Congresswoman running for N.J. governor is target of escalating attacks on campaign trail

Yahoo

6 days ago

Three of Rep. Mikie Sherill's Dem rivals have turned their sights on her as the June 10 gubernatorial primary approaches. (Amanda Brown for New Jersey Monitor)
With less than two weeks to go before the June 10 primary, Democrats vying to become New Jersey's next governor have stepped up their attacks on Rep. Mikie Sherrill, who election observers and pollsters consider to be the race's front-runner.
In new television ads and mailers, Sherrill's rivals have bashed her wealth, her establishment ties, and past campaign contributions she accepted from a PAC associated with SpaceX, the spaceflight company helmed by Elon Musk.
The grievances aren't new, but they're escalating as the primary approaches. And they're coming from candidates like Steve Fulop and Ras Baraka, who are running as anti-establishment insurgents, as well as party darlings like Steve Sweeney as they look to erode Sherrill's support among voters, many of whom remain undecided.
'Why on earth would Mikie Sherrill vote to send millions in taxpayer funds to Elon and SpaceX? Musk be the money he gave her campaigns. End the corruption!' says an ad from Coalition for Progress, a PAC boosting Fulop's candidacy (its treasurer is Fulop's wife's business partner).
Another ad from Baraka's campaign takes aim at Sherrill for both the SpaceX donations and profits Sherrill and her husband, a banker, made from stock trades. The congresswoman, along with other politicians, paid a fine several years ago for disclosure failures.
'Mikie Sherrill let us down. Mikie took $30,000 from Elon Musk's campaign fund, while Trump attacked abortion access,' the ad's narrator says.
Sherrill, after speaking to voters in Somerset Tuesday, told the New Jersey Monitor that the uptick in negative campaigning against her is 'a shame to see.'
'A lot of that's based on false information from Newsmax, which is paying $40 million in court settlements for misinformation. And I'm the only person in the race that's put out my tax return for state and federal over the last two years. It's all really transparent,' she said.
Sherrill's congressional campaign received $24,000 between 2019 and September 2024 from the SpaceX PAC, while a Sherrill-affiliated leadership PAC received another $7,500 total from the PAC in 2020 and 2022. Sherrill donated the amount her campaign received to a food bank, her campaign filings show.
When Charlamagne tha God, a host on the radio show The Breakfast Club, interviewed Sherrill last week and asked her to confirm claims in Baraka's campaign ad — plus in news reports — that she made $7 million in stock trades, Sherrill said she didn't know.
'I haven't, I don't believe I did, but I'd have to go see what, what that was alluding to,' she said. 'Look, I, both my husband and I come from very middle-class families. My parents were the first in their family to go to college and his were both teachers, and then we both went into the military. And afterwards he got a good job and, I, we've been really lucky. I really, I really deeply feel like this country has provided an incredible amount of opportunity to us and that's why I think I feel a responsibility to sort of pay that forward.'
The clip of the interview promoted on social media prompted a succinct reaction from Sweeney.
'Yikes,' he wrote.
Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, told the New Jersey Monitor that the criticism facing Sherrill is fair given the race's high stakes. He doesn't think Sherrill, if she wins the Democratic primary in June, can pull off a general election win in November, citing mounting public disillusionment with Democrats in both D.C. and Trenton. Sherrill has the backing of key New Jersey Democratic Party officials.
'She's a creature of the political establishment,' Fulop said. 'She has the same machine infrastructure and the same playbook as was run in the last 25 years. And the nature of where the state is and the country is, is not that. After eight years of Democratic machine politics, it's going to be hard for any Democrat that is part of that structure to be elected.'
He pointed to Jack Ciattarelli, a former assemblyman and the front-runner on the Republican side of the race, and his habit of hammering Trenton lawmakers for things like skyrocketing taxes and electric bills. Fulop said Sherrill makes an easy target for Ciattarelli because she's 'the status quo machine politician.'
If she prevails in the primary, Fulop said, 'Jack Ciattarelli's biggest talking point is going to be 'four more years of Phil Murphy.' 'You like your taxes? Four more years of Phil Murphy. You like your energy bill? Four more years of Phil Murphy.''
Requests for comment from Baraka's and Sweeney's campaigns were not returned.
Sherrill campaign spokesman Sean Higgins disputed the claim that Sherrill would be a weak general election candidate, and highlighted the electoral histories of the three men criticizing her. Baraka and Fulop won elections in towns that have nonpartisan municipal races, while Sweeney lost his bid for reelection in 2021 to a Republican whom Sweeney vastly outspent.
'Mikie has actually beaten Trump Republicans election after election — while the mayors have never faced a competitive general and Senator Sweeney famously lost to a MAGA Republican,' Higgins said.
Asked to respond to Fulop's complaint that Sherrill is a creature of the political establishment, Sherrill said, 'I think most people would find that a really odd statement coming from Steve Fulop.'
Sophie Nieto-Muñoz contributed.
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