By Alex Zdan
If she could turn back time.
If she could find a way.
Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, Democratic nominee for Governor of New Jersey, sure tried her best to turn back the clock while in Newark on Saturday.
In desperation amid tightening polls, the congresswoman attempted to channel the solidarity of the elbows linked, pink pussyhat wearing, rainbow flag waving, loud and proud Democrat halcyon days of 2017 and 2018 when gaudy progressivism was the cool counterculture and conservatism was in a defensive crouch across the country.
It’s a bludgeon of an anti-Trump message that seems to be the main platform that Mikie, given name Rebecca, married name Hedberg, is running on. Second place goes to her training in the US Navy in flying transport helicopters, which has become the incessant focus of signs and TV ads, so much so that her four children get pushed off screen despite her running as a mom.
On Saturday night, in front of a carefully curated crowd of supporters (a mosaic of colors in the TV camera shot, Karens filling the off-camera seats) Sherrill and former President Barack Obama played throwback resistance fighters.
Sherrill tried to import joy. She aimed to create the artifice of hope through osmosis. She dripped in rented Jersey attitude and tried on the cloak of a Springsteen song protagonist despite her Virginia roots. Yet she skipped over some history, like the part where the Democrats ran New Jersey and the years where presidency and Congress went blue.
Sherrill and Obama desperately tried to pretend the years 2020 to 2024 never happened.
Kamala who?
It’s a Rip Van Winkle strategy, yet this time it’s the voters whom Democrats hope have been sleeping through the Biden years, much like Biden himself. In the real world, the Republican brand is still red hot, constant Trump criticism is becoming passe’, and Jack Ciattarelli has re-assembled the coalition that elected Trump and will define the Republican party for a generation.
In the past month, Ciattarelli hasn’t only rallied with cops, small business owners, the country club crowd and the MAGA faithful. Jack – tanned, ready and somehow rested despite a packed schedule of up to a dozen events a day – has of course hit those Republican crowds with alacrity and left a room buzzing with energy.
Yet he’s also rallied with Latino business owners – one of whom faced cancel culture simply for inviting the Republican nominee for Governor to his restaurant. Jack has addressed church groups of African-American men, women and hat-wearing church ladies in the deepest blue cities in the state. He’s talked philosophy with dozens of imams, been welcomed at the largest Hindu temple in North America (for the second time since May) and received the glowing endorsements of the most powerful Orthodox Jewish religious councils in the state.
The durability of the Republican brand – the multi-racial, cross-cultural, interwoven garment of destiny that Democrats claimed was their birthright – is on the ballot in our state today.
Mikie Sherrill is talking to the Democratic party of the past. Jack Ciattarelli is leading the Republican party of the future.
There’s been a lot written about New Jersey’s shift to the right, about momentum and meaning and whether it can translate to this year’s Governor’s race. On how the 10-point reddening of the state in 2024 as compared to 2020 was even more dramatic in the less white portions of the state. How African-Americans and Dominicans and El Salvadorans and Guatemalans and Venezuelans and South Asians have all latched on to the faith, family and freedom message of the GOP.
The nation’s first Black president must have skipped those articles too on his way to checking the White Sox box scores.
“And she will listen to everyone too,” Obama gushed over Sherrill Saturday from his trusty teleprompter. “Whether they voted for her or not.”
“Because she knows that if we want to make progress on the things we care about, we have to be able to disagree without calling each other nasty names. Or demonizing each other. At a time when our politics just feels so broken, we need leaders like Mikie.”
Really? Someone who calls her opponent a murderer, causing even the most liberal Jersey columnists to blush? Someone who puts words in her opponent’s mouth, pinning imaginary tax hike plans on him in a bold-faced lie?
That kind of a leader?
Even worse than whistling past the demographic graveyard, through remarks like those it’s as if Obama and Sherrill wanted to wash away a summer and fall of tragic political violence, which culminated in the assassination of Charlie Kirk while engaging with his opponent in peaceful dialogue.
Read the room, Democrats.
Phil Murphy was barely re-elected as New Jersey’s Governor in 2021, just a year after an all vote-by-mail election had led to a double-digit Biden romp and a landslide for Sen. Cory Booker.
As Jack says on the campaign trail this year, in 2021 he had wind in his face. But that campaign nearly pulled off an epic upset and help carry the largest Republican gains in the state Legislature in 20 years.
Now, he has the wind at his back.
As a pilot, Sherrill should know you need to make adjustments when flying into the wind.
The march of history stops for no one – male or female. If Cher couldn’t turn back time, Sherrill certainly can’t.
Not this year, Becky.
You don’t know Jersey. You don’t know this Republican party. And you don’t know Jack.
