Steve Hockstein/NJ Advance Media via AP
New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, left, and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka discuss issues at the New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial primary debate at NJ PBS Studios, May 12, 2025, in Newark.
The outcome of New Jersey’s June 10 gubernatorial primary is anyone’s guess. With no clear front-runner, the elimination of distorted ballot designs that rigged the vote for county party-endorsed candidates, frustration with Democrats and the influx of Republican voter registration, scholars and other election-watchers said they wouldn’t put money on any of the hopefuls who want Phil Murphy’s job.
Six Democrats are vying for the nomination, an unusually high number enabled by the elimination of the “county line”—a ballot format that allowed county political committees to cluster their preferred candidates into a prominent column, which studies show all but guaranteed a win. Last year, then-Rep. Andy Kim successfully sued to eliminate the design for his U.S. Senate race, arguing that it is unconstitutional. Legislation is moving with overwhelming bipartisan support to codify that ruling into law, but even before that, the county line will not be in place for this week’s primary.
In the past, candidates would compete for all-important county endorsements, and might have dropped out if they didn’t get them, as current Democratic candidate Stephen Sweeney, a former state Senate president, did in 2016, said Julia Sass Rubin, associate professor and director of the public policy program at Rutgers’s Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy. That typically knocked the number of candidates down. Not this year.
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For the most part, that’s refreshing and liberating: Instead of foregone conclusions hammered out in back rooms, there’s a real opportunity for the people of New Jersey to actually select who they want to lead them. But the peculiarities of New Jersey, a fractured field that may confuse a low-information electorate, and the continued presence of the party bosses make this new dawn less bright.
Three candidates are what observers described as county-boss favorites: Josh Gottheimer, representative from New Jersey’s Fifth Congressional District, which covers most of Bergen County and parts of Passaic and Sussex Counties; Mikie Sherrill, representative of the 11th Congressional District, which covers parts of Essex, Morris, and Passaic Counties, an area rich with Democratic voters; and Sweeney.
The other three are running as explicitly anti-machine candidates: Newark Mayor Ras J. Baraka; Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop (who rose as a machine candidate before dramatically breaking with it); and Sean Spiller, president of the New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union.
Sherrill, who did win a plurality of county party endorsements, is in the lead, but not by enough to make her a sure thing, observers said. A poll taken in May from Emerson College found Sherrill ahead of the pack, but just four percentage points ahead of “undecided.” Nailing turnout in an off-year summer and the impact of a normal ballot is a difficult task for pollsters, and most of them haven’t tried.
Adding to the uncertainty is the lack of a media center. Northern New Jersey is in the New York City media market, while the southern half is tied to Philadelphia, so residents “know a lot about the New York mayor’s race, but they don’t know a lot about the governor’s race in New Jersey,” said Julie Roginsky, a Democratic political consultant, co-founder of Lift Our Voices, and writer of the column Friendly Fire at NJ.com. “There’s just no local news anymore. It’s incredibly hard for candidates to communicate.”
It can be hard for candidates to break through, she said, and added that Ras Baraka’s high-profile arrest while inspecting an ICE detention facility was a rare exception.
“He’s the one person who was able to break out and break through the public consciousness,” Roginsky said. “But I don’t know if that’s enough.”
Meanwhile, the lead GOP candidate in a field of five is easier to pinpoint. That’s Jack Ciattarelli, the ex-state Assembly member who vowed to run again this year after he lost to Murphy in 2021 by just three points. President Donald Trump recently gave Ciattarelli his “Complete and Total Endorsement.”
The closeness of the 2021 race and the 2024 presidential election—while Kamala Harris won, New Jersey was actually closer than swing-state Arizona—looms over Democratic voters’ decisions.
Mariam Zuhaib/Mike Catalini/AP Photo
Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ), left, and former New Jersey Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli
MULTIPLE FACTORS ARE SCRAMBLING pollsters’ ability to predict how voters will respond to the threat of MAGA in New Jersey. Conventional wisdom holds that, as with Virginia, the state’s odd-year elections make it an indicator of how Americans view the sitting president. But observers said that voters are so frustrated by Democrats that the outcome could reflect that, too.
“This year is very strange—it’s the first scenario we’ve seen like this as well, where we’ve had eight years of a Democrat in [the governor’s] office. He’s not popular but not deathly unpopular, he’s just kinda blah, and we have a president who’s becoming more unpopular, and a Democratic party nationally that is really damaged,” said Roginsky.
Observers also noted that while there are still more Democrats than Republicans in the state, the gap between them is shrinking and more people are opting to reject both. According to New Jersey data, there were 2,768 new registered Republicans in May, compared to 2,226 new registered Democrats. New unaffiliated voters outpaced both at 4,472. There were about 6.6 million voters in the state overall as of the end of May, 2.5 million of whom are registered Democrats.
“Republicans feel like they’re on the move, and Democrats are like, ‘Oh my God, are we gonna lose to this MAGA Ciattarelli guy?” said Bob Dreyfuss, independent investigative journalist and author of the political newsletter The New Jersey Democrat. “It’s not as blue of a state as you might think.”
Dreyfuss said that Democratic voters are thinking about electability, but the crowded field makes that hard to discern. “Sherrill seems like a moderate … she’s running the most centrist don’t-offend-anybody campaign, but does that make her electable? I don’t know.”
The uncertainty about the election highlights that it would have been a good idea for lawmakers and political operatives to have thought ahead about what an election year might look like without county-line ballots, said Samuel S.-H. Wang, a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University.
“Without that system, it’s a free-for-all. The state political parties are not ready for this new world of open competition,” Wang said. “It would be a good idea to think ahead … you know, ranked-choice voting is just sitting there to consider.” He outlined that idea, which would allow voters to select more than one candidate in the order of their preference, in a recent column.
Such a change would require legislation, and it would help avoid the selection of a governor by a very small number of voters, an outcome Wang described as unrepresentative of the total population. Even though more people than usual mailed in ballots during early voting—282,000 voters as of last Wednesday morning—that’s still a fraction of the total number of voters in the state. Wang said he worried about the scenario where just 100,000 people select who will hold one of the most powerful governorships in the country.
Just over the river in New York City, ranked-choice voting is in effect for their mayoral primary, making it harder for Andrew Cuomo to dominate a similarly large field.
Another voting option, Wang said, could be an approval rating, in which a voter checks everyone they approve of. “The point is that anything would be better than what we have now, which is this crazy plurality voting system.”
WHILE OBSERVERS AREN’T MAKING BIG-MONEY BETS on the six candidates, they would bank on county bosses’ dogged fight to retain power. Though the new ballot stripped them of the ability to cluster their endorsed candidates in one column, they’re still wielding considerable influence.
They still endorse candidates, for example, who can select a slogan to run beneath their name on the ballot referencing that endorsement. So while the order of the candidates is randomized, committees still have their say. Take the ballot in Bergen County. Beneath Gottheimer’s name is “Democratic Committee of Bergen County,” reflecting its endorsement. Other candidates have different slogans on that ballot, such as Sherrill’s “Navy Pilot. Mom. Democrat for NJ.” But on the Essex County ballot, her slogan is “Essex County Democratic Committee,” which endorsed her. Gottheimer’s slogan is “Democrats of Essex County,” which is not the precise name of an organization. (The ballot design quarrel is ongoing; a district court judge said in a court filing last week that the new design may be unconstitutional, too.)
County bosses also send out literature that’s indistinguishable from material sent by the campaigns themselves, Rubin said. Tuesday’s election will be a test drive for which methods work best. Even if they’re not all that successful, county committees will likely represent that they were.
“The political machines adapt. They’re about surviving. If this is all very effective for them, they will do the same thing again,” Rubin said. “If it doesn’t work, if their preferred candidates don’t win, I fully expect them to change the rules again to make it even easier for them to control the outcome.”
“There’s going to be an effort by the political machines to signal that ‘we’re still in control.’ If you don’t need them, they become less relevant … there’s a real incentive for them to demonstrate that they’re all still very powerful.”
