Election night scrambled the assumptions that had shaped two of the region’s most closely watched races.
Polls pointed to a competitive governor’s race in New Jersey and a potentially splintered mayoral electorate in New York City. Instead, both contests broke sharply away from conservative candidates and toward Democrats.
In New Jersey, some last-minute polling showed the race within a few points. In the end, Jack Ciattarelli, who ran as a Trump Republican, significantly underperformed compared to polls as well as his performance in 2021, when he came within 3 points of beating then-incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy.
Democrat Mikie Sherrill closed the night with a 13-point lead, far outpacing expectations with an anti-Trump agenda in a state Republicans believed was trending right.
And in New York City, Republican Curtis Sliwa was relegated to the margins. Though final polls showed him winning between 14% and 24% of the electorate, as of Wednesday morning he was at 7%.
Sliwa’s support appears to have shifted to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who beat his polling but still came within the 3- to 4-point margin of error in most polls. Cuomo had been tracking 13 points behind Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who passed the 50% mark by holding his coalition intact. Cuomo was trailing by 9 points Wednesday, according to preliminary results.
“When you look at this outcome, it was a mandate,” said Matthew Wing, a Democratic consultant. “Over a million people, over a million New Yorkers voted for Zohran Mamdani, more people than have voted for any mayor since [John] Lindsay” in 1969.
Sherrill attributed her win — and that of another moderate Democrat, Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger in Virginia — to “building back that juggernaut of a coalition.”
“Working people, the Black and Latino communities, these are communities that want to see great government,” she said during an appearance on WNYC’s Morning Edition. “They want to see great schools, great job opportunities, and that’s what Democrats have traditionally focused on … good, effective government.”
Chris Coffey, a longtime Democratic strategist and head of the political consulting firm Tusk Strategies, said Tuesday was a good night for Democrats, noting “you had districts in New Jersey that were plus-Trump districts in 2024 that were Sherrill districts last night in a way that was very strong for Democrats.”
Coffey and Wing both pointed to other Democratic wins across the country, including redistricting in California, down-ballot races in Virginia and Pennsylvania and a pathway toward a Democrat mayor in Miami.
Still, Wing cautioned Democrats about reading too much into the results and assuming the midterms are a lock. Voters in different places turn out for different reasons, he said. In Virginia, a state with a disproportionate number of federal workers, Trump was likely a leading figure, while in New Jersey, affordability was a key issue.
“There’s a reason to believe there is a path to victory, but it would be foolish to just say this is inevitable, and Democrats are going to have a fantastic midterm,” he said.
Sliwa’s collapse in New York likely had little to do with any national trends.
“ The same thing happened in the primary, which is once folks actually go to vote it really was clear that it was a binary choice,” Coffey said. “Either Zohran Mamdani was going to win or Andrew Cuomo was going to win. People don’t like throwing away their vote.”
What’s more, national and local Republican leaders were actively encouraging their base to vote for Cuomo. Trump had been targeting Sliwa for weeks, attacking his cats and his red beret, and finally came out with a full endorsement of Cuomo the night before polls opened.
Still, Mamdani ended the night with a clean majority, meaning that even had Cuomo taken all of Sliwa’s vote share, the former governor still would have lost to the upstart democratic socialist.
“ The next question beyond all the punditry and the polling is going to be governance of New York City,” Coffey said. “Winning a campaign is one thing. Running a city is another.”
