New Jersey's Surprisingly Wide-Open Race for Governor: Despite their reputation as solid-blue Democrats, New Jersey voters like to go back and forth when it comes to choosing governors. Neither party has held the New Jersey governor’s office for more than eight consecutive years since the 1960s. And starting in 1990, voters have always elected freshman governors from the party that doesn’t control the White House.
This year, one of those long-term electoral trends has to break. Six Democrats and five Republicans are competing in the gubernatorial primaries next Tuesday to succeed Democrat Phil Murphy, who was first elected in 2017, the year after Donald Trump won the presidency. Will voters send another Democrat to office, in keeping with their tradition of rebuking the president’s party? Or will they send a Republican and keep up their run of alternating parties every two terms?
As usual, national media are treating the New Jersey governor’s race — which, along with the one in Virginia, is typically the first significant election following a presidential year — as an indication of the national political mood. Often that bellwether narrative is overblown, says Ashley Koning, director of the Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University. But given how much New Jersey’s electorate has in common with the national electorate — a racially and economically diverse group of urban and suburban voters that had a strong rightward lurch in the last presidential election — the 2025 election could say a lot about what to expect in the midterms and in 2028.
“This is one of the first times that it’s actually a legit indication,” Koning says. “There’s a huge narrative that will be spun in each direction based on what happens in the gubernatorial.”
Garden State political watchers expect a tight general election in November no matter the results of next week’s primaries. On the Republican side, Jack Ciattarelli, the 2021 GOP challenger to Murphy, is leading the polls in a field that includes Bill Spadea, a popular conservative radio host, and Jon Bramnick, a state senator and stand-up comedian. Ciattarelli, who came much closer to beating Murphy than virtually anyone expected in the last election, was recently endorsed by President Trump.
Despite the state’s tradition of voting against the president’s party, Republicans have a lot of advantages this year, says Chris Russell, a Republican political consultant and adviser to Ciattarelli’s campaign. The state’s high cost of living, high property taxes and rising energy prices could help make the general election a referendum on the Murphy administration as much as, or more than, the Trump administration. Trump came within six points of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, in the 2024 race — the best performance for a Republican presidential candidate in New Jersey since the early 1990s. And Republicans have been steadily chipping away at Democrats’ still-sizable voter registration advantage for years. “It’s a Democratic state on paper, but I don’t think New Jersey is a liberal state,” Russell says.
The Democratic primary, meanwhile, is unusually wide open. Two big-city mayors, Ras Baraka of Newark and Steven Fulop of Jersey City, are holding down the progressive side, along with Sean Spiller, a former mayor of Montclair and president of the state’s biggest teachers’ union. Two Democratic members of Congress are also running: Josh Gottheimer, a moderate, and Mikie Sherrill, who has been backed by much of the official Democratic Party apparatus. Stephen Sweeney, who served as president of the state Senate for 12 years, is seeking a return to office after losing his Senate seat to a no-name Republican aligned with Trump in 2021.
One reason why the Democratic primary field is so full of viable candidates is because of a change to the way party endorsements affect ballot placement. A court ruled last year against a practice called “the line,” in which endorsed candidates got prominent ballot placement, long considered an almost-decisive advantage. With the end of that practice, more candidates see a viable path to victory. Because the line has been removed, the primary also presents a test of how much clout county Democratic organizations really have to get out the vote for their preferred candidates.
“We’re really going to get to see,” says Henry de Koninck, a New Jersey Democratic campaign strategist, “which counties’ endorsement carries weight.”
A Partisan Turn in San Antonio: San Antonio is the seventh biggest city in the U.S., having gained more than 23,000 residents between 2023 and 2024. That put its population above 1.5 million, just behind Philadelphia. In this year’s first-round mayoral voting, however, only about 100,000 people cast votes — a turnout rate of less than 10 percent. With 27 candidates on the ballot, the top vote-getter, Gina Ortiz Jones, a former Air Force under secretary during the Biden administration, won with only about 27,000 votes, representing less than 2 percent of the city’s population.
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This weekend, Jones will face the second-highest vote getter, Rolando Pablos, in a runoff. Despite the mayoralty being an officially nonpartisan office, the race has turned sharply partisan. Jones is a Democrat who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress. Pablos is a Republican who served as secretary of state in Texas under the state’s conservative governor, Greg Abbott. The race is seen as competitive, even with Democrats’ strong advantage in San Antonio. In the past, says Molly Cox, a San Antonio-based communications consultant, “there was sort of a wink and a nod around partisan issues. Now it’s very out in the open and very clear.”
Like other growing cities, San Antonio faces challenges related to housing affordability, though it has managed them better than many other places so far. The city is also in the midst of a debate over a development proposal called Project Marvel, which would remake portions of the downtown and provide a new home for the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. The candidates have taken different positions on that project, and business groups have reportedly lined up behind Pablos, who’s been openly supportive of Project Marvel, unlike Jones. But in general, the discussion during the runoff campaign has turned on national political issues. “There’s not really a conversation about local policy or what a mayor does,” Cox says.
Four San Antonio City Council members ran for mayor this year, but none of them made it to the runoff. Some observers see that as voters’ rejection of insiders. Others see it as evidence that voters simply aren’t well-attuned to local government. City Council members had a hard time raising money against candidates who had name recognition outside the city, says Laura Barberena, a consultant who ran the campaign for one of those City Council candidates. Low local turnout, state and national PAC money, and a turn away from hard-line progressive politics have created an opening for Republicans in one of the few Democratic strongholds in Texas.
“City politics are kind of out the window at this point,” Barberena says. “This is 100 percent about, how are you going to be a mayor in the context of Greg Abbott and Donald Trump?”
