Mikie Sherrill Says Democrats Need A New Approach. She’s Offering Hers

TRENTON, New Jersey — Gov. Mikie Sherrill says Democrats haven’t been effective — and she’s holding up New Jersey as a model for how they can do better.

Nine months into her first term, Sherrill, 54, is calling for a “new generation of leadership” to break with the party’s old habits. She also acknowledged in a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO that she has fielded calls about a presidential campaign of her own.

“With the new generation, what we’re doing is saying, ‘Our party has not been effective, and we haven’t won on the issues that most concern us,’” Sherrill said.

“That’s why we’re taking leadership right now and saying, ‘This is where we have to go, and that’s why we have to focus on affordability, and these are the critical areas for people,’” she added. “What I’m looking for is a leader who is in that mold and is not going to sound to me like a Democrat from years of old, but is going to sound like a strong fighter and champion of working people.”

A former House member and Navy helicopter pilot, Sherrill has put forward criticisms of her own party and promises of a different way ahead for years. She voted against Nancy Pelosi for speaker in both 2019 and 2021, following through on a campaign promise to oppose the longtime Democratic leader. And in 2024, she was the seventh House Democrat to call for President Joe Biden to end his campaign after a lackluster debate that increased worries about his ability to beat Trump.

As governor of New Jersey, Sherrill has continued to pitch herself as a new style of Democrat: one who saw the sclerotic pace of Congress up close and wants to move her state, similarly known for its old-fashioned politics, in a different direction.

Naturally, that’s led to speculation that Sherrill might have an eye on higher office herself, much like Republican Gov. Chris Christie before her. Asked whether she had fielded any calls about her interest in a presidential bid, Sherrill indicated that she had — and told those people she is “very happy in Trenton.”

“But I’ve also told them that we need to see leaders who are coming up with this vision,” she said. “We are charting it out here in New Jersey.”

Sherrill has mostly steered clear of the public jockeying for higher office that many of her fellow Democratic governors have engaged in. But her fall schedule has included several trips around the country to campaign for Democratic candidates — including in some contentious primaries in Massachusetts and New Hampshire — and her boosters say it would be unwise to ignore her.

“All governors are viewed through the lens of, could they be national figures?” said Matt Bennett, the co-founder of the center-left think tank Third Way. “She’s definitely in that conversation.”

Investigations pose early challenges

Sherrill argues that her record speaks for itself, pointing to some early affordability-focused accomplishments like freezing electricity rate hikes, lifting a 50-year moratorium on nuclear power and banning algorithms in rentals and grocery store pricing. Her relentless focus on those issues during last year’s campaign, when the high cost of living was still seen as a Democratic vulnerability, has since become the norm for other Democratic candidates around the country.

“Governor Sherrill very much set the template for what Democrats are running on in 2026 across the board, and she deserves credit for being at the vanguard of that,” said Jared Leopold, a Democratic strategist who previously worked with the Democratic Governors Association.

But it may be too soon to tell if any of Sherrill’s initiatives are making a difference for the average resident of her state. A Rutgers University poll from September said New Jerseyans are struggling to afford basic costs such as gas, housing and health care more than they were earlier this year. Her approval rating in the same poll was 44%-34%, similar to what Rutgers found in March.

The governor is also coming off a challenging few months. In July, she revealed that thousands of noncitizens had been added to the state’s voter rolls several years ago thanks to a software error, drawing fire from the Trump administration. An investigation she ordered into the error is ongoing, though Sherrill said the state has already begun implementing safeguards to prevent similar errors in the future.

Then, last month, Sherrill called for the resignation of her own lieutenant governor, whom she had personally chosen as her running mate, after a report found he had committed ethics violations and made a sexually charged remark to a staffer. Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell denied the allegations but resigned less than 24 hours after Sherrill told him to.

Sherrill projected confidence throughout both crises, but admitted it was hardly how she wanted to spend several of her critical early months in office — time that she intended to spend pushing for the next components of her legislative agenda and campaigning for like-minded Democrats around the country.

“Is it how we want to be spending our time? We’d rather be doing the work of the people, but that is part of it: addressing the problems,” Sherrill said.

Democrats in the state Legislature largely deferred to Sherrill on both issues, saying that they trusted the independent investigations — both helmed by former Republican attorneys general — to do a thorough job. There was widespread hand-wringing about the lack of transparency on Caldwell’s indiscretions prior to the release of the report, but with Caldwell efficiently kicked to the curb, some Democrats now see that as an asset.

“She waited out the investigation, which may not have been politically popular but it was the right thing to do. I don’t know if she could have handled it any better,” said state Sen. Vin Gopal, Sherrill’s 2025 campaign chair. “Night and day compared to what we’ve seen in the past.”

Republicans, though, don’t think Sherrill can say she’s out of the woods. New revelations could still come from the noncitizen voting investigation, and Republicans in the Legislature have also demanded more details on the handling of the Caldwell report.

“There’s so much more that needs to be investigated, mostly about the handling of this by the Sherrill administration — it’s shocking that she hasn’t been held to account for this,” said state GOP chair Christine Hanlon. “This is a major issue for the administration. And people deserve answers.”

Looking for a new LG and policy goals

During her gubernatorial campaign last year, Sherrill sought to distance herself from the status quo in a state that’s been led by Democrats for nearly a decade; she chose Caldwell as her running mate in part because he was a political unknown, and her Cabinet is full of policy wonks and bureaucrats, many of them from out of state, rather than politicians and patronage picks.

But at the same time, Sherrill is cozy with the state’s powerful Democratic establishment, much of which supported her during her competitive primary for governor. Her relationships with the Democratic leaders of the state Senate and Assembly, while not tremendously close, have so far been cordial and undramatic — certainly far more so than when Gov. Phil Murphy took office in 2018 promising to shake up business as usual and ran headlong into legislative opposition.

That split-screen was on clear display during Sherrill’s first state budget process. The governor announced that the state couldn’t afford the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of pet projects that typically get tacked onto the budget at the last minute. But after closed-door negotiations, Sherrill and legislative leaders announced that a reduced number of those projects would make it into the budget after all, an outcome both sides claimed as a win.

Sherrill has also had to balance her ties to Democratic power brokers with the state’s restive progressive movement, which threw its support behind two alternate candidates in last year’s race for governor. Those tensions flared in May, when Sherrill sent State Police officers to the Delaney Hall immigrant detention facility in Newark after it was engulfed by protests, drawing progressive ire.

What comes next is less clear. While Sherrill and legislative Democrats have articulated broad goals of improving affordability, there isn’t an obvious legislative agenda awaiting approval. On some issues, the governor and the Legislature may be at loggerheads; a growing number of legislators, for example, have started to push for a moratorium on data centers, but Sherrill threw cold water on that idea in a separate interview with POLITICO.

Sherrill said that in the near future, she’d like to take further action on junk fees and children’s mental health, both key talking points during her campaign. Congressional redistricting, she said, also remains a possibility, though she noted there may not make “a lot of sense” to do so if Democrats, who already hold nine of the state’s 12 seats, make expected gains in November by flipping at least one seat, possibly two.

Some thornier issues could force themselves to the fore, too. A politically perilous battle over the state’s complex mechanism for funding local schools is likely to emerge in the near future, and state health benefits programs for government workers are on the verge of collapse, threatening Sherrill’s efforts to make the state’s sprawling bureaucracy more efficient.

And then there’s the task of choosing a new lieutenant governor, which Sherrill will have to do by Nov. 9. Sherrill said she’s begun vetting potential options, and that in addition to the typical screening process, she’s also laying out clear expectations for her next number-two in order to prevent another disaster.

“We’ll run the vetting process, which we always do — background check, talking to people, et cetera,” she said. “But then I think the further conversation will be, ‘Here are the expectations,’ and ensure that before any move is made, everyone feels comfortable that they can, in fact, adhere to those.”

In the meantime, Sherrill’s second-in-command is Senate President Nick Scutari, who became acting governor for two days last week when Sherrill headed to Ohio to campaign for gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. Sherrill said she’ll continue to hit the campaign trail in the coming weeks, including in New Jersey, where one top Democratic House candidate, former Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett, has a biography that echoes Sherrill’s own.

The bigger test for her may come in 2027, when all 120 legislative seats are on the ballot and Democrats have hopes of further expanding their already substantial majorities. The state’s burgeoning progressive movement, too, has set its sights on expanding its influence and potentially challenging incumbent legislators, though Sherrill said she’d be reluctant to get involved in intraparty contests.

“If there’s some real problems, then as the head of the party, I’d certainly get involved,” she said. “But I don’t anticipate we’ll have to do that. I think the people will decide.”

Contests like those will help determine what Sherrill can accomplish in New Jersey and, in turn, what she can promote to the rest of the country as the New Jersey model. The more Sherrill can make that model work, Leopold said, the more she stands to benefit.

“What I would always advise someone who’s just started is to focus on what they need to do to deliver for their state,” he said. “Good things will happen from there.”

Daniel Han contributed to this report.