Will New Jersey Stay Blue?: The race for New Jersey governor is down to Democrat Mikie Sherrill, a four-term congresswoman, and Republican Jack Ciattarelli, the runner-up in the surprisingly close governor’s race four years ago. If you were just listening to the radio ads, though, you might think it was a contest between President Donald Trump and Democrat Phil Murphy, the state’s sitting governor.
New Jersey and Virginia are the only two states that elect a governor in the year after a presidential election. For that reason, their contests are often seen as a referendum on the party in the White House and a bellwether for the following year’s midterms. Sherrill, who won an open primary with the backing of much of the state Democratic Party apparatus, is pressing Ciattarelli’s alignment with Trump, who is unpopular in New Jersey. Ciattarelli, a former “Never Trump” Republican who has since embraced the president and accepted his endorsement, is tying Sherrill to the policies of Murphy, whose approval ratings have slid in New Jersey in recent months.
Both candidates are appealing to voters’ cost-related frustrations, from a recent spike in utility prices to general inflation concerns and perennial irritation with the state’s highest-in-the-nation property taxes. At a recent debate, Sherrill vowed to start her term by declaring an energy emergency and freezing utility rate increases. She wants to invest in power generation from a range of sources, including nuclear and solar. Ciattarelli favors nuclear and solar generation as well, while blaming the Murphy administration’s focus on offshore wind development — which was proceeding at breakneck pace just a few years ago, before hitting the skids around the time Trump took office — for the state’s high utility costs.
Both campaigns like their chances. Democrats have an 800,000-voter advantage over Republicans in registration in New Jersey, and the state’s voters tend to elect governors from the party opposing the White House. But Ciattarelli is a well-known candidate, having come much closer to beating Murphy in 2021 than many anticipated. New Jersey voters also have a history of switching between Republican and Democratic governors every eight years. Sherrill has a comfortable lead in some polls, including a Quinnipiac University poll released this month that shows her up by 49 percent to Ciattarelli’s 41. But Ciattarelli’s campaign has circulated an internal poll that shows him with a one-point lead. On Thursday morning, Emerson College released a poll showing the candidates virtually tied with 43% support each and 11% of respondents undecided.
“We have an unpopular and growing-more-unpopular governor,” says Chris Russell, a Republican campaign strategist who works with the Ciattarelli campaign. “Voters have figured out that there’s no one else to blame here. It’s kind of hard to blame Republicans for anything going on in New Jersey that you don’t like.” Henry de Koninck, a Democratic campaign strategist, says it’s going to come down to a simple party preference for most voters, which would give the edge to Sherrill.
Even with the election only six weeks away, there’s lots of time left for the candidates to define themselves. A second debate is scheduled for Oct. 8. With an avalanche of national political news taking up much of voters’ attention, there’s an opening for both sides.
“Whichever campaign is successful in setting that narrative frame — whether Sherrill can make this about national politics and Trump, or Ciattarelli can make it about state issues and Murphy — that’s going to give that candidate the leg up,” de Koninck says.
(Emily Curiel/TNS)
Royal Recall Rumble: Is it the end of the line for Frank White? This fall, the longtime second baseman for the Kansas City Royals and three-term county executive in Jackson County, Mo., is facing a recall vote. With turnout expected to be low, and little sign of an enthusiastic pro-White contingent showing up to counter the pro-recall effort, the vote could very well end White’s political career.
The recall is in large part a response to a property tax reassessment in 2019 that angered many homeowners. The reassessment led to higher tax bills and inconsistent valuations for some properties of the same type. White and the County Legislature have been at odds on how to handle the increased burden and the discrepancies for years.
White did win a post-reassessment election in 2022, albeit by a fairly narrow margin. White’s office says the current recall, which was the result of a signature-gathering campaign funded largely by a dark-money PAC called Democracy in Action, is an effort to punish him for opposing a stadium-funding deal for Kansas City’s two major sports teams last year. He says his critics want to remove him from office ahead of another vote on the stadium issue.
Last year, White was one of the few elected officials in the Kansas City area to oppose a sales tax extension to fund a new stadium for the Kansas City Royals baseball team, for which he once starred, and to pay for improvements to the football Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium. White, who had a public falling out with the Royals’ former owners toward the end of his time with the team, said the tax extension was a bad deal for the county taxpayers. Some local leaders said he had a vendetta against his former team. In any event, White argued publicly that the teams should provide more benefits to the county if they want to continue using part of its sales tax money. And county voters ended up voting no on an extension of the tax — in effect siding with White on the issue even as his popularity continued to sink.
“The result of a successful recall is that we will see another stadium-subsidy vote in April, and [the teams] want to do so without the opposition of the county executive,” says Caleb Clifford, White’s chief of staff.
Guy Howard, the director of Democracy in Action, says it was easy to gather signatures for the recall petition because people were so frustrated by the assessments.
“We never collected signatures regarding the sports teams. It was always around the property taxes and how it affected people,” Howard says. “People were so upset with the county. They didn't feel like the county was responding.”
White doesn’t have many friends in the County Legislature. But some have risen to his defense even as they’ve acknowledged his missteps. “While property owners may be disgruntled, the recall is overwhelmingly about wealthy special interests ensuring their priorities dominate Jackson County government,” Megan L. Smith, a Democratic county legislator, recently wrote on Facebook. “With likely low voter turnout, a handful of donors and a small, mostly white Republican electorate could remove a county executive twice elected by the majority.”
For his part, White has vowed not to seek re-election. Sort of. “I have decided that I do not plan to seek re-election as Jackson County executive when my term ends next year,” he said in a statement in August. He added, a few paragraphs later, “I must be candid — there is a part of me that could reconsider.”
In California, More Recalls: The pace of recalls is picking up in the Bay Area. Last year, Oakland voters recalled Mayor Sheng Thao on the same day that voters in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, recalled District Attorney Pamela Price. Those elections came less than two years after the high-profile recall of the progressive San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Last week, voters in San Francisco’s Sunset District recalled Joel Engardio, a member of the Board of Supervisors. A politically mixed cross-section of the district’s voters was upset about Engardio’s support for a project that turned a former road, the Great Highway, into a park called Sunset Dunes. The conversion was approved in a citywide vote but opposed by most voters in the area adjacent to the park. Some of the same people who backed Engardio’s recall are also reportedly organizing against a plan, supported by San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, to upzone parts of the Sunset neighborhood. They’ve hinted, without much subtlety, that they could use the same tactics against Lurie if he doesn’t back down.
For now, though, the recall party has moved 20 miles north to Fairfax, a tiny town in Marin County with a population of around 7,500. There, residents have organized a recall of Vice Mayor Stephanie Hellman and Mayor Lisel Blash, scheduled for November, partly in response to their support for a high-density housing project called School Street Plaza. The scale of the project, with a proposed 175 units, is “absolutely unacceptable and not part of the character of the town,” one of the recall organizers told a local CBS News reporter.
Blash, a first-term mayor, has said approval of the housing project was essentially mandated by state law, which requires communities to permit construction in accordance with the state’s housing needs. “Fairfax is facing a number of challenges, including state housing mandates, aging infrastructure, unaffordable housing, and wildfire risk,” Blash said in an official response to the recall petition. “Recall proponents have seized on these issues to drive a wedge in our community.”
The vote is scheduled for Nov. 4. But the fight to control the future of California communities — a tug-of-war between NIMBYs, YIMBYS, environmentalists, developers, state legislators, small-town mayors, tenants, and homeowners — is far from over.
