How the candidates are handling Trump and more

The matchup in New Jersey’s race for governor is officially set — and Tuesday’s primaries also laid down big indicators about the state of both political parties after the first major intraparty contests since the 2024 election.

Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a former state legislator, easily won his party’s primary with President Donald Trump’s endorsement, underscoring Trump’s significant sway over the GOP electorate.

U.S. Rep. Mikie Sherrill won the crowded Democratic primary, pitching herself as the candidate with the best shot at holding on to the governorship and steering past ideological and antiestablishment sentiment simmering in her party. She defeated candidates who were to her left and to her right.

The race to replace term-limited Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, one of two governor’s races this year, is expected to be competitive. Trump lost the state by 6 percentage points in November, a 10-point swing in his direction compared with his 2020 margin.

Here are five takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries:

Democrats revive 2018 playbook

Sherrill won as many Democratic voters were weighing which candidate would be most electable and as each Democratic candidate pitched a different path forward for the party.

Sherrill’s victory suggests some Democratic voters want to dust off the party’s successful playbook from the 2018 midterm elections, when she flipped a longtime Republican-held House seat. In that campaign and in her primary run this year, Sherrill stressed her background as a Navy helicopter pilot and a former federal prosecutor and pitched “ruthless competence” as a counter to Trump.

“It just seems so obvious to me what the path forward is. It’s effectively govern,” Sherrill recently told NBC News. “And this is what I’ve been doing since 2018 when I first ran, right? … I say to people, ‘What’s keeping you up at night?’”

“I tell people it’s not maybe the sexiest tagline, but ruthless competence is what people in New Jersey want to see in government,” Sherrill added later. “And that’s what I’ve always provided, and that’s what I think stands in stark contrast to the most incompetent federal government we’ve probably ever seen in this nation.”

Still, while Sherrill won with over a third of the vote, the results revealed a fractured party.

Two candidates who pitched themselves as more progressive, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, won a combined 36% of the vote. Two of the…