Despite the millions of dollars that have been spent and the personal and political attacks that have been lobbed on both sides over the last three months, a new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University finds that Democrat Mikie Sherrill’s lead over Republican Jack Ciattarelli in New Jersey’s gubernatorial race has remained essentially unchanged.
In FDU’s poll released this morning, Sherrill, a congresswoman from Montclair, leads Ciattarelli, a former assemblyman from Somerville, by a seven-point, 52% to 45% margin among likely voters.
When FDU last looked at the race in July, the result was almost exactly the same, though some undecided voters have since flocked to one candidate or another; the July poll put Sherrill up by eight points, 45% to 37%.
“So far, this race is going exactly as expected,” Dan Cassino, the FDU poll’s executive director, said in a release accompanying the poll. “Undecided voters have almost all made up their minds, and partisans have put aside any misgivings and lined up behind their candidates.”
Earlier this week, a Quinnipiac University poll found Sherrill leading 50%-44%, a slight decline from her 49%-41% lead in Quinnipiac’s September poll. (Quinnipiac and FDU have historically been two of New Jersey’s pre-eminent pollsters, though only FDU has a recent track record in the state; Quinnipiac took a seven-year hiatus from New Jersey politics between 2018 and 2025.)
And a Fox News poll released last night put Sherrill up by a five-point margin, 50%-45%, again representing a small drop from the eight-point, 50%-42% lead she posted in Fox’s September poll.
Both candidates could arguably claim victory from the new set of polls: Ciattarelli because he gained some ground in all of them, Sherrill because she’s maintained her lead in each poll despite the blitz of campaign developments, both positive and negative, that have happened in the last two months.
The FDU poll contains some other good news for Sherrill’s campaign, too. The poll didn’t ask a traditional “favorable/unfavorable” question, instead asking respondents to give both candidates scores out of 10, where 1 is intensely dislike and 10 is intensely like. On that front, Sherrill came out better-liked, scoring a mean of 5.5 while Ciattarelli had a mean of 4.6.
Five messages that Sherrill has frequently used on the campaign trail also proved broadly popular among voters: that she was a Navy helicopter pilot (+53 favorability), she’s a mom of four (+58), she supports enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution (+22), she wants to fight President Donald Trump’s policies that would hurt New Jersey (+17), and she would freeze utility bills (+39).
The Ciattarelli messaging that FDU tested, on the other hand, came out to be a bit more mixed. The fact that he’s a lifelong New Jersey resident (+60) and a father of four (+57) proved to be broadly popular, but voters were less enthusiastic about implementing a state-level Department of Government Efficiency (-6), opposing wind farms off the Jersey Shore (-7), and supporting Trump’s policies (-18).
“There are limits to partisanship: voters like the biographies of both of these candidates,” Cassino said. “While there’s not much agreement on policies, there are some proposals, like rooting out waste and fraud, or freezing energy bills, that have some support across the political spectrum.”
The Fairleigh Dickinson University poll was conducted from October 9-15 with a sample size of 814 likely general election voters and a margin of error of /- 3.4%.
