — former President Barack Obama, current governors and future party leaders — descending on New Jersey to support Ms. Sherrill, Mr. Trump instead hopped on the phone.
There would be no photo ops, nor any risk of energizing the anti-Trump Democratic base with a personal appearance by the president in the state.
Instead, the president and the candidate held a “telephone rally,” an old-school, audio-only event where supporters could dial into a phone number provided by the Ciattarelli campaign to listen to Mr. Trump’s remarks.
Mr. Ciattarelli emphasized his gratitude, saying how “thankful” he was to Mr. Trump three times in his 50-second introduction.
Mr. Trump, in turn, repeatedly praised Mr. Ciattarelli as “fantastic” and attacked Ms. Sherrill and the “radical left.”
The entire event lasted 12 minutes.
A Trial Balloon Candidacy
A third-generation Italian American from New Jersey with a preference for Frank Sinatra over Bruce Springsteen, Mr. Ciattarelli arrived in Trenton nearly 14 years ago as a freshman assemblyman with an accountant’s background and a hope that Republicans could pass some reforms with Mr. Christie, a Republican, in the State House.
Declan O’Scanlon, a veteran Republican legislator, recalled meeting Mr. Ciattarelli on the floor of the State Assembly on his first day. It took “seven minutes and 37 seconds” into their first conversation, Mr. O’Scanlon recalled, to realize he had a new legislative partner.
But Mr. O’Scanlon said it was also evident that Mr. Ciattarelli would grow restless in the legislature. In 2015, with accusations of corruption swirling around Senator Robert Menendez, Mr. Ciattarelli’s name came up as a potential candidate.
Instead, Mr. Ciattarelli announced his candidacy for governor in October 2016.
His campaign was centered around presentations made on PowerPoint slides in the meeting rooms of chain hotels, as he tried to win voters over with statistics on school funding. His pitch started with a family photograph, as Mr. Ciattarelli mixed the slapstick comedy of a motivational speaker with the analytical obsessions of a tax accountant. He pledged to be above the partisan fray.
“I’m not rigid in my ideology,” he said in June 2017 at a campaign stop in Hasbrouck Heights. “I’m not a hyper partisan. I’m about solving problems.”
As a relative unknown, Mr. Ciattarelli lost his first bid in the primary to Kim Guadagno, then the lieutenant governor to Mr. Christie, by 15 points. Unbowed, he vowed to run again.
The Covid Candidacy
By 2021, though many in the state still considered him a moderate Republican after the launch of his second campaign, Mr. Ciattarelli took a decidedly more combative approach.
With the polarized politics from the pandemic still raw, Mr. Ciattarelli seized on discontent over the state’s strict lockdown policies, putting him in line with more of the Trump base, though with rarely any mention of Mr. Trump himself.
Indeed, Mr. Ciattarelli was determined to make the pandemic about the state’s Democratic governor, Philip D. Murphy, blaming him for the deaths of seniors in nursing homes in the early days of the crisis.
He focused intensely on mask mandates, especially in schools, claiming that masks inhibited learning and that parents — not the governor — should be able to choose.
Mr. Ciattarelli walked a finer line on vaccinations. While he tepidly opposed requirements, he spoke encouragingly of the vaccine.
“I’m vaccinated, and I certainly would advocate for it again,” Mr. Ciattarelli said in an interview with local media in 2021. “I understand people not wanting to make the choice. I support their right to not make that choice, but I would certainly advocate for it.”
In a subsequent interview, Mr. Ciattarelli praised Mr. Trump’s leadership in fast-tracking the vaccine, a project known as Operation Warp Speed.
But he sought to keep his distance from the election denier movement that followed Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, culminating in the Jan. 6 riot.
And he spoke forcefully about the mayhem at the Capitol, calling Jan. 6 “a very, very sad day in our nation’s history.” “The president’s rhetoric on that day,” he said, contributed to the riot.
In November 2021, his newly combative campaign brought him within three points of Mr. Murphy, a shocking result in a race most polls had as a runaway victory for the Democratic incumbent.
Mr. Ciattarelli’s concession speech included a promise: He would run again — and begin immediately.
All or Nothing
Running for governor for four years straight offers a lot of opportunities to show up at party functions and build relationships with the many fiefs that control New Jersey politics.
“He continued to go to every pancake breakfast around the state,” said Alexandra Wilkes, a Republican operative who worked on his 2021 campaign. “And on multiple levels — county level, municipal level, different clients — if they needed something, we called Jack. Like, oh, I need a speaker. I need a check. I need something. Just call Jack and he was always there.”
Often, he could be found in diners. Mr. Ciattarelli frequently cites a desire to win over “all 600 diners” in the state. (His preferred diner order: a BLT on toasted rye, to help him keep a “32 waist.” But if he has extra time, it’s a bowl of onion soup “without the cheese on top.”)
His relationship-building extended across the aisle. After the Democratic primary for governor in June, Mr. Ciattarelli called Mayor Steven Fulop of Jersey City, who lost to Ms. Sherrill, and left a voice mail message complimenting him on the race. He has since kept in touch with the mayor, who was critical of Ms. Sherrill during their primary battle, but endorsed her the night she became the Democratic nominee.
“He’s a very savvy, relationship-driven person,” Mr. Fulop said. “He’s nurturing a lot of relationships that the Democrats kind of take for granted.”
The election of Mr. Trump and recent Republican gains in the state crystallized for Mr. Ciattarelli that he needed to run a different kind of race in 2025. Gone would be any criticism of Mr. Trump. Instead, he would wrap his core policies with nods to Trumpism.
“They worry about pronouns, I worry about property taxes,” Mr. Ciattarelli said during a Republican primary debate.
The approach during the primary — lead with MAGA, finish with Jack — netted him the coveted endorsement of Mr. Trump over a Republican rival who was decidedly to the right of Mr. Ciattarelli on many issues.
In the general election, there has been little moderating of his message. He still proclaims his No. 1 executive order will be “ending sanctuary cities” while blaming “illegals” for many of the state’s ills. He vows to unshackle police officers to be more aggressive in a “law and order” state.
But he’s no longer airing the “Trump Backs Jack” digital ads that he ran in the primary campaign. Indeed, his entire ad campaign is devoid of Mr. Trump, except for one ad in which he blasts his opponent for repeatedly invoking the president.
“Come on,” he says in the ad. “What does the president have to do with rising property taxes and higher electricity bills?”
But as Mr. Ciattarelli has tried to walk a careful political line, the world of MAGA has tried to claim him as one of their own.
In mid-October, the chairman of the Cape May Republican Party organized a rally titled “America First: Return to the Wildwoods,” a reference to a raucous rally Mr. Trump held in 2024 that drew tens of thousands of people to Wildwood, N.J.
This year, Mr. Trump did not attend, but the event had all the trappings of a modern MAGA gathering: far-right influencers, red baseball caps and escalating rhetoric.
Mr. Posobeic, a far-right media personality, delivered a speech about how the Department of Justice would be “coming for” enemies of the president. And he mused about setting up an immigrant detainment center in New Jersey similar to the one nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida.
“What should the New Jersey one be?” he asked. “How about the Boardwalk Brig? We’ll have them right here. You can throw tomatoes. It’ll be great.”
But Mr. Ciattarelli, who spoke earlier, didn’t change his stump speech much at all.
Tracey Tully and Mark Bonamo contributed reporting.
Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.
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