There’s good news and bad news in the latest Election 2025 poll for Mikie Sherrill…
The good: assuming it’s accurate (always a big “if”), most public polling shows her with a consistent mid-to-high single digit lead over Jack Ciattarelli – 8-points in this Quinnipiac survey – and there’s evidence that her early TV ad advantage successfully neutered the electricity bill issue as an anchor around her campaign’s leg (the campaigns are statistically tied on which candidate would do a better job addressing the crisis).
The bad news: odd-year gubernatorial elections tend to be turnout battles won on base enthusiasm, and at the moment, Jack has a significant edge in this department. Nearly half (48%) of Ciattarelli voters report being “very enthusiastic” about their candidate as opposed to only 37% of Sherrill voters.
What this suggests? If you’re evaluating this poll of 1,238 New Jersey “likely” voters conducted between September 11th and 15th, you can safely assume that the + / – 3.9 margin of error likely skews in the GOP’s direction. This poll was conducted entirely AFTER the assassination of Charlie Kirk on September 10th, an event which is widely being viewed as a rallying moment for Trump coalition voters horrifed by the latest example of extreme Leftist violence.
You can click here to view the crosstabs.
One more thing: the historically Left-leaning Quinnipiac poll needs to be viewed with a degree of skepticism, Save Jerseyans.
They didn’t poll Election 2021 so we don’t have anything inside the Garden State with which to compare it. In 2017, Quinnipiac’s early/mid September gubernatorial poll showed Phil Murphy ahead of then-Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno by 25-points. Guadagno went on to lose by 12. Quinnipiac’s last poll that cycle was closer to the mark, missing by under 2-points, but by that point several other polls had produced a similar finding so “herding” could explain Q’s massive correction in a reltively short amount of time.
In fairness, the Q poll is hardly the only one with a checkered past. The RCP average of polls was “too Democratic” by 5 points in 2021.
