Mikie Sherrill Wants To Move On

TRENTON, New Jersey — New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill hasn’t had many plans outside the Garden State the last few weeks.

An investigation into her lieutenant governor’s behavior grounded her midterm campaigning for like-minded Democrats in other states, and prompted scrutiny of the leadership style she so frequently espoused as a candidate and in her first months in office.

But now that she’s forced the resignation of Lt. Gov. Dale Caldwell, Sherrill is back on the trail and looking to see through some legislative priorities focused on affordability and children’s mental health, she told POLITICO in an interview last week. The following day, she was off to the Midwest to campaign in Ohio for gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton and to speak at a pro-abortion rights event in Chicago.

She portrayed the distractions of the Caldwell scandal — as well as an investigation into noncitizens being added to voter rolls before she took office — as inevitable aspects of the job.

“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. We handle the problems, and then we keep moving on,” she said. “But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s not as if everything grinds to a halt.”

In the interview, Sherrill also laid out her policy goals leading up to the end of her first year as governor in January, critiqued the Democratic Party and described what she’d like to see in a 2028 presidential candidate — someone a lot like herself.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You have pitched yourself as one of a new core of “get things done” Democrats. I know that you’re meeting with other Democrats after the election to talk about the future of the party. What are things you’ve done in New Jersey that you think can or should serve as a model for the party?

We’ve had a constant focus on driving down costs and creating opportunity for people. And by that I mean on day one — in fact, I’d say on hour one, during my inaugural address — I froze rate hikes, and I also signed an executive order to expand power generation. We’ve lifted the 50-year nuclear moratorium. I’ve passed regulations on virtual power plants. I think we have the best guardrails in the country on data centers, and we did that back in the April-May timeframe. So we’ve moved incredibly quickly.

We’ve studied exactly how many houses we think we’ll need to come up with a path to really drive down costs. We’ve also passed grocery store algorithm bills, rental algorithm bills to drive down costs; we’re working on junk fees.

My job is to protect people from a lot of the downside risks that they’re seeing in this changing economy, and we’ve done so incredibly quickly. We are now working on how we are going to protect people as Trump’s tearing down the healthcare system, and what a state can do in that area.

What’s next? What are the specific policy moves that you want to be looking at in the next few months? To narrow it down further, what two or three bills are you hoping that the Legislature puts on your desk and that you’ll sign into law?

We are continuing on affordability, the economy and kids. We’re doing a lot of consumer protection stuff, so I’d love to take on junk fees, especially with respect to our seniors.

I passed a budget with the biggest investment in schools, but we’re still seeing costs go up on the state health benefits plan. So we have convened everyone. Part of the problem is — and this isn’t just for our state health benefits plan, this is in a lot of areas of healthcare — a lot of people don’t feel incentivized to make changes because, say, the unions raise costs on their members, and that cost just gets gobbled up by the hospital systems, or the pharmaceutical companies, or the [pharmacy benefit managers], or the insurance companies. So nobody has been seeing a path forward to come to the table with changes. So we’re fixing the state health benefits plan — that’s going to be legislation I’d like to see on my desk as we chart that course out.

And then as far as kids, we’ll have the research center starting right away. I’d like to see continued movement to address the mental health of our kids — possibly related to social media, but possibly just expanding some more work that we’re doing on mental health already that we passed in the last budget. But there’s more to do, and I think that’s a key area that the Senate wants to move on as well.

What is the fix, do you think, for the School Employees’ Health Benefits Program?

If there was a fix, if it was easy, somebody would have done it. The reason it’s about to fall apart is because it’s hard, and because it involves taking on some pretty entrenched interests in the state. Because every healthy community at this point has left it, you’re treating sicker and sicker and sicker risk pools, making costs go up more and more — it’s about to collapse.

I think everyone involved understands that, so now they’re willing to come to the table. And everyone’s going to have to give a little bit. Again, it’s a very complicated problem. Every single person at the table, whether it’s hospital systems, insurance companies, unions, is going to have to give a little in a way that maybe they don’t want to, but I think will get us all better outcomes in the future.

Congressional redistricting is something that has come up intermittently at various points from you and from the Senate President, but there hasn’t been a lot of movement towards that. At a certain point, there’s going to be crunch time on this. Are you going to proactively ask the Legislature to do something on this in advance of the 2027 ballot?

It really depends on a couple factors, most importantly this election. I think we’re going to take the 7th [Congressional District]. I think there’s a possibility to take the 2nd; we should hold the 9th. So if we only have one district left — if it’s just [Republican Rep.] Chris Smith left standing — then I don’t think that makes a lot of sense.

If Trump does not attack the elections further and create more ways in which he can create chaos and disrupt a fair election — then this is the status quo. But if he continues to try to undermine a fair election and try to rig it, then we might make some different decisions here, and that would be something I would work with the Senate president and the Assembly speaker on to determine what the best path forward is.

Right now, there’s some really concerning signs: sending FBI agents into polling places out west; I think a sheriff in California took 650,000 ballots, and it took a court to force him to turn them back over. The SAVE database that the president’s trying to make everyone use kicked 100,000 people off the rolls initially in Texas. Again and again, he’s tried on numerous occasions to have me turn over personal information on our voter data rolls, and I’ve refused to do so.

I want to ask about you know that as well — the noncitizen voter registration investigation. Do you have any updates to share on that in general, and have you spoken to Governor Murphy at all about getting any more information on what he knew and how this problem first arose?

I haven’t spoken directly to Murphy about this. There’s an ongoing investigation into it, so I haven’t been speaking directly in that way.

But what we have done is take a really deep and thorough dive into our data systems, the MVC systems and the election systems. And I think what’s striking is, in basically two and a half months, we’ve done a thorough review. We’ve taken everyone who is enrolled solely due to noncitizen voter status — they’ve all been taken off the rolls. Anyone that had any further registrations and needed further investigation have been sent down to the counties. They’ve been directed to get that done by the time ballots went out. And then we’ve undertaken a thorough review of the rest of the data.

So here we are, two and a half months, ready to run a really fair election and make sure every vote counts, and that it’s credible and that people can have faith in it. The president, on the other hand, has been complaining about the vote for 10 years, has done nothing to make it stronger, has done everything he can to undermine it. It just stands in really stark contrast.

On the other big investigation of the summer, into now-former Lieutenant Governor Caldwell — do you have a shortlist yet for your new lieutenant governor? Has the vetting process changed at all in light of what happened with him?

We have been vetting names from the community, and different names of people that I’ve worked with. We only have 45 days, so we are already working on that.

We run a really intense vetting process. I think that’s why you see such great work coming out of the commissioners and different people across Trenton. Unfortunately, when the LG got into office, he chose not to follow the rules and regulations of working here. So I think the difference would just be a very direct conversation about what the expectations are. We’ll run the vetting process, which we always do — background check, talking to people, et cetera. 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.

Do you feel any sense of responsibility for what happened with the lieutenant governor, given that it was ultimately your vetting process that led him into office? He wasn’t really a known figure until you chose to be your running mate.

We took it all very, very seriously. I would suggest that the tradition, if that’s the right word, in Trenton would be to sweep all this under the rug, to continue to cover up or try to minimize behavior so that you don’t have a political problem on your hand.

But I think what I’ve shown through my career is that I’m not in this office for a political career. I’m in this office to actually create change for people in New Jersey, and to actually do the work of the people — and that’s different.

My frustration, in more of a broad sense, is that the tail’s been wagging the dog in our system for too long. Trump is sort of the ultimate emblem of that, where it’s all politics, it’s all campaigning, it’s all fake. Here, I don’t run campaigns to run campaigns. I run campaigns to get into government and govern. We have a government here of people who feel the same way. I was told, “Why would you ever want to be governor? The problems are too big to fix.” We can fix all of them. We just have to focus on actually governing, and that’s what we’re doing here.

Do you broadly have any regrets about anything that’s happened during your first nine months in office?

We’ve faced crisis after crisis, whether it was weather-related, or the previous administration not handling a problem and sweeping it under the rug, or having a problem with the lieutenant governor not following the ethics rules, not following the sexual harassment rules, putting his girlfriend up for a job without disclosing it. So we’ve had these challenges. Would I like to be talking about my plan to drive down utility costs, or the housing plan, or how we’re going to do this? You don’t want to get off track on communicating to people, because when you’re trying to show people a different kind of government — I really do have your back, and here’s what we’re doing as proof points — you don’t want to get off that messaging.

At the same time, I was trained for crisis response. That’s what military training is. I also came into office after Trump. So not only did I have all of the crisis training in the military — I’m used to chaos, I’m a mom of four kids — I came into office post-Trump. This is the playing field I’ve been operating in the whole time.

So they happen. We have to address them. 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. We handle the problems, and then we keep moving on. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s not as if everything grinds to a halt. I think when we received the lieutenant governor report and we announced it, that was a Thursday, and Tuesday we had a major housing conference to lay out months of work on housing. So we didn’t let it derail us.

You started an aggressive campaign schedule in the late summer, and then the Caldwell thing derailed that a little bit. What candidates are you going to go out to campaign for, in New Jersey or elsewhere, in the next month?

I wouldn’t say we stopped the aggressive campaign schedule — I think we brought it a little closer to home. We did New Jersey campaigning, and then we also were doing some fundraisers in New York and setting up New York fundraising.

We had Amy Acton in New Jersey to fundraise for, and did some events across New York with other candidates. So we continued to aggressively engage. We’ll be continuing to support Amy — my mom’s from Cincinnati, so we’ll continue to support her there, and then Greg Landsman, who’s the congressman from Cincinnati. We’re also headed out to support a pro-choice abortion rights group in Chicago to speak to them because I think a lot of what Trump’s really tearing down directly impacts women. Then we have some more fundraising planned, both here and on the road.

Do you plan on being heavily involved in New Jersey’s elections in 2027? Presumably general elections, but I’m also curious about primary elections, since there might be lots of progressive-versus-moderate fights.

A lot of what I’ve done after running really hard in ’25, with a lot of great Senate and Assembly candidates and local candidates, was to build a body of work. Certainly to serve people, but also because I actually think this is going to be something that is going to be very compelling to people — what we’re doing here — and I think we can be very helpful to Senate and Assembly candidates because of a lot of the legislation that they’ve passed.

The Senate and Assembly can be like any legislative body, like Congress, right? There’s a lot going on, and I think you get into the weeds, you hold your hearings, you pass good legislation — you don’t always see how it’s impacting on the ground. So I need to tell that story for people. I intend to do that. We’re already raising money for the state party, and I think we’ll be able to really support the elections.

I generally don’t get involved in primaries. I can’t think of when I’m planning to get involved, but we’ll see how the election goes, or if there’s any problems. Certainly, if there’s some real problems, then as the head of the party, I’d certainly get involved. But I don’t anticipate we’ll have to do that. I think the people will decide.

Looking far ahead to 2028, I’m curious whether you have any early thoughts about what is going to be a very competitive Democratic process for the nomination. Do you think Kamala Harris, who you supported in 2024, should run again? Do you have any other thoughts about the way that this field is shaping up?

I’m not a, “They should or shouldn’t run.” I think in democracy, all the people decide this, they should have a choice, and they should have a field to choose from.

I personally will be very interested in candidates who come from a new generation of leadership. I think we have some people who still feel that you can just go to the Senate dining room and hash it all out. Look, I was at one point one of the most bipartisan members of our delegation. I worked incredibly hard to build out these broad coalitions.

I think at this point, it really requires people who are going to stand up against a party that Trump has consolidated. The fact that you would see Tom Kean Jr. in Morris County saying the tariffs are good and the war is good and whatever Trump wants to do is good and having no excuse for being out of Congress — at that point, you just really have to chart out a different path forward and really strongly say, “This is what our party stands for.”

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.” So 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.”

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. I think that’s going to include some key areas on healthcare, on housing, on utility costs and power generation, on technology.

At this point in his term in 2010, Chris Christie was starting to field calls from Republicans about running for president. I’m curious whether you have fielded any of those calls, and if so, what you’ve told those people.

I’ve told those people that I just got out of Washington, and I’m very happy in Trenton. But I’ve also told them that we need to see leaders who are coming up with this vision. We are charting it out here in New Jersey — we’ve charted out what we can do as a state.